We are all reeling from the shock of Ted Cruz’s donaldorsement yesterday. While sorting through all of the reactions, it might be helpful to see how Cruz explained why he did it apart from the Facebook post.
Here’s what he told a local Texas news outlet:
In an exclusive interview with Eyewitness News, Cruz said it was not a snap decision.
“There were no deals,” he said. “We had been engaged in conversations. You know it’s been a decision as I said I’ve been thinking about and praying about for weeks and months, discussing it with my family, and I made the decision today and announced it Friday.
This rather flies in the face of reports that he did it for the sake of staving off primary opponents, or that he did it to get Mike Lee on the Supreme Court. Those are much more pragmatic reasons than the one he seems to be pushing here.
“Listen,” he said. “(In) politics, there’s always criticism. If no one is throwing rocks at you, you’re not doing much of anything. I’ve discussed it with both Heidi (Cruz) and my dad. I love my wife. I love my dad. Both of them have forgiven Donald. I have forgiven him. This is not personal. This is not about our family. It’s about the country.”
This actually sounds very familiar. I’m pretty sure Ben Carson offered the same explanation of his endorsement of the Donald after he called him a child molester. When pressed on it, Ben Carson said he had forgiven Trump. But there’s a slight problem with this – the Donald never ASKED for forgiveness. Indeed, he’s gone out of his way to say that he doesn’t think he’s ever done anything worth asking forgiveness for. So Cruz’s explanation here just doesn’t fly. Did the Donald ever apologize? And if not, then how can he say he “forgave” him?
“We have to choices,” he said. “We have Hillary or Donald. Now when this race started I had another choice in mind. I campaigned very hard. Tried to make that case. Out of 17 republican candidates, we beat 15 of them, but we didn’t beat 16 of them and at this point Donald is the republican nominee. At this point it is a choice, a binary choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and my conscience leads me to conclude that a Hillary Clinton presidency would do enormous damage to the court, to the bill of rights, to the constitution, to our freedom, to our jobs. And that’s why I am going to be voting for the republican nominee.”
We’ve heard this a million times over. This is the standard Trump talking point. So this doesn’t fly either.
Because it was a “binary choice” right after Trump got the nomination. So why did Cruz wait so long to endorse, if that’s his reasoning?
I think this is why Cruz’s endorsement is so displeasing to people – the reasons he gives just don’t quite make sense. Or at least, the reasons he says he’s endorsing didn’t change between the convention and now. So they don’t satisfy the reasoning for why he’s endorsing now.
But, as I said before in a previous post, he deserves our benefit of the doubt.