Ted Cruz Is Still Running for President, writes Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker:
Cruz is merely taking the next step toward the Presidency in a manner that he previewed when I profiled him
for the magazine, in 2014. Cruz may be wrong about Republican and
Presidential politics, but he’s consistent, and his rejection of Trump,
when every other putative successor as Republican nominee has endorsed
him, fits into his master plan. In simple terms, Cruz thinks that
conservative Republicans win Presidential elections
… despite his defeat, Cruz positioned
himself perfectly to reassert his core argument in 2020. Assuming that
Trump loses this year, Cruz can argue that Trump failed because he did
not fully embrace conservative dogma. While Trump has taken conservative
positions during the campaign, he has held a variety of less hard-line
views over the years, including on such bedrock issues as abortion.
And
Trump has, in any event, largely steered away from social issues
during his campaign. In recent days, Trump even appears to be trying to moderate his views on illegal immigration, which had been the heart of his conservative appeal. The
greater Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory turns out to be, the
stronger Cruz’s claim will be. Without a political base of his own, a
defeated Trump will be a deserted Trump; he will not be making a second
run for President in his mid-seventies. Trump will be a scorned and
discredited figure.
… Cruz has built his career on repudiation of moderation—and on
confrontation with his fellow-Republicans. On balance, it has worked out
well for him. As a first-term senator, he nearly shut down the federal
government single-handedly in a failed bid to end Obamacare. This kind
of absolutism alienated his Senate colleagues, including Republicans,
but it propelled him to a strong second-place finish in the Republican
Presidential primaries—an extraordinary achievement for a politician who
has won exactly one election in his life. For a party picking up the
pieces after a catastrophic Presidential election (if that’s what it
turns out to be), there will be great appeal in a politician, like Cruz,
who can say, “I told you so.”
