Eight years ago this week, Sen. Ted Cruz delivered remarks at the Republican National Convention. They were not well received.
The Texas senator had just wrapped up his own failed presidential bid, during which time he got to know Donald Trump fairly well. Their relationship, however, could’ve been better: The future president went after Cruz’s wife and suggested Cruz’s father played a role in the JFK assassination. The senator, meanwhile, told voters that Trump was a “pathological liar,” a “bully,” a “narcissist,” “utterly amoral” and a “sniveling coward” with “a consistent pattern of inciting violence.”
With this in mind, when Cruz spoke at his party’s 2016 convention, he couldn’t quite bring himself to endorse his former rival, instead saying, “If you love our country and love your children as much as I know that you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience.” The booing from attendees was relentless.
In the years that followed, the senator did what most Republicans did and became a Trump sycophant. It was against this backdrop that the far-right senator spoke again at his party’s national convention — and this time, he received a far warmer reception than he did eight years ago.
Cruz pleased attendees, not only by throwing his support behind the GOP ticket, but also by feeding the crowd the kind of anti-immigrant red meat that tends to generate strong reactions.
Pitching the idea that the United States has become a violent hellscape as a result of undocumented criminals, Cruz went so far as to declare: “How did we get here? It happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”
To the extent that reality still matters, Cruz combined a series of lies to create one larger lie. The senator told people to believe that non-citizen voting is rampant, which isn’t true. He told people to believe that Democratic officials want support from non-citizen voters, which isn’t true and doesn’t make any sense. And perhaps most importantly, Cruz told people to believe that Democratic officials are willing to sacrifice the lives of American children — deliberately — in order to benefit electorally from the support from non-citizen voters, which is transgressive madness.
A Washington Post analysis described the Texas Republican’s rhetoric as “grotesque.”
Cruz claimed not only that Democrats were encouraging immigration to gain power, but that they were callously sacrificing children to do so. What can you say about that? You can say it’s false. You can say it’s toxic. You can say it’s opportunistic or cynical or a degradation. But none of this really captures it. It doesn’t capture Cruz, standing on a stage at the convention, speaking on a night in which his party was purportedly demonstrating its commitment to safety, accusing his political opponents of letting boys and girls be murdered so that they can get a few more votes in some House races.
Cruz is not a dumb man. He surely knows that his ugly rhetoric is false. He pitched it to a national audience anyway. Watching the senator’s appalling speech, I was reminded of recent chatter about Cruz turning over a new leaf. The Texas Tribune reported in April, for example, that Cruz, as part of his latest re-election campaign, was “casting himself as a bipartisan lawmaker with a penchant for reaching across the aisle.” The Wall Street Journal soon after published a related report, noting that Cruz is “rolling out a softer, bipartisan side,” and taking steps to “recast his image as a dealmaking lawmaker.” The article added, “His campaign even shot ads featuring ‘Democrats for Cruz.’” His convention speech made fools of those who believed such talk.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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