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Ted
Cruz's non-endorsement of Trump sets fire to Republican 'unity'
Richard Wolffe
Thursday 21 July
2016 05.30 BST
When the senator
took to the stage, we saw just how far the party has traveled since
the bitter primaries: not very far at all
Donald Trump says he
wants to make America great again. At least that’s what it says on
his baseball cap. But after three days in Cleveland, it’s not clear
he can make his own convention great again.
By this stage of an
election, the disgruntled former rivals have normally reconciled
themselves to their fate – and the party welcomes them back into
the fold with cheers of relief. But this is not a normal convention
and Trump is not a normal nominee.
So when Ted Cruz
took to the stage, we saw just how far the party has traveled since
the bitter primaries: not very far at all. When we last heard from
Cruz, less than three months ago, the Texas senator held the reality
TV star in something less than high regard.
“This man is a
pathological liar,” he told reporters. “He doesn’t know the
difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word
that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is
straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse
everybody else of lying.”
That was before he
called Trump “a narcissist” and “utterly amoral.” Oh yeah,
and chronically insecure.
“Every one of us
knew bullies in elementary school,” Cruz continued. “Bullies
don’t come from strength, bullies come from weakness. Bullies come
from a deep, yawning cavern of insecurity. There is a reason Donald
builds giant buildings and puts his name on them everywhere he goes.”
For Trump, of
course, that reason is: greatness.
“I want to
congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night,”
Cruz said in the most factual statement he could muster about his
nominee. It was also the only time Cruz managed to say Trump’s
name.
“Like each of you,
I want to see the principles that our party believes prevail in
November.”
Cruz’s
autobiography was subtitled A Time for Truth and his campaign slogan
was Conservative, Courageous, Consistent. But the Trump delegates
didn’t seem to appreciate those qualities in Cleveland.
As Cruz droned on
about freedom and the constitution, they began chanting their
nominee’s name. When he urged conservatives to vote their
conscience, they heckled and booed him like he was a member of the
much-loathed media.
“I appreciate the
enthusiasm of the New York delegation,” Cruz deadpanned. When he
walked off stage, the senator turned in the darkness and delivered
the kind of deep bow that oozed disdain for a convention that had
cheered him wildly when he walked out just ten minutes earlier.
Trump, meanwhile,
feigned indifference towards Cruz’s speech in a tweet. “Wow, Ted
Cruz got booed off the stage, didn’t honor the pledge! I saw his
speech two hours early but let him speak anyway. No big deal!” As
the Clinton diehards said in 2008: party unity my ass.
Newt Gingrich, the
former House speaker and failed veep candidate, later tried to defend
Cruz by telling the Trumpistas, “you misunderstood one paragraph.”
But they understood
Cruz only too well. What they wanted was good old fashioned mob
justice for Hillary Clinton. Sure enough, the vice-presidential
nominee Mike Pence delivered enough red meat to feed several chants
of Lock Her Up!
There’s good
reason to think this chant will become the de facto slogan for
Trump’s general election. In place of Hope and Change, we now have
Abandon Hope.
Marco Rubio didn’t
perform much better than Cruz. He once suggested Trump was a sweaty
con man who was variously incontinent, impotent, a business failure
and a coward.
“It’s time to
pull his mask off so that people can see what we’re dealing with
here,” Rubio told one of his rallies in February. “This guy has
bankrupt a casino. How do you bankrupt a casino?” he asked back
then.
A great question for
another convention. Instead, the Florida senator appeared on what
looked suspiciously like a hostage video, testifying to the fact that
Donald Trump was not Hillary Clinton on taxes and terrorism.
“After a long and
spirited primary, the time for fighting each is over,” he said with
a forced smile that suggested he didn’t quite agree to the terms of
his release from captivity.
The tone on
Wednesday night was set neither by Cruz nor Rubio, though, but by
Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, who ejected words from her
mouth like she was deporting undocumented immigrants. “Lock her
up,” she told the crowd after declaring Clinton a security risk. “I
love that.”
In Trump’s
Republican party, the best protest may be the silent kind delivered
by Eileen Collins, the first woman to command the Space Shuttle.
After arguing for a revival of Nasa’s manned space program, Collins
somehow neglected to deliver the last two lines of her speech: “We
need leadership that will make America first again. That leader is
Donald Trump.”
Cleveland, we have a
problem.
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Ted
Cruz showered with boos at RNC as he withholds Trump endorsement
An
impatient crowd drowned out Cruz’s speech, which seemed designed to
lay the groundwork for a future bid at the presidency, with chants of
‘Trump!’
Mike Pence bid
for unity marred by clashes on convention floor
Cruz attacks
‘serial philanderer’ Trump as race enters ‘the abyss’
Sabrina Siddiqui in
Cleveland
@SabrinaSiddiqui
Thursday 21 July
2016 04.42 BST
Ted Cruz returned
full of hope to the national stage on Wednesday, seeking to recapture
the limelight at the Republican national convention.
But a speech
designed by the Texas senator to lay the groundwork for a future bid
at the presidency quickly unraveled as the crowd met Cruz with
resounding boos after he withheld his endorsement of Donald Trump as
the Republican nominee.
Cruz, the runner-up
in the 2016 Republican primary, had arrived onstage to a thunderous
reception at the arena in Cleveland. The senator, who clashed
bitterly with Trump prior to suspending his presidential campaign in
May, congratulated his former opponent for the first time on winning
the party’s nomination and appeared to extend an olive branch to
Trump’s supporters.
“Like you, I want
to see our principles prevail in November,” Cruz told the thousands
gathered.
But the mood within
the arena changed dramatically when Cruz, while delivering what
sounded like the opening speech of a second presidential campaign,
declined to make the case for Trump’s election.
“Please, don’t
stay home in November,” he said. “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.”
Factions of the
audience had already grown impatient, drowning Cruz out with jeers
and chants of “Trump! Trump!” as he spoke at length with an
impassioned pitch for conservative values without making a single
mention of the Republican nominee.
Cruz at first made
light of the protests, telling the crowd: “I appreciate the
enthusiasm of the New York delegation.” It was a reference to his
infamous skirmish with voters in Trump’s home state, whom the
senator had knocked during his campaign as holding “New York
values”.
The crowd
nonetheless appeared to be holding out hope for a last-minute change
of heart, even as aides to Cruz had repeatedly cautioned he would not
be endorsing Trump in his speech.
Cruz instead issued
a lengthy rebuke of Barack Obama, criticizing the president’s
record on domestic issues and foreign policy. He also addressed the
heightened tensions among Americans amid frayed race relations,
before making an appeal for new leadership in broader terms.
“We’re not
fighting for one particular candidate or one particular campaign,”
Cruz said.
Republican
convention: Cruz's last stand against Trump dominates night three –
as it happened
Follow all the
latest from Cleveland as the Republican national convention takes the
theme of ‘Make America First Again’
Read more
“We deserve
leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values,
cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect,
from everybody.”
But as it became
clear Cruz would not be backing Trump, most of the crowd revolted and
drowned out the final moments of his speech with boos that
reverberated across the basketball arena. Cruz put on a brave face,
wrapping up his remarks and thanking the audience, but the damage had
been done. In the midst of the uproar, Heidi Cruz had to be escorted
out by security due to fears for her safety.
As the convention
broke for the night, Trump accused his former rival of failing to
honor a pledge all the GOP candidates had made to support the
eventual nominee:
Republican officials
told reporters the senator’s speech was “classless”, while
commentators observed they had never witnessed anything like before.
A moment intended to channel Ronald Reagan’s 1976 convention
speech, when the former president revived his political career after
failing to win the nomination in his first attempt, was dubbed as
memorable for its brutal reaction in an election year already defined
by grassroots anger.
The two men have
shared a notoriously frosty rapport following a primary battle that
grew uncharacteristically nasty, with Trump attacking the physical
appearance of Cruz’s wife, Heidi Cruz, and even implicating his
father in the assassination of former president John F Kennedy.
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Cruz, on the final
day of his campaign in May, let loose his feelings about Trump by
assailing his opponent as “a pathological liar”, “a narcissist”
and “utterly immoral”.
He was preceded on
Wednesday by Florida senator Marco Rubio, who issued an endorsement
of Trump through a pre-taped video message that played like a
campaign ad.
“After a long and
spirited primary, the time for fighting each other is over,” Rubio
said.
In a stark
turnaround, Rubio also offered full-throated support of Trump as the
better candidate on issues such as national security, despite having
maintained in recent months that he wouldn’t trust the real estate
mogul with the nuclear codes.
Rubio’s absence
from the convention was nonetheless notable, given his position as
one of the Republican party’s more prominent stars. The senator,
who is seeking re-election to the Senate, said he needed to focus on
his campaign in Florida.
Mike Pence bid for
Republican unity marred by clashes on convention floor
Read more
Rubio, like Cruz, is
widely perceived as harboring ambitions to seek the presidency once
more.
Neither Rubio or
Cruz has ruled out a second presidential bid as early as 2020. Cruz
may run regardless of who occupies the White House in four years, an
official with the RNC told Yahoo News on Wednesday, predicting the
first major challenge to an incumbent president since 1980 if the
Texas senator were to stand in a primary against Trump.
Both senators remain
keenly aware of the damage they risk inflicting upon their own image
by aligning themselves too closely with Trump’s controversial brand
of politics. But staring down the barrel at a fractured party, they
have taken vastly different routes while picking up the pieces of
their failed campaigns.
While Trump’s
long-term impact on the party remains unknown, many within the top
brass have acknowledged they are bracing for a potentially
devastating loss to Clinton in November.
On Wednesday, Cruz
crystallized his view that the conservative movement will come to
judge those who staked their beliefs on their support for Trump. What
will remain to be seen is whether he can deliver on his bet that he
will come through to lead the party back to power in 2020, or whether
his ambition died in Cleveland.
What
we learned from day three of the Republican convention
The third day of the
Republican national convention is over and done. Here’s a summary
of what happened:
Ted Cruz did not
endorse Donald Trump in a speech to the convention, and he was
lustily booed by a crowd that had cheered much of his speech to that
point.
“Please, don’t
stay home in November,” Cruz said. “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.”
Then he stood and waved to thousands booing.
Newt Gingrich
came out after Cruz and said the crowd has misunderstood, that what
Cruz said was in effect an endorsement of Trump because Trump was the
only candidate faithful to the Constitution, see?
A sense of
deteriorating order in the arena was expanded by the flickering
malfunctions of the jumbotrons as Eric Trump attempted to follow
Cruz.
Vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence won an enthusiastic, if not
quite rapturous, reception for a smooth speech that framed the
election efficiently thus: “It’s change versus status quo.”
After Pence’s
speech, the last of the evening and on the late side of things,
Donald Trump came onstage to very strong cheering. And mis-kissed his
running mate:
The big finale
begins tomorrow just after 7pm ET, with Donald Trump, preceded by
daughter Ivanka.
Early in the
night, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham threatened to steal the
show with attacks on Hillary Clinton and the media and a call on Cruz
(not by name) to endorse Trump.
Marco Rubio
addressed the crowd by video before the Jumbotrons went out and said
it was time to unify the party and get behind the nominee. His pixels
were cheered.
A Trump staffer
released a statement inviting blame for the inclusion in Melania
Trump’s speech Monday of Michelle Obama’s words. Trump said “we
all make mistakes” and declined to accept her resignation.
The secret
service was investigating a Trump aide who said Hillary Clinton
should be shot for treason. The Trump campaign said the aide did not
speak for Trump.
Cleveland
officials said a flag burning that turned into a melee resulted in
the arrest of 18 people, bringing total RNC-related arrests to 23.
A woman at the
centre of sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump has spoken
for the first time in detail about her personal experience with the
billionaire tycoon who this week became the Republican nominee for
president.
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