The Second Reagan Revolution

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

 

You read this newsletter for the pessimism, and I aim to please. So here’s my best pessimistic take on Disney standing up to the president and reinstating Jimmy Kimmel.

 

It’s going to convince many Americans that everything is basically fine when everything isn’t fine.

 

The White House bullying a late-night host off the air is the sort of news that will plausibly filter down even to those whom we delicately describe as “low-information voters.” Ask the average joe how they feel about Donald Trump jawboning major corporations or Ivy League universities or white-shoe law firms, and they’ll either look at you perplexed or shrug. When authoritarianism doesn’t affect them directly, they don’t much notice or care. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

Plus, let’s face it: It’s impossible to sympathize with Harvard (... says the Yale alumnus).

 

But when Donald Trump starts messing with the boob tube—er, I mean with free speech—Americans notice. That brings authoritarianism into their living rooms, turning it into something that’s being done to them rather than to others, and that’s a bridge too far. Kimmel’s restoration after less than a week off the air feels like false reassurance that We the People won’t be directly burdened by coercive postliberalism. Only those who “deserve it” will.

 

So everything is fine, you see. America is still America, where comedians get to make wisecracks about the president while he snatches every bit of federal power within arm’s reach and Congress applauds.

 

As much as I prefer to go full Eeyore, though, the truth is that there are encouraging aspects to l’affaire Kimmel. One is that the White House’s attempt to extort a major company in broad daylight did, in fact, fail. Maybe it failed because Disney’s management felt obliged to defend freedom of expression, or (more likely) maybe it failed because the company came to fear a consumer backlash more than it feared the president and his FCC toady. Either way, liberalism isn’t entirely licked yet.

 

It was encouraging for another reason. As Kimmel acknowledged in Tuesday night’s monologue, he had some influential right-wingers in his corner. “Maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don’t support my show and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway,” he said before naming Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Sens. Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul—and Ted Cruz.

 

It’s true. Donald Trump’s chief congressional accomplice in the coup attempt of January 6 was the right’s most outspoken critic of his attempt to jawbone Disney. Cruz even used the same analogy I did last week to describe FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s boorish ultimatum to have Kimmel taken off the air “the easy way or the hard way.” It’s something you might hear in Goodfellas, the senator said with righteous contempt: “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

 

Indeed. The last time I heard him criticize the president or his henchmen so frankly was in the spring of 2016. What’s gotten into him?

 

I think Jonathan Martin had it right today in Politico. Cruz knows that war is coming to his party, and he’s preparing for it, as are a lot of other people on the right.

 

Bad bets.

 

Ted Cruz always has a plan. His plans tend not to work, but not for lack of strategic deliberation.

 

Clearly, his plan upon joining the Senate in 2013 was to get elected president by distinguishing himself as the most uncompromising conservative in government. Then, as now, the grassroots right demanded “fighters” and Cruz believed he could consolidate their votes in the next Republican primary by branding himself as the rootin-est, tootin-est fighter in the party. Ringleading a doomed effort to defund Obamacare by shutting down the government was the pillar of that strategy.

 

His plan failed, but it succeeded well enough to make him the runner-up for the GOP nomination in 2016. He might well have won if not for the surprise entry into the race of la grande orange.

 

Once Trump jumped into the primary and zoomed to a lead in the polls, Cruz hatched another plan. He praised his new populist rival lavishly, seeing it as a chance to burnish his own populist credentials ahead of Trump’s inevitable collapse. Cruz bet that grassroots Republicans would sour on the frontrunner as it became clearer that Trump didn’t believe in smaller government or traditional values. Once they did, the senator would inherit their votes as the next-best populist alternative in the race.

 

That plan didn’t work out either.

 

After Trump knocked him out and became the presumptive nominee, Cruz concocted a third plan. The GOP’s large conservative majority would never fully reconcile itself to the new guy, he seemed to believe. By standing on principle at that year’s Republican convention and refusing to endorse the nominee, the senator set himself up for what looked like a no-lose proposition. Either Trump would lose the general election to Hillary Clinton, giving Cruz a chance in 2020 to say that only a staunch conservative can win, or Trump would win the general election and Cruz would end up as the de facto leader of the party’s dominant conservative faction, a sort of prime minister of the right.

 

That also didn’t turn out so hot for him. By October, he was so desperate to repair relations with Trump that he was phone-banking for him, producing one of the more humiliating photos in American political history.

 

The common mistake in all three plans was Cruz assuming that populist conservatives care about conservatism, or at least care more about it than they do about populism. He learned the truth the hard way, repeatedly. And he learned it well enough that, by January 2021, he was no longer willing to take sides against Trump by defending basic conservative beliefs like “seizing power after losing an election is wrong.”

 

That was the one plan that worked out for him, I think. He wagered that his political standing among the loathsome postliberal right would implode if he opposed the coup plot, and he was surely correct.

 

Now here he is, seemingly unlearning the lesson of 2021 by condemning the jawboning of ABC and Jimmy Kimmel. And for a familiar reason, as Jonathan Martin sees it: Yet again, as in 2016, Cruz appears to be gambling that Republican voters will eventually choose conservatism over feral populism—once Donald Trump is removed from the political equation.

 

It’s clear the 54-year-old Texan is wagering that at some future date, when he’s still young enough to run for president again, his party will drift back to its free market and free speech moorings. I know Cruz well enough to hear him saying it on the stump at some future Pizza Ranch stop: Look, folks, I think Trump did a lot of good and his critics never gave him a fair shot, but I stood up for our conservative values when it wasn’t totally popular in our party.

 

Ted Cruz always has a plan. When he complains about the Trump White House acting like hoodlums or criticizes the president for his tariff insanity, he’s jockeying for position in 2028 as the guy who didn’t abandon Reaganism entirely and betting that there’ll be a constituency on the right for a candidate like that.

 

But why is he implementing his plan now? The president has more than three years left in his term. J.D. Vance is a runaway frontrunner in early 2028 polling. The earlier Cruz leaps to distance himself from Trumpism, the greater the risk that he’ll make an enemy of the White House and have to come crawling back to salvage his political career like he did in 2016.

 

Frankly, I think he’s getting freaked out. And he’s not the only one who is.

 

The schism.

 

On Monday, radio host Mark Levin, a longtime Cruz ally, posted an ideological call to arms. “I’m gearing up for a massive political battle in 2028 within the GOP,” he declared. “We will see who turns out the most votes and who builds the strongest coalitions. And then there’s the general election, which cannot be won without us.”

 

So-called constitutional conservatives have “had enough of the grifters and neo-Nazis, the Marxists and Islamists, and their patsies and lapdogs in the media and politics,” he continued. “They don’t represent we, the people. They’re destroying our country. They reject Trump, Reagan, and our founding. And we reject them.” He didn’t name names but he didn’t need to. He and Cruz have been sparring for months with Tucker Carlson (or “Qatarlson,” as Levin calls him) over Tucker’s hostility to Israel and platforming of Jew-baiters.

 

Charlie Kirk’s murder brought that dispute to a head. In his speech at Sunday’s memorial service, Carlson referred to certain unnamed hummus-eaters who plotted against Jesus; Levin called him on it and exhorted influential right-wingers to condemn it. Meanwhile, Carlson and Candace Owens have alleged that Kirk had privately soured on Benjamin Netanyahu and the war in Gaza before his death and was warned by right-wing donors to keep quiet about it—a claim that incensed Cruz.

 

“I’m getting really tired of Tucker & his cronies falsely claiming ‘Charlie agreed with me that Israel is terrible & the problem in America is all the damn Jews,’” he wrote recently. “I knew Charlie well & indeed the very last conversation we had was how deeply concerned he was about the rising, toxic wave of antisemitism on the right.”

 

Watching the postliberal right mobilize to present itself as the rightful heir to the martyred Kirk’s legacy may have driven home a few frightening realities to Reaganites like Cruz and Levin.

 

One: Their opponents aren’t fringe. Carlson, Owens, Steve Bannon, and uber-groyper Nick Fuentes have millions of followers among them. Carlson, as noted, is esteemed enough to have been invited to speak at Kirk’s funeral. “Fundamentalist MAGA” can and will mount a serious effort to steer the GOP in its direction after Trump is gone.

 

Two: Republican voters may be more receptive to that direction than we think. The GOP will remain solidly behind Israel as long as the president does, no doubt, but opinion is moving beneath the surface. A Pew Research poll taken in March found 50 percent of Republicans ages 18-49 now have an unfavorable view of the Jewish state, up from 35 percent in 2022. (Just 23 percent of GOPers aged 50 and older have an unfavorable view.) You don’t need to look hard to find young right-wingers willing to say things like, “To be ‘America First,’ the Stars and Stripes must come before the Star of David.”

 

Three: The differences between Reaganites and postliberals cannot be reconciled. They’ve been papered over since 2016 in the name of loyalty to Trump, but they’re going to break wide open when his departure from politics creates a power vacuum at the top of the party. And not just on Israel—on everything from tariffs to Russia to whether the government should act like greasy hoodlums in shaking down late-night comedians. The GOP will never again be the party of Reagan, but the 2028 debate will determine whether it’s more recognizably Reagan-esque than the scummy ethnonationalist Euro-fascism to which postliberals aspire.

 

If Cruz is moving early to engage in that debate, it may be because he’s genuinely alarmed by what his party’s base is being conditioned to support and thinks there’s no time to lose in heading it off. You don’t need to hold him in high regard (and shouldn’t) to believe that, while coup attempts may not bother his conscience, antisemitism and crackdowns on free speech properly do.

 

And while I’d never be so optimistic as to tell you that Reaganites will win the coming war, I can understand why Cruz thinks they could—and why his latest plan to lead the fight will, he thinks, be good for him politically.

 

The plan.

 

For starters, he must realize by now that he’s never going to outpopulist the postliberals. His only chance at being a major Republican player after Trump is to reestablish his conservative ideological identity and hope that the base moves in his direction.

 

And it’s not unthinkable that it might. The right’s commitment to nationalism in 2028 may prove as shallow as its commitment to conservatism was in 2016 once there’s no charismatic celebrity demagogue to rally around. More to the point, Carlson and Bannon are considerably more unsavory in their politics than even Trump is; neither can win a primary if their base ends up consisting mostly of groypers. And conservatives will have a solid electability argument against them: Do we really think that a more explicitly ethnonationalist GOP will hold onto the black and Hispanic converts that the president won last November?

 

Cruz might also be calculating that there’s a lot of pent-up dissatisfaction with Trumpism on the right that will come flooding out once the GOP’s political fortunes no longer depend on defending the president. That’s especially so if his protectionist policies end up running the economy into a ditch. Nothing will rekindle respect for Reaganism like watching the dumbest trade war in history plunge America into stagflation.

 

But even if the economy holds up, some of Trump’s authoritarian excesses are destined to be renounced in hindsight by many Republicans who put up with them for the moment as the unfortunate price of having a “fighter” in charge. One of the few times I’ve seen a MAGA relative flash real disgust at the president’s antics was when Trump threatened “serious consequences” for Elon Musk if Musk exercised his right to donate to Democrats. Not all of his fans take political persecution by the government lightly, as we were reminded this past week.

 

Cruz may expect that impulse to reassert itself en masse within the GOP in the post-Trump era: He went too far, some Republicans will finally admit. The senator is signaling bright and early to those voters that he agrees.

 

In short, he may be rebooting the plans that he tried to execute in 2016. Perhaps the lessons of hard experience will lead Republican voters to choose conservatism over authoritarianism the next time the two face off in a primary. But even if they don’t, Cruz’s renewed conservative advocacy could boost his influence in the party: Either a postliberal nominee will lose the next general election, giving the senator a chance to say “I told you so” in 2032, or the nominee will win and feel obliged to meet some of the demands of Reaganites like Cruz in order to hold the GOP’s fragile coalition together.

 

Because if that nominee refuses, Reaganites are going to make good on Mark Levin’s threat and bolt the party, right?

 

Well, no. I’m afraid that, as a sentient being who’s been conscious for the past 10 years, I don’t believe that.

 

I can believe that a committed ideologue like Levin might boycott the 2028 general election if the Republican nominee is a postliberal whom he disdains and who’s unwilling to accommodate him on issues about which he’s passionate, like an ongoing alliance with Israel. But the average Reaganite voter? Please. The deathless logic of partisan conservatism will prevail, as it always does: The best Democratic president will be worse on the issues that I care about than the worst Republican.

 

It ain’t true, but truth has nothing to do with American politics anymore.

 

If anyone’s likely to boycott a general election over the nominee not being to their liking, it’s the Tuckerites. It’s simple “horseshoe theory” at work. If your top policy priorities are ending aid to the Jewish state, boosting redistribution to the working class, and normalizing protectionism in economic policy, you’re better off with a progressive as president than with Ted Cruz. You’ll do better with fascist recruitment too, as nothing will radicalize the right like suffering under the abuses of a far-left administration.

 

The whole reason Cruz and Levin are in the position they’re in today is because much of the right has decided that the constitutional order is an impediment to American “greatness,” not the source of it. If you think that’s likely to change by 2028, you’re an optimist. As we’ve established, I am not.

Ted Cruz Knows Better

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, August 22, 2025

 

Competition for the top spot is fierce, but the very worst of Donald Trump’s enablers and sycophants aren’t the rage-addled, rustic, resentment junkies but such polished epitomes of servility as Sen. Ted Cruz, who insists that his highest political calling is the defense and fortification of the Constitution, and who—being one of those anti-elitist sons of the Texas caliche who learned his ABCs at Princeton and Harvard Law—knows full well that the president’s contempt for the Constitution is exceeded only by his ignorance of it.

 

Here is Trump on social media, serving up the baloney pretext for his next attempt to nullify an election:

 

Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.

 

This is, in the familiar Trump style, a motley bolus of stupidity and dishonesty. The Constitution says, in fact, precisely the opposite: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” Where there is a federal role, it belongs to the lawmaking branch, not to the president: “[B]ut the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” I do like that anachronistic “chusing”—more than I like many of the laws and regulations that Congress has written over the years with regard to voting.

 

There are a few Americans who generally must do what the president, “FOR THE GOOD OF THE COUNTRY,” tells them to do. They wear uniforms, and we thank them for their service. No one else in this republic of free men and free women is, in fact, at the president’s command. Even the president’s direct subordinates have the option of resignation if asked to carry out an order that is illegal or immoral, though it is a shame how few have done that over Trump’s time in office.

 

The states aren’t people, and, in spite of an ancient and confused American rhetorical tradition holding otherwise, states do not have “rights.” Citizens have rights, states have powers. Like our indolent Congress, they tend to use those powers less often and less vigorously than they should, preferring to offload hard things—or politically unpopular things—onto the federal government when doing so is convenient.

 

States have the constitutional power to run elections, which they sometimes do poorly, as with the mail-in ballot dispute in Pennsylvania in 2020 that went as far as the Supreme Court, undermining public confidence in the impartiality of election managers. (Incompetent and corrupt elections are an unhappy fact of life in Pennsylvania.) In the context of our constitutional architecture, the power to do something entails the power to do it poorly—or, at least, to do it in a way that does not meet with the approval of the president, who is the chief executive of one branch of the federal government and not the god-emperor Trump imagines himself to be.

 

In fact, as Cruz no doubt heard many times at Harvard Law, insisting that the states act as its “agents” is one of the things the federal government is prohibited from doing. Federal law may supersede state law in cases of conflict, but the federal government cannot command the states to enforce federal law, or to do—anything, really. The United States of America is a federal union of sovereign states that have delegated certain enumerated powers related to their common interests—war-making, international trade, relations among the states themselves—to the federal government. That is why, for instance, “sanctuary” states and cities present no constitutional problem even if they are idiotic from a policy perspective—the federal government may enforce the law, but it cannot “commandeer” (the legal term of art) the state governments to do its work. The existence of federal election law is not an open-ended mandate for the president to command the states to do his bidding.

 

Someone—maybe Ted Cruz?—should explain that to the president.

 

I pick on Cruz here because I want to put him to some good use, mainly for the sake of the country but also for his own. Cruz enjoyed a truly meteoric rise in Republican politics: In less than a decade, he went from being a well-regarded lawyer in private practice to a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Funny thing about meteors: They seem to be flying, but they are falling.

 

Cruz was an intellectually serious politician of the kind who would quote Hayek and reference Milton Friedman off-the-cuff in private conversation until he discovered—and this is a thing with Texas politicians—that there was more juice to be had from pretending to be the good ol’ boy that he is not than in simply being the Ivy League lawyer he is. Cruz’s current position in American public life is that of a piteous and contemptible figure. He may end up in a dignified retirement like George W. Bush or he may end up becoming a psychedelic-drug salesman like Rick Perry, but, for the moment, he is still a senator caught between the fringeward push of his radicalizing party and the centerward pull of his state’s urbanizing electorate.

 

Cruz is (or should be) smart enough to have figured out by now that he is never going to be president, and he ought to allow himself to be liberated by this and take on a new role—one that the genuine Ted Cruz, if there is anything left of him inside the chrysalis of grotesque opportunism and self-degradation in which he has enveloped himself, would be well-suited to undertake: defending the Constitution and the American order from a sustained assault that is coming from within his own party.

 

It would not take very much: “No, Mr. President, you may not willy-nilly create a new national sales-tax regime with rates based on how you’re feeling that day, even if you call it a tariff; no, you may not federalize the Philadelphia police department or deploy troops in U.S. cities based on whatever phony emergency pretext occurs to you in between social media posts; no, the states are not your ‘agents,’ and they most certainly do not have to do ‘whatever the president of the United States tells them’ to do, even if you put ‘FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY’ in capital letters. And if you refuse to honor the constitutional limits on your office, then you can be removed from that office—with my vote, if necessary, though I would regret it and would probably lose my Senate seat as a result. But there are things more important than winning the next election.”

 

No, I do not think Cruz has it in him.

 

But he is starting to reach the stage of life when, to borrow David Brooks’ formulation, it is time to stop thinking about one’s résumé and start thinking about one’s eulogy. Cruz’s opportunities to make a more substantive contribution to American political life dwindle by the day.

 

The meteor blazes across the night sky, but it is quickly gone as the darkness reasserts itself. No man knoweth the hour.

Ted Cruz Debases Himself for the Base

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, January 07, 2022

 

What an extraordinary disappointment Ted Cruz is. On paper, the man should be a star. He’s intellectually gifted, he has a remarkable memory, and, on the vast majority of public-policy questions, his political instincts are sound. But he’s a coward, and, at this level, cowardice represents an intractable flaw.

 

Worse, Cruz is transparent in his cowardice. One must assume that Cruz believes himself to be a practitioner of political chess, and yet he seems oddly unaware of his tendency to prefigure each and every move through a loudspeaker. On Wednesday, as part of a mawkish paean to the Capitol Police, Cruz described the events of January 6, 2021, as “a despicable act of terrorism.” A day later, he went on Tucker Carlson’s show to explain sorrowfully that “the way I phrased things yesterday was sloppy, and it was, frankly, dumb.” What had changed in the interim? Nothing had. This wasn’t Ted Cruz carefully debating the meaning and suitability of words and making a handful of concessions in the process; this was Ted Cruz noticing that his previous position had made him unpopular with his base and finding another one on the fly. Its accuracy notwithstanding, there was nothing “sloppy” about Cruz’s use of the word “terrorism.” Indeed, he had used that word in both official statements and interviews on a number of occasions before this week, including on January 7, 2021, on January 8, 2021 (twice), on January 25, 2021, and in May 2021. The difference this time was that someone with a big platform attacked him for it, and, coward that he is, he couldn’t take the heat.

 

As a tactician, Cruz is as subtle as an air raid. Back in June 2015, he said, “When it comes to Donald Trump, I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific. I think he’s brash. I think he speaks the truth.” In May 2016, he said that Trump was “a pathological liar” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen” who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.” Cruz did not arrive gradually at this second asseveration via a process of constant revision, speaking up only when not doing so had become unbearable; rather, he decided overnight that it made political sense to shift gears, and then did just that. Announcing the alteration, he told his audience that he was “going to do something I haven’t done for the entire campaign, for those of you all who’ve traveled with me, all across the country: I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump.” In other words: Before today, I was lying. Now, I’m not. Trust me!

 

Queen Victoria often complained of William Gladstone that “he speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.” Ted Cruz suffers from a similar problem. He has no personality outside of elective politics; he finds it hard to read a room or adjust to new circumstances; and he seems genuinely to believe that his audience is incapable of noticing his machinations, even as he telegraphs them for all the world to see. There is a great deal of “How do you do, fellow kids?” about Cruz. Groveling before Tucker Carlson, he said that he’d misspoken. But there was not a single person in America — including Carlson, who laughed derisively — who believed him. Given his objectives, Cruz would have been better off had he simply said, “Look, Tucker, I still want to be president, and your taking shots at me is hurting me, so tell me what I need to say to make you stop, I’ll agree to say it, and then we can all move on.”

 

That, at least, would have been honest.

The Trump Presidency’s Inevitable, Wretched End

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 07, 2021

 

Joe Biden gave the rioters who stormed the Capitol yesterday the obligatory stern talking-to. He wasn’t really talking to the rioters — he was talking to the nation at large, attempting to reassure America that, once he is sworn in, he will be up to the task. He won’t be, of course, but old men are entitled to their delusions.

 

“This isn’t who we are as Americans,” the president-elect insisted. Yes, old men are entitled to their delusions, but the rest of us are not obliged to share them. Biden could not be any more wrong: This is exactly who we are as Americans.

 

“We must not normalize Donald Trump!” A hundred thousand variations on that sentence have been published in the past four years. It is a stupid sentence. Donald Trump does not require normalization. He is as normal as diabetes, as all-American as shooting up your high school.

 

Wednesday’s riot is not the first act of political violence to take place inside the Capitol. One of the greatest men ever to serve in the Senate, the Republican abolitionist Charles Sumner, was beaten nearly to death in the chamber by a vicious Democratic slaver, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. It was a savage attack in response to a blistering speech: Brooks broke the gold-handled walking stick he used beating Sumner over the head, and the senator was sidelined by his injuries for three years. Brooks was a hero to the slavers, who sent him hundreds of new walking sticks in the mail. Brooksville, Fla., and Brooks County, Ga., were named for him shortly afterward.

 

Senator Sumner’s speech, on the question of slavery in Kansas, began:

 

You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The State will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad Territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history forevermore.

 

The attack on Senator Sumner shocked the country and divided it. It was one of the events that precipitated the Civil War. Brooks, who died young from a respiratory infection, did not live to see the Civil War he helped to start. Perhaps he would have been gratified if he could have seen the riot on Wednesday, in which the so-called patriots of the Trump movement carried the flag of the rebel slave powers.

 

Some things never really change.

 

The Trump presidency began in shame and dishonesty. It ends in shame, dishonesty, cowardice, and rebellion against the Constitution. For the past few weeks, the right-wing media, including the big talk-radio shows, has been coyly calling for a revolution. Of course they never thought they’d actually get one: That kind of talk is good for business — keep the rubes riled up and they won’t change the channel when the commercials come around on the half-hour. I never had much hope for the likes of Sean Hannity, tragically born too late to be a 1970s game-show host, but to watch Senator Ted Cruz descend into this kind of dangerous demagoguery as he jockeys to get out in front of the Trump parade as its new grand marshal has induced despair.

 

On May 4, 2016, I posted a little note to the Corner, headlined: “Pre-Planning My ‘I Told You So.’” It reads, in part: “Republicans, remember: You asked for this.” The path that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have taken in the past four years is not one that was forced on them — it is the product of choices that were made and of compromises that were entered into too willingly by self-interested men and women seeking money, celebrity, and power.

 

Of course it ends in violence — this is, after all, America.

Ted Cruz Fails the Moment

By Isaac Schorr

Thursday, January 07, 2021

 

TrusTED. That was one of the Ted Cruz presidential campaign’s favorite refrains in 2016. At the time, it made some sense. Cruz, for all of his obvious ambition and penchant for stunts (remember when he read Green Eggs and Ham during a 21-hour speech to the U.S. Senate in 2013?) was one of the two or three most conservative members of the upper chamber (depending on your measure). And although his antics often irritated his colleagues — Lindsey Graham once remarked that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you” — they did help him gain the trust of the Republican base.

 

It wasn’t enough in 2016, though. Donald Trump stole the show by making Cruz’s antics look like child’s play, and the rest of the Republican primary field was too fractured to coalesce around someone fit for office. Cruz had to settle for silver. For a moment, at the 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC), it seemed that you might really be able to continue to trust Ted. In his address, Cruz declined to endorse the nominee, instead declaring the following:

 

If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand and speak and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.

 

Right then, it looked as if Cruz may have really meant everything he had said and done during his first term in the Senate. Perhaps they hadn’t been cynical political ploys. Perhaps he really was a man of principle.

 

Wrong.

 

Surprised by the chorus of boos that greeted him at the RNC and chastened by the avalanche of criticism that he faced in his speech’s aftermath, Cruz backpedaled and endorsed Trump. Without exception, Ted Cruz will do whatever Ted Cruz believes is best for Ted Cruz’s career. Unfortunately for Ted Cruz, and for the rest of us, he is sometimes hopelessly wrong about what exactly that is.

 

Which brings us to yesterday, when rioters who attended President Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally tore down fencing, climbed over barriers, and attacked law enforcement while Vice President Mike Pence and both chambers of Congress were busy certifying the Electoral College results inside the Capitol. The Madison Building (part of the Library of Congress,) Cannon House Office Building, and eventually the Capitol itself were all evacuated, as were some private residences on the Hill. A pipe bomb was found at the Republican National Committee. Authorities were thankfully able to safely detonate it before things got even uglier and bloodier. Inside the Capitol, National Review’s John McCormack reported that the Senate loudspeaker warned its inhabitants to stay away from windows and doors, and that gas was used to repel rioters. That was before the massive incursion into the building forced the evacuation. Four people died in the ensuing American carnage. And instead of unequivocally condemning the violence and disorder, Trump egged them on.

 

He tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution” because the vice president wouldn’t unilaterally yet impotently attempt to overturn the November election. In so doing, he put a target on the back of the man a heartbeat away from the presidency. A man who already found himself in dangerous circumstances of Trump’s own making. Once rioters entered the Capitol, they reportedly hunted for Pence; God only knows what would have happened if they had found him.

 

Trump urged the rioters to “stay” peaceful after they had already attacked law enforcement, broken windows, and forced their way into the building. When he finally instructed his rioters to go home, hours after what Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell characterized as a “failed insurrection” had begun, he reiterated that he believed the election to have been stolen and assured the thugs inside the Capitol, “We love you, you’re very special.” A day that began with President Trump’s rally ended with death, destruction, and desecration.

 

Yet the origin of yesterday’s events was not a rally — sure, that was the spark — but an idea. A deeply pernicious idea that the election had been stolen from President Trump. An idea propagated by none other than Ted Cruz. Prior to yesterday’s events, Cruz had pledged to object to the certification of the Electoral College vote in all of the battleground states and to call for an electoral commission to investigate the myriad fraud claims made by the president and his legal team over the last two months. Forget that these claims have been investigated, litigated, and disproved over and over again, Cruz was willing to muddy the waters further, divide the country more deeply, and even risk violence to do what he does best: stage a political stunt.

 

In fact, he still is. Even after the siege on the Capitol Building, Cruz shamelessly voted to overturn the results of the election and throw out the electoral votes in both Arizona and Pennsylvania. Right when his country and party needed him most, when its most high-profile, rock-ribbed, ruby-red conservative in the Senate could have stood up and said “enough” to the lies, he couldn’t bring himself to be any more responsible than Donald Trump. Except Cruz is perhaps even more culpable, since he assuredly knows better.

 

Mitch McConnell gave extraordinary speeches before and after the attack on the Capitol, dismissing the president’s conspiracy theories and calling the vote to certify the election results the most important of his career. Mitt Romney blasted the president for allowing his “injured pride” to “incite an insurrection.” Ben Sasse and Mike Lee both unequivocally denounced the effort to overturn the election and the incursion on the Capitol. But many Republicans believe Romney to be a squish, McConnell to be a snake, Sasse to be a glorified history professor, and they don’t know who Mike Lee is. Only Cruz had the trust and stature within the party to end this.

 

This hour was made to be Ted Cruz’s finest. Instead, it was his most dishonorable.

Ted Cruz Is Severus Snape

By Rachel Lu

Friday, July 22, 2016

Who is Ted Cruz? It’s remarkable we’re still asking the question after months of intense media scrutiny. That in itself should tell you he’s rather an extraordinary politician, for good or ill.

Here are the agreed-upon facts. Cruz is brilliant and articulate. He is extremely ambitious. He knows conservatism very, very well. He can be prickly and a bit cold. He has a weird-looking nose.

From there, accounts differ. Actually, they differ enormously. Some see Cruz as a true-hearted conservative warrior. Others see him as a Machiavellian schemer with a dagger under his cloak.

Here’s the truth, then. He’s Severus Snape. Right down to the awkward nose.

Lion Ted Cruz

Snape is a fascinating member of the “Harry Potter” cast. We know without a doubt that he’s important; clearly he will play a key role of some kind in the final resolution. J.K. Rowling keeps us constantly guessing, however, about what that role will be. Cruz is very much like this. He’s clearly a major player on the conservative field, still assessing his hand and calculating his moves. But will Cruz emerge in the end as the hero, or the anti-hero? It’s exceedingly difficult to tell.

Both figures have a kind of maddening mystery to them. Snape is imposing, ingenious, calculating, and cloaked. He has tremendous gravitas and enormous discipline, which combine to make him a powerful presence at Hogwarts. Rowling makes him a master of “occlumency,” an art by which a wizard seals his mind against other sorcerers who might wish to read his thoughts. The point is clear enough: Snape is an absolutely closed book.

Cruz, likewise, undeniably affects a kind of greatness. He almost never comes across as peevish or trivial, but like Snape, he is a closed book, ruthlessly disciplined but clearly calculating. Some find his Man of Principle demeanor inspiring, while others find it grating or disturbing. It’s especially problematic when it bleeds over into his political choices—a man who believes he can do no wrong is apt to make mistakes. Even when wrong though, he is clearly a force, and even those who condemn his tactics generally concede he is decidedly not a liberal.

Man of Mystery

When Rowling was still working on the Harry Potter series, people would passionately defend their detailed theories about Snape’s final role in the story. I’m reminded of those debates now when listening to hilariously hyperbolic accounts of Cruz’s plans, right down to very fine details of his emotions and moral state. Everybody wants to crack that mysterious book of scrolls.

I don’t know Cruz personally, but smart people I’m normally inclined to trust have given me astonishingly divergent accounts of the man. The bad news for Cruz is that inconsistency really doesn’t inspire trust. It doesn’t matter that this is reputational and not personal inconsistency. Clearly somebody’s read him very wrong, but I’m not sure who that is, so I remain wary. Ingenious, calculating, cloaked men sometimes turn out to be bad.

Cruz’s flirtations with populism always seemed reckless to me, and events have validated that assessment rather well. I also never bought the argument that Cruz’s Senate colleagues didn’t like him just because he was practically perfect in every way. It’s true that perfect people can be galling. I’m pretty sure, though, that Cruz is not the perfect man, even overlooking the nose.

Still, I did finish the Harry Potter series, so I know cold, calculating men can also be judged unfairly. (Remember in book one, when our three little heroes were busy stalking Snape and making his life miserable as he was quietly trying to save them from the newly reawakened Voldemort?) It could be that Cruz really is a good man and a committed conservative who just happens to be a bit too ambitious for his own good. That ambition, combined with his intelligence and discipline, might give him a Machiavellian reputation that is less-than-fully deserved. Such reputations can be hard to shake, especially for those who are naturally of a reserved temperament.

Conservatism at the Crossroads

Whatever the future of conservatism, it feels almost foreordained that Cruz will be in the thick of it. Of course, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Whether you regarded it as calculating or principled, it took some incredible moxie to stand up at the Republican National Convention and tell conservatives across the nation to vote their consciences. Of course the speech was yet another Cruz-ian calculation, but that doesn’t make it any less brilliant or brave. After so much skulking and mealy-mouthed apologizing, it was amazing to see a politician seizing that shining moment, speaking refulgent truth to corrupt and craven power. A politician with the stones to do that could have true greatness in his future.

After reading countless profiles on Cruz and listening to countless debates, I have concluded that nobody really knows. Even his friends don’t know. Even Cruz himself probably isn’t sure whether he truly has that capacity for excellence, although he obviously wants it. As with the Harry Potter books, we’ll just have to wait for the next installment. (Remember how that seemed to take forever?)

This much at least might give us hope: Cruz is clearly reading the writing on the wall, and the writing he sees reads “Trumpism will fail.” He probably knows Humpty Dumpty won’t quite go back together, at least not in quite the same shape. If he expected the status quo (or something like it) to reassert itself, he would have followed House Speaker Paul Ryan in offering an obviously painful endorsement of Trump. Instead he took a more daring route, planting his flag for a post-Trumpian conservatism.

As usual, he wants to lead the charge. Some of us still mistrust him, and not without reason. It’s still good to see that someone as brainy as Cruz glimpses brighter horizons ahead.

In A Party Full Of Cowards, Cruz Stood Apart

By David Harsanyi

Friday, July 21, 2016

Say what you will about Ted Cruz’s politics or personality, but it takes a special kind of badassery to stand up at a convention — in front of millions of viewers — and unfurl a comprehensive attack on the party’s nominee. It’s also unprecedented. Last night, Cruz gave a commanding and inclusive speech about conservative values. It was so good that the crowd forgot to boo until he was more than halfway finished.

“Stand and speak and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom.”

“Freedom matters, and I was part of something beautiful.”

All these words were broadsides against Donald Trump’s candidacy. By the end, the crowd tried to drown him out with boos and pro-Trump chants. Cruz’s wife had to be escorted out of the convention center because a mob of Trump fans was threatening her. A man in a donor suite had to be restrained when Cruz walked by. They don’t want something beautiful at the RNC, they want something angry.

When Trump first ran for the presidency he claimed the Republican Party was nothing but a bunch of spineless weasels who didn’t have the mettle to fight. Trump then won the nomination and most of the Republican establishment proved his contention true by backing a candidate whose worldview directly conflicted with their own stated beliefs.

There were those, like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who reluctantly offered unconvincing endorsements to avert a civil war. Let’s just say this is the sort of risk aversion that falls well within the normal parameters of politically expedient behavior — the kind we all supposedly hate.

Then there were those who had no shame. Example: Then-candidate Rick Perry once gave a speech entitled, “Defending conservatism against the cancer of Trumpism.” Cancer. Now, if you want to read the text of his speech, you won’t be able to find it on Perry’s website. It’s been removed. And the man who once said Trumpism was “a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued,” was soon angling for the veep spot and promised that he would help Trump in “a myriad ways.”

Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, and Scott Walker were the people who would supposedly synthesize conservative ideals and then offer a compelling, modern, principled, political case. All of them were at various times harshly critical of Trump. All of them fell in line. Trump fans are never going to warm to these “elitists,” no matter how helpful they are this year. Now, after Cruz’s speech, all of them look weak.

Cruz, who we shouldn’t forget tried to be buddies with Trump for most of last year, ended up in a different place. Now, I should note that if someone smeared my wife and accused my father of being complicit in murder of a president, I wouldn’t merely refuse to endorse that person, I would have a new favorite enemy. I’m sensitive like that. So I can imagine Cruz’s speech had something to do with this history. We’re human, after all.

It also says something about Trump’s judgment that he invited a politician whom he’d cruelly attacked to speak at the convention — in a prime time spot. “This man is a pathological liar,” Cruz spat out not that long ago. “He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth … The man is utterly amoral. Morality does not exist for him.” Even if you believe that the Trump camp set Cruz up to be booed (a story I’m highly skeptical about), he created a needlessly divisive situation that could easily backfire.

It couldn’t have only been vengeance. Cruz hasn’t really wavered on his political positions — like them or not. What shouldn’t be lost in the kerfuffle is that the speech he gave was a well-delivered distillation of conservative ideas that went well beyond the strikes on Trump. In contrast to what’s been going on, it sounded inclusive.

Cruz also made a strong case for religious liberty — for “Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Atheists” — and for federalism, mentioning a pot legalization state like Colorado. All that talk about the Constitution offended Trump’s fans because they know well the candidate has little, if any, interest in preserving the document. The phrase “vote your conscience” literally provoked boos from the GOP nominee’s fans.

The same day Cruz angered Trump supporters by not honoring a silly, political pledge to endorse the GOP nominee, Trump was quoted in a New York Times interview praising another authoritarian and asserting that he would ignore international treaties signed by the United States.

So while it takes guts to pull off what Cruz did, there wasn’t much downside politically. It seems unlikely that a Trump victory would mean an end of his Senate career. If 2016 ends up being a disaster for his party — and, right now, it’s a good bet it will — Cruz will be the only major Republican to emerge from the Trump fiasco with his principles largely intact. Maybe, as his critics claim, he’s just laying the groundwork for 2020. Maybe it will backfire. Maybe only someone as stubborn and egotistical as Cruz could do it. So what?