TRUMP TO JOIN CRUZ AT RALLY
Sen. Ted Cruz needs the same voters who have pushed Trump to a lead fifive months before primary voting begins.
ATLANTA — As other Republican presidential candidates go after Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is getting cozy with him. The two men are in a so-far cordial competition for many of the same anti-establishment conservatives, and they’re about to share a stage.
Wednesday, at Cruz’s invitation, Trump is to appear with him at a Capitol Hill rally protesting the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran.
One of 16 GOP candidates looking up at Trump in the polls, Cruz says the invitation was only to attract more attention to objections to the “catastrophic” deal. “Wherever Donald goes, the media follow in droves,” Cruz said.
Any suggestion that the joint appearance has deeper meaning would be a “political horse game,” he said.
Yet Cruz, the tea party hero who helped shut the federal government in 2013, needs the same frustrated voters who have pushed Trump to a surprising lead five months before primary voting begins. If it takes a shared stage to convince those conservatives that he should be their choice, so be it.
Cruz has stood out for his refusal to criticize Trump. Among other presidential contenders, Rick Perry called Trump a “cancer” on conservatism, Rand Paul has called attention to the billionaire’s friendship with Democrats Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Jeb Bush has branded Trump’s rhetoric on immigration “ugly” and “divisive.”
“An awful lot of presidential candidates,” Cruz said, “have gone out of their way to take a stick to Donald Trump. I am not one of them.”
Instead, he credits Trump with “shining a light” on an immigration crisis and getting conservatives excited.
“Look, I like Donald Trump, and I am glad Donald Trump is in this election,” he said at a recent stop in South Carolina.
Yet he added: “There will come a time as this campaign goes forward for additional policy differences and differentiation.” And his standard campaign pitch — which he has not changed through Trump’s rise — contains the seeds of what could emerge as an argument against Trump when the time for comity passes.
In every speech and almost every interview, Cruz hammers “the Washington cartel.” His definition: “Anyone who stands with the career politicians in both parties” and gets “in bed with the lobbyists and the special interests.” That’s how the establishment operates, Cruz says.
Trump admits he has played by those rules, explaining his history of campaign contributions across the political spectrum this way: “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”
And the core of Cruz’s argument is that he’s a “consistent conservative day in and day out.”
“With me, you know what you’re gonna get,” he says.
Trump has never held office, so he’s not one of Cruz’s standard targets: the “campaign conservatives” who “say one thing and then do another.” But he’s certainly flip-flopped.
He now echoes the Republican call to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law, but once advocated a single-payer health care system, an even farther-reaching overhaul that Cruz assails as “wild-eyed socialism.”