By pandering his way to top, Cruz hopes to be Trump’s 2024 surrogate
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a Republican elected official about the peculiar predicament of this state’s junior U.S. senator.
As the Republican pointed out, Ted Cruz badly wants President Donald Trump to flame out but has to pretend that he’s rooting for Trump to succeed.
It’s a near-certainty that Cruz will make his second bid for the presidency in 2024. He knows the members of Trump’s ardent fan base will have a big say in who the GOP picks to be its next nominee.
Cruz wants to secure their goodwill by championing Trump’s every move, including the president’s ego-warped crusade to overturn the results of an election that he lost in decisive fashion to Joe Biden. At the same time, Cruz has to hope Trump himself will not be a factor in 2024.
If this gambit sounds familiar, there’s a good reason for it. Cruz is repeating the failed strategy of his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump, a real-estate mogul and reality-show host with no governmental experience, disrupted the political order by announcing his candidacy in June 2015 and quickly vaulting ahead of the other 16 Republican hopefuls in national polls.
Most of Trump’s GOP opponents determined the best course was to knee-cap this boorish rogue before he gained too much momentum.
Lindsey Graham called Trump “the world’s biggest jackass.” (As if to prove the point, Trump responded by publicly releasing Graham’s cell-phone number.) Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry branded Trump a “cancer on conservatism.” Jeb Bush described Trump as a “jerk” and a “chaos candidate.”
While Trump’s rivals did a tag-team number on him, Cruz went out of his way to forge an alliance with The Donald.
“An awful lot of the Republican candidates for president have basically taken out a 2-by-4 and tried to smack Donald Trump, and I have very consciously avoided doing that, and I’ve regularly sung his praises,” Cruz said, after inviting Trump to join him at a September 2015 rally in opposition to then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.
At a December 2015 private fundraiser, Cruz acknowledged the calculation behind his refusal to criticize either of his highestpolling opponents: Trump and Ben Carson.
“My approach, much to the frustration of the media, is to bear hug both of them and smother them with love,” Cruz said. “I believe that gravity will bring both of those candidates down. I think the lion’s share of their supporters will come to us.”
Gravity (and a strange anecdote about once trying to stab a relative) did take down Carson, but Trump was resistant to the laws of political physics.
As Trump took control of the race and Cruz tried to hang on, things got nasty.
Trump accused Cruz (who he dubbed “Lyin’ Ted”) of stealing the Iowa caucuses, mocked the appearance of Cruz’s wife and suggested that Cruz’s Cuban-born father had conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
On May 3, 2016, with Cruz on the verge of dropping out, he unloaded on Trump, calling him “utterly amoral,” a “pathological liar” and a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.”
At that point, Cruz surely assumed Trump was headed for a general-election defeat. Cruz wanted to position himself as the voice of reason who tried to save the party from going off a cliff with Trump.
That’s why Cruz made such a big show out of refusing to endorse Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. But when even Cruz’s fellow Texas Republicans came down on him, he re-calibrated and morphed into the relentless Trump apologist we’ve seen for the past four years.
In recent weeks, Cruz’s pandering to the Trump base has been breathtaking to behold.
He has embraced Trump’s debunked allegations of widespread voter fraud in this year’s election. He has encouraged Trump not to concede the race to Biden.
When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to throw out the results of four swing states lost by Trump, Cruz offered to argue the case in front of the court.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected Paxton’s suit before the sham became a complete farce, but it still was remarkable to see Cruz treat a gimmicky legal stunt as a serious case.
Over the years, Cruz has been called mendacious, ruthless and shamelessly self-promoting. None of his critics, however, would question the man’s intelligence.
The former Texas solicitor general has argued nine cases in front of the Supreme Court. He knows a frivolous lawsuit when he sees one. But he’s determined to curry favor with the Trump crowd.
Over the past week, while Cruz’s protégé and former chief of staff, U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, has blasted Trump for flip-flopping on a $900 billion COVID-19 stimulus bill, Cruz has maintained a cowardly silence. He’s all in on the pandering.
Of course, if Trump runs again in 2024, he could negate all of Cruz’s carefully constructed plans. After all, he did it once before.