Former Indiana Congressman takes on Donald Trump

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Former Indiana Congressman David McIntosh is behind a big money effort to defeat Donald Trump in the race for the GOP nomination.

After McIntosh lost a bid to return to Congress from Indiana in 2012, he became the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee.

The Club for Growth is spending a million dollars on television ads in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Those ads are aimed at convincing GOP primary voters that Trump is, in McIntosh’s words, playing them for chumps.

The Club for Growth believes that Trump’s record is more liberal in some ways than the records of the two Democrats running for President.

“There’s nothing conservative about four bankruptcies,” say the ads. “There’s nothing conservative about giving money to the Clintons. There’s nothing conservative about Donald Trump.”

“What they do is they tell the truth about Donald Trump,” McIntosh told CNN, “that his vision for America will bankrupt us essentially.”

“You look at Atlantic City. That’s where Trump had the biggest impact and he went bankrupt. He survived but everybody else was left holding the bag.”

Trump has responded with a tweet saying that the Club for Growth came to his office seeking a $1 million.

“I told them no,” he said, “and now they are doing negative ads.”

McIntosh disputes that claim, saying that Trump asked for a meeting in an effort to buy his silence.

McIntosh ran similar ads in Iowa and says they were responsible for knocking Trump out of the top spot there.