I think Chris Cillizza is guilty of being both too cynical and not cynical enough. Of course, this is forgivable, since watching Ted Cruz and Donald Trump can be a dizzying experience.
As I explained last night (and I am much more confident in my assessment this morning), I believe that Donald Trump knew exactly what Ted Cruz would and wouldn’t say last night and was determined to see him booed off the stage and humiliated. I won’t rehash my argument for this here other than to say that I’ve seen plenty more corroboration of my theory, including that even the press had an accurate advance copy of the speech two hours before Cruz delivered it.
If you have trouble believing that Trump would prioritize humiliating Cruz over highlighting his running mate, you probably aren’t from the New York metro area and/or had trouble initially believing that Chris Christie would shut down the George Washington Bridge because some lowly Democratic mayor refused to endorse him. It’s a cultural thing.
In any case, Cillizza doesn’t really entertain this possibility and instead tells us that “it was a stunning thing to witness…the man everyone expected to, eventually, fall in line behind Trump” give a speech in which he did not endorse. I guess Cillizza didn’t read the advance copy of the speech or listen to both the Cruz and the Trump camps explain that they all knew, days in advance, that Cruz’s speech would carry no endorsement. When he says that “everyone” expected Cruz to endorse, that’s pretty much 180 degrees away from the truth. Certainly Trump didn’t think that, and he Tweeted as much right after his New York delegation booed Cruz off the stage at the same moment that he made a dramatic and synchronized entrance into the hall.
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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 21, 2016
So, no, Trump knew precisely what Cruz was going to say and he wanted Cruz to say it and he wanted Cruz booed off the stage as he emerged triumphant to be seated for his son’s speech which was scheduled to follow. When walking to his car after the show was over, Trump replied simply to a question on his reaction to Cruz’s speech: “I loved it.”
As for Cruz, he was definitely caught by surprise. His speech had been vetted and approved. It didn’t really say anything that would warrant the spontaneous reaction he received. There’s no way that the whole New York delegation (and pretty much only the New York delegation) was collectively and instantaneously outraged by the words “vote your conscience” without prepping and prompting.
Cruz was using a strategy by deciding to show up and not endorse. He was choosing his (fully vetted and approved) words carefully. But he wasn’t counting on getting booed off the stage.
Now, Cillizza (and many others) have praised Cruz’s cunning gambit here. The basic story is that Trump will lose and lose very badly. And when that happens, the best place to be is as far removed from Trump as possible. Cruz’s supposed brilliance is in realizing that he’d get more mileage out of irritating people at the convention by not endorsing than he would be simply staying away as so many others had chosen to do.
In this telling, Cruz is 100% a conniving and ruthless strategist who sees many steps ahead of his competitors. Completely discounted is the possibility that Cruz has normal human emotions and resentments about things like his wife being disrespected and his father being accused of complicity in the assassination of a former president. Also totally blown off is the idea that Cruz might actually have some conservative or basic American principles that lead him to reject Trump’s candidacy and go on the record about it. I don’t normally quote Jonah Goldberg approvingly, but what he says can’t be discounted.
Ted Cruz has never been my favorite politician. And I am not so naïve that I don’t recognize the gamble Cruz is making.
But if the choice is between forgiving Ted Cruz’s obvious political calculation to become the standard bearer of an authentic conservatism or Donald Trump’s lizard-brain narcissism where no principle or cause outranks his own glandular desire to be worshipped like a conqueror atop the carcass of conservatism, I choose Ted.
If the choice is between, say, congratulating the Boy Scoutish obedience of Mike Pence as he sells off bits and pieces of his soul like jewels from a family heirloom just to survive another day or Ted Cruz, who took the tougher road and refused to join the mewling mobs of toadies, apologists, human weathervanes, difference-splitters, and vacillators, I choose Ted.
Yes, Cruz was calculating, but he was also taking up the banner of an “authentic conservatism.”
And, okay, I know people will always try to rescue the virtue of authentic conservatism from the hands of Movement Conservatives, but they do have principles they believe in and that Trump does not. If Cruz believes even five percent of what he says, he’s legitimately appalled by many of Trump’s policies and utterances. In the news right now, for example, is Trump’s refusal to unqualifiedly honor our NATO commitments. That’s a deal-breaker for Americans of all stripes, definitely including most conservatives. In speaking for Jonah Goldberg, it’s at least possible that Cruz was also authentically speaking for himself. That he understands the short-term risks and potential long-term benefits of this doesn’t make it a 100% cynical move. And it doesn’t make it a 100% principled stand, either. What it is is a confluence of factors that explain Cruz’s behavior.
The counternarrative is that Cruz was thinking of no one but himself and put his career ambitions over the best interests of the party. He was selfish and petty.
That’s going to be the dominant narrative in the short-term because the Republican Party isn’t going to take down their tent and begin praising conscientious objectors to their own nominee four months before the election. For now Cruz is the guy who broke his pledge and got booed off the stage, and that’s as far as Trump can see or cared to see. For Trump, none of it matters unless he wins, and exerting his dominance is part of his strategy for winning and also a foundational part of his personality. He wanted Cruz humiliated, so he was humiliated.
What Trump didn’t factor in is how this would be perceived outside of his narrow circle of supporters. Cruz emerged as a principled person who somehow punk’d Trump at his own convention. That wasn’t the narrative Trump wanted, which is why he is eager to tell everyone that he knew exactly what Cruz would say and permitted him to say it.
But, of course, that happens to be true.
“Ego and ideology keep entwining in the Republican election. As Cruz told the Texas delegation this morning, it mattered to him, when he decided to publicly reject his Party’s nominee, that Trump had suggested that Cruz’s father had played a part in the John F. Kennedy assassination and had retweeted unflattering photos of Heidi Cruz next to glamour shots of his wife, Melania. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” Cruz said. But there were political motivations, too: Trumpism had infected some part of his base. For several weeks, the question has been whether the future of the Republican Party belonged to Trump or to the establishment with which he has warred. After last night, there is a third possibility.”–Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker today
As a son of the New York Metro area, I suggest that it’s not a cultural thing. It’s an asshole thing.
Maybe they are both playing 11th dimensional pattycake.
I was thinking eleven dimensional derp.
How many projected that Trump would suffer for dissing John McCain? I didn’t because at their core GOP base voters don’t like or defend their losers. It’s why Trump calling another politician a loser is so effective with those voters. It’s childish and should have no place in campaigns, but as winning has become the only thing for many voters, it’s hardly surprising that a candidate would be so gauche as to taunt an opponent as a loser.
Suspect that pundits and bloggers are intellectualizing to much about the Trump campaign and the convention. He’s playing an emotional game. And for many people engaging in politics on an emotional level is thrilling. They don’t need any intellectual pinheads to tell them what their guts know.
Billmon tweet:
Bax tweet:
Billmon tweet:
“Suspect that pundits and bloggers are intellectualizing to much about the Trump campaign and the convention. He’s playing an emotional game. “
Boy I can’t agree more. I don’t think pundits, and liberals for that matter, understand that politics is visceral for most people.
Trump doesn’t care much about policy – and understanding him that way is missing the point.
Trump is about telling people they are being ripped off and they should be pissed off about it.
It has its appeal.
That is Trump’s problem he only thinks how those that are his radical supporters will react. Trump has no concept of what average thinking voter sees him as and he does not really care as long as his main base adores him.He craves those never ending applause.
Trump thinks? Who knew.
Must note about Cruz….he won his senate seat with under a million votes in a state with at least 14 million registered voters. If he cannot be President, he at least wants to keep that senate seat.
As long as this is right I think Cillizza is right.
“Now, Cillizza (and many others) have praised Cruz’s cunning gambit here. The basic story is that Trump will lose and lose very badly.”
But if Trump loses by 5 they are going to blame Cruz for the loss.
Similarly, if Clinton actually loses can you imagine the Democratic Bloodbath between the Clinton and the Sanders people.
I still believe Clinton wins by 10.
Trump, as a fan and sometimes-participant in pro wrestling, wanted Cruz to be the heel riling up the crowd so he could step out and get all the cheers for being a face.
Unfortunately for him, political conventions involve a very different sort of kayfaybe.
Trump tweet today:
Billmon response:
Has there ever before been a US politician that could so nearly imitate a carnival barker? How soon before his campaign devolves into the man hawking Trump timeshares? On a Mexican riviera.
Another master stroke by a master
bator…errr, ahhhh, I mean master baiter.And it has done its work well.
He baited Cruz onto the hook using Crus’s insufferable self-righteousness and then used that bait to catch…
To catch what?
To catch media coverage, of course. His one path to win is constant media coverage. Marie3 is perfectly correct above when she says:
Trump knows how bone-deep stupid the majority of potential voters are, especially the ones who do not habitually vote. he’s playing the media game, which is really his strength as a politician.
I have been saying this right from the get-go. He is playing Gorgeous George, right on up to the hairline.
The villain who wins. Everybody else is a loser, ergo the ‘villain” is right.
Bloomberg — Navy’s $12.9 Billion Carrier Isn’t Ready for Warfare, Memo Says
(The US Navy announced that there would be USS Gerald R Ford in January 2007. Construction began November 2009. So, if Trump/GOP politicize the delays/difficulties, we know who will get the blame.)
motto – Time Megyn Kelly as a reporter at the RNC under fire for inappropriate dress
Fair enough but where were they when Melania wore a skin-tight (a good size too small) dress for her convention speech?
At the risk of whatever, I do hold the Obama Admin accountable for the fiasco of the USS Gerald Ford. When and who is ever going to hold the military accountable for these mega-expensive military hardware disasters like the fighter plane that also doesn’t work?? I’m sick of my tax dollars being utterly wasted on this junk that doesn’t work.
As for Kelly’s dress? I rarely pay attention and mostly could care less. But… it does seem like an odd choice for reporting at a convention.
I found one or two of the tweets in response pretty funny though – about how they’re “Christian Conservatives” so cover up already. Like all those young, skinny, interchangeable bottle blondes on Fox wearing skin-tight, super short bandage dresses and super high stilettos??? Like that’s “conservative” enough?? What’s the difference between those Fox babes & what Megan Kelly’s wearing? Not much.
What’s the difference between those Fox babes & what Megan Kelly’s wearing?
Kelly displays less cleavage?
MIC big budget items are bi-partisany. It’s why at the Presidential level doesn’t matter if votes R or D because the outcome is the same. That “no difference” extends to most members of Congress. On this issue DiFi is indistinguishable from 99% of Republicans.
All of them are responsible for the mega-dollars squandered on the MIC. Too bad no more than 25% of the voting population cares about that or recognizes the economic links from that to income/wealth inequality.
You mean…Kelly isn’t a “Fox babe?”
The perfect “Fox babe?”
Oh.
Nevermind.
Yore freind…
Emily (AKA the “Not Ready For Prime Time Babe”) Litella
The problem for Cruz is that he needs Trump to not only lose, but lose badly. Otherwise it won’t force the reckoning he’s banking on.
He needs Trump to get completely wiped out. And, unfortunately for him, that’s not likely to happen.
If history is any guide, the GOP doesn’t respond to a thumping by doubling down on the rightwing crazy that wiped them out in the prior election. Hence, it was Nixon in ’68 and not Thurmond and Dole in ’96 and not Buchanan, Dornan, or Keyes.
>”If history is any guide, the GOP doesn’t respond to a thumping by doubling down on the rightwing crazy that wiped them out in the prior election.”
Your examples are good, but to play devil’s advocate, McCain and Romney (and their VPs even more) (and McConnell & Co.) could be said to have doubled, tripled or quadrupled down on the rightwing crazy of Bush-Cheney-DeLay et al that wiped them out in 2006, 2008 and 2012.
Would have to disagree that McCain doubled down on GWB/Cheney crazy. He did preserve his status as the moderate to GWB’s extremism in 2000. The Palin pick was an attempt to exploit the woman’s vote because so many expressed anger or disappointment that HRC was denied the nomination. McCain has a habit of not attending to details when he attempts to fly and therefore, knew almost nothing about the woman before selecting her. Also, he not all that smart and well-informed.
Ryan was a pullback from Palin. He’s scary in that dull technocratic way but not in the emotional, religious, and ignorant way that Palin is scary.
>”Cruz was calculating, but he was also taking up the banner of an “authentic conservatism.”
Taking up the banner, yes, but I’ve never been the slightest bit convinced that Cruz actually believes in conservative dogma or religion. I think he’s always been trying to do precisely what Trump has done: to take over control of the millions-strong minority of old white Americans and the money from which they can be so easily separated. Why either wants to do this is a more difficult question, but I think Cruz is using a complex, intellectual, fantastically cynical approach, which has so far been less effective than Trump’s intuitive reality television based approach. But to dismiss Cruz (and Ryan, Rubio et al), we have to first explain what will happen when the November election paints bright red “Loser” graffiti all over the Trump brand. I can’t see how the collision of Trump’s narcissism with electoral Armageddon ends in anything other than epic and unending humiliation.
There is no contradiction between people having genuine feelings, and being cunning and calculating. So I don’t see why both terms wouldn’t describe Ted Cruz.
Secondly, I don’t find his feistiness at all surprising, considering that his whole political career has been based on the benefits of being widely hated. (Something which works particularly well, BTW, in Texas.) We already know that Cruz dines out on the fact that every member of the Senate hates his guts. So why would he give a shit that every Trump supporter hates his guts? He positively enjoys it, and it validates him to his own supporters. When Trump finally implodes, Cruz will be ther to pick up the pieces and say, “Wha’d I tell you?”