Ted Cruz Debases Himself for the Base

W hat 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.