For a brief moment on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz appeared on the same stage as allies rallying for the same cause. They shook hands as Cruz handed Trump the microphone at a rally against the Iran deal, on the West lawn of the Capitol.

And that was where the togetherness ended.

Cruz and Trump’s back-to-back speeches were a contrast in both style and substance, indicative of the different paths they have charted to the White House. And while the two have cultivated a tentative friendship over the past few months, each man’s speech to the hundreds of sweaty, sign-toting, American flag–swathed supporters at today’s rally included subtle jabs that made clear that the relationship has its limits.

The entrance music set the stage.

Trump walked on to R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of The World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” a fitting introduction for the man who has upended the GOP presidential primaries and conventional political wisdom, changing the calculus for every one of his Republican rivals, including Cruz.

RELATED: Ted Cruz Challenges Boehner and McConnell: Stop the Iran Deal

Cruz’s intro music? The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” It was a jab at President Obama and the Iran deal, to be sure. But it also brought to mind an attack many other Republican contenders have leveled at Trump: that he espouses conservative principles but doesn’t really believe them. (Cruz, almost alone among his rivals, has largely avoided tangling with the billionaire real-estate mogul since his meteoric rise in the polls began.)

For about twelve minutes, the Texas senator focused his remarks on the Iran deal and on what he warned would be deadly consequences if it went into effect. He delved into detail about the specific players involved, going so far as to explain just how exactly the Iranians could use a nuclear weapon to disable the power grid of the entire Eastern seaboard.

#share#When Trump took the microphone, the tenor changed.

The author of The Art of the Deal declared that “never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.” But he was lighter on specifics.

“Ted and everybody else have gone through all of the details,” Trump said of the nuclear agreement itself.

Trump was the major draw of the event — event organizers acknowledged that he brought with him a huge amount of media attention — and he knew it.

RELATED: Don and Ted’s Excellent Anti-Iran Rally

“I was called by Senator Cruz a few days ago and he said, ‘You think we can get a really good crowd out here to protest this incompetent deal?’ And I said, ‘Boy, can we get a crowd,’” Trump recounted as he opened the speech, noting just how many people had shown up on the sweltering day, and who had drawn them there.

Speaking to reporters later in the afternoon, following a meeting in the Capitol building with Senator Jeff Sessions and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Trump made sure to again note that the “great, great crowd” had come to see him.

Palin, he said, had told him, “Once you left, everybody just disappeared.”

Trump focused the bulk of his speech focused on what would happen if he won the presidency.

‘We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,’ Trump said.

“If I win the presidency, I guarantee you that those four prisoners are back in our country before I ever take office,” Trump said. “They will be back before I ever take office because they know that’s what has to happen. They know it. And if they don’t know it, I’m telling them right now.”

It wouldn’t just be the Iran deal. With Trump as president, everything would be amazing.

“We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.

#related#Cruz, on the other hand, waited until the last two minutes of his speech to mention his own political aspirations. But when he did, he took a jab at the man who was set to take the stage after him.

“The single most important issue in 2016 will be stopping Iran from a acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Cruz said. “And any commander-in-chief worthy of defending this nation should be prepared to stand up on January 20, 2017, and rip to shreds this catastrophic deal.”

There are two GOP presidential candidates who have said they would not rip up the deal on Day One. One of them is Donald Trump.

“I want to thank my friend Donald Trump for joining us today,” Cruz added moments later.

— Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.