GOP’s ghastly parlor game: President Cruz or Trump?
Ruth Marcus LAS VEGAS — Who would be a more dangerous president: Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? This ghastly parlor game lacks a satisfying answer; either would be toxic for America. That the question is not fanciful makes it all the more terrifying.
Trump’s deficiencies are evident. He is a demagogue and a bully. He has thought deeply about ... nothing, except how to promote Donald J. Trump.
Such bluster masks — barely — a yawning insecurity. A man confident in his intellect would not be so compelled to announce how smart he is. Trump craves adulation; poll numbers are his crack.
These traits are dangerous for a president, a post for which character and temperament are paramount concerns. It is scary to imagine him dealing with world leaders or Congress.
Cruz is a different, and in many ways more dangerous, character. Where Trump is emotional and impulsive, the first-term Texas senator is contained and methodical. Contrast Cruz’s canny embrace of Trump, his restraint in responding to Trump’s provocations, with Trump’s explosiveness.
Cruz couldn’t care less what others think of him, except to the extent it might interfere with his ability to achieve his end.
Where Trump is driven to boast about his intelligence, Cruz remains quietly self-confident about his far superior intellect. You don’t hear him crowing about his Supreme Court clerkship or Harvard Law degree. Trump wants to show you how many magazine covers have featured him. Cruz simply wants to amass, and exercise, power. Publicity is a means to an end for Cruz.
These comparisons might tip the scale in Cruz’s favor, if one were forced to choose. The finger-on-the-nuclear-button contest goes to Cruz. He is the more emotionally stable.
Yet, in a post-Cold War setting, that cannot be the end of the discussion.
First, although neither man is particularly constrained by truth or facts, Cruz is even more ruthless and cutthroat. Cruz is best known for his self-interested willingness to shut down the government over his pique du jour.
There seems to be no argument too low for him to make — for example, his recent claim that “the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.”
Second, while Trump’s efforts are in the service of self-promotion, Cruz’s are all that plus the implementation of an extreme right ideology.
Trump’s ascendancy, and the outrageousness of his pronouncements, has made Cruz appear like the more reasonable alternative. As Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller said, “I don’t think six months ago anybody would have thought that Ted Cruz was mainstream. ... Trump has made Cruz mainstream.”
In fact, Cruz is by far the more doctrinaire and ideologically extreme. You can see Trump making a deal — on taxes, on funding Planned Parenthood, on implementing Obamacare, you name it. Cruz, not so much.
He is so incensed by the “judicial tyranny” of Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage that he wants a constitutional amendment to subject Supreme Court justices to retention elections. “Today is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation’s history,” Cruz told Sean Hannity after the court’s rulings last summer. Really? Pearl Harbor? 9/11? Dred Scott?
I can’t believe I’m saying this. But I might prefer President Trump.