WASHINGTON, March 16 (UPI) -- Texas congressman Ted Cruz's flaming remarks that he made while talking to a 3-year-old New Hampshire girl have not tormented the child, despite media reports to the contrary, her mother said Monday.
During an event in Barrington Sunday, Cruz slammed the foreign and domestic policies of President Barack Obama using verbiage that sounded straight out of the Bible.
"The Obama economy is a disaster, Obamacare is a train wreck. The whole world is on fire," he said.
The girl, Julie Trant, reacted with surprise, asking, "the world is on fire?" Cruz reponded, "Yes! Your world is on fire."
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Perhaps realizing that the rhetoric may have been a bit heavy-handed for a child so young, the Republican then reassured the child.
"But you know what? Your mommy's here and everyone's here to make sure that the world you grow up in is better," he said.
What really caught fire were the senator's remarks, which lit up social media channels and several news outlets. By Sunday evening, it was being reported that the fiery lawmaker's rhetoric frightened the girl.
But Monday, the girl's mother, Michelle Trant, said that is not so.
"There was no tears," she told Boston radio station WRKO. "Ted Cruz is the one that will put this fire out.
"I'm telling you, she was quite happy. She was like, 'oh? you're going to put that out? We're good. We're good here.'"
Michelle Trant added that both she and her husband are ardent supporters of Cruz's.
"He's a firefighter, in her mind as a three-year-old, and was quite happy. And then she wanted a cookie," she said, according to ABC News.
ABC News also reported that a person who captured the exchange on video confirmed that the girl didn't seem upset by the senator's remark.
"The little girl just went back to calmly playing games on a phone. She wasn't upset at all," he wrote in a post that accompanied the video on YouTube.
Several news outlets, including Britain's Daily Mail, had earlier reported that the remarks startled or terrified the girl.
