Ted Cruz to His Supporters: 'Strap on the Full Armor of God, Attacks Are Coming'

Ted Cruz isn’t only surging in the polls — he’s now in second place nationally and leads in Iowa — he is also raising a truckload of money. In the last quarter of 2015 alone the Republican presidential candidate received almost $20 million from his supporters.

Not bad for a grassroots candidate who’s despised and hated by his own party’s leadership team.

Small wonder then that Cruz bragged about these results during a phone call with supporters, adding that he’s confident he’ll be the Republican nominee — soon:

There’s a very good possibility that the Republican primary will be decided by the end of March.

That doesn’t mean, however, that he believes it’s going to be an easy ride. Quite the opposite in fact: he also warned his supporters to get ready for an epic battle, telling them it would get “uglier and uglier and uglier.”

We’re winning right now, and as a result, I want to tell everyone to get ready. Strap on the full armor of God. Get ready for the attacks that are coming. We’ve already seen hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in attacks directed at us. Well I went to tell you that come the month of January, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

He added:

I want to encourage everyone to get ready, because starting tomorrow morning, we are in a 90-day sprint to win this nomination, and then to turn around and win the general election. To defeat Hillary Clinton in November of 2016 and to turn this country around.

Cruz isn’t exaggerating about the attacks. Senator Marco Rubio and his SuperPAC are doing everything in their power to discredit the senator from Texas, even if they have to spin and blatantly lie to do so. More recently, Rand Paul also jumped on the anti-Cruz bandwagon, accusing him of flip flopping. I’m sure the senator from Kentucky will continue to do so in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses.

Of course he’s only doing so because he’s trailing in the polls and is getting desperate, but that isn’t the point. What’s important here is that Rand and Rubio are targeting Cruz because they believe him to be the man to beat. At least in Iowa. If they didn’t, they’d leave him alone. As Cruz said during the phone call mentioned above:

There’s an old line, if you’re not taking flak, you’re not over the target. If we were sitting here on Dec. 31 and no one was attacking us and no one was going to be attacking us, I would be deeply, deeply concerned because it would mean we weren’t winning.

Exactly.