Cruzing

A history lesson on how scoundrels succeed

Diary of the Late Republic, #13

The (first?) Trump administration is officially history: I spent two days on it this week in my cultural and history of the United States, 1970-2020 elective with a notably strong group of kids. Meanwhile, the Trump presidency was also history this week in a Manhattan courtroom, in which jurors heard the testimony of National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, avatar of checkbook journalism, who colluded with the Trump campaign in 2016 to catch-and-kill negative stories about Trump and run damaging ones on his rivals. One such rival was Ted Cruz, one of the last men standing in the bruising Republican primary. So it was that in May the Enquirer emblazoned a yellow headline “TED CRUZ FATHER LINKED TO JFK ASSASSINATION!” with a doctored photo of Rafael Cruz standing next to Kennedy’s killer Lee Harvey Oswald. (And yes, I believe Oswald did it, and did it on his own.) A mere eight years later, Artificial Intelligence has made this kind of thing commonplace.

Trump was shocked, shocked, by this revelation of the elder Cruz’s perfidy. “I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting?” he asked Fox News. “It’s horrible.” Trump wondered why the Enquirer wasn’t being awarded a Pulitzer prize.

Cruz, naturally, found the “controversy” ridiculous—and infuriating. He called it “another garbage story in a tabloid full of garbage.” He also called Trump “a pathological liar” and “dangerous.”

Trump wasn’t done assassinating the Cruz family character. Amid charges and countercharges—Melania Trump posing nude, vague insinuations of financial malfeasance on the part of Cruz’s wife Heidi, who worked for Goldman Sachs—Trump in July of 2016 re-tweeted side-by-side images of the two women as a means of comparing their looks. “The images are worth a thousand words,” he said. Cruz’s response: “Donald, real men don’t attack women. Your wife is lovely, and Heidi is the love of my life.” He called Trump “a sniveling coward” who “has a problem with women—particularly “strong women.”

Cruz went on to endorse Trump. He’s been a supporter ever since. When asked this week about Pecker’s testimony this week he said he’s “not interested in revisiting ancient history.”

The Princeton/Harvard-educated Ted Cruz is a brilliant man who is likely to win election for a third term as U.S. Senator from Texas this fall.

And, as history shows, prostitution takes many forms.