US Secretary of State John Kerry has criticized the chaos in America’s presidential campaign, saying it “is an embarrassment to our country.”
Kerry told CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ on Sunday that “everywhere I go, every leader I meet, they ask about what is happening in America. They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say they’re shocked.”
The comments are apparently directed at the recent intensified mudslinging between Republican frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz who have been bashing each other on the campaign trail.
Cruz on Thursday branded Trump a "sniveling coward" as a war of words between the contenders over their wives took a nastier turn.
The verbal attack came after Trump’s earlier threat to "spill the beans" on Cruz’s wife, Heidi.
The spat erupted in the wake of the recent publication by an anti-Trump group of a decade-old nude photo of his wife, Melania, when she was a model before marrying him.
Trump attributed the advertisement to the Cruz campaign and warned him on Twitter, "Be careful, Lyin' Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!"
The two rivals also stirred controversies by calling for surveillance on Muslims in America and tougher laws against migrants.
Such rhetoric “upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability,” Kerry said. “It’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.”
The campaign for Republican nomination has been marred by countless instances of scandals, mudslinging and onstage vulgarity, where rivals have time and again seized opportunities to blacken their opponents and push them down the gutter.