Sen. Ted Cruz has given Indiana his all. He tried to broker a deal with John Kasich to get the do-nothing Ohio governor out of his way. That agreement lasted a hot nanosecond before falling apart. He tried appealing to Hoosiers’ sacred idol, the Basketball Ring, only to be mocked for his imprecise terminology. He selected a vice presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina, even though he trails Donald Trump by hundreds of delegates. It came off as world-historically desperate. What else? He dragged Indiana Gov. Mike Pence kicking and screaming into a half-assed endorsement; that was good stuff. None of this seemed to improve his prospects ahead of Tuesday’s primary.
So this morning, cued up by Trump’s rumormongering about how Cruz’s father was in cahoots with Lee Harvey Oswald, Cruz just spewed out every nasty thing he could say against Trump in one final blitz.
“I’m going to do something I haven’t done for the entire campaign for those of you all who have traveled with me,” Cruz said in a Tuesday morning gaggle with reporters in Evansville, Indiana. “I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar.” Cruz continued:
He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying. He accuses everybody on that debate stage of lying, and it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen. …
Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald. And he combines being a pathological liar, and I say pathological because I actually think Donald if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon, and one thing in the evening, all contradictory, and he’d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it, but the man is utterly amoral.
He went on to say that Trump will “betray supporters on every issue” and that he “has a real problem with women.” He accused News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch and Fox News president Roger Ailes of turning “Fox News into the Donald Trump Network,” saying Murdoch “is used to picking world leaders in Australia and the United Kingdom running tabloids, and we’re seeing it here at home with the consequences for this nation.” He referenced Back to the Future’s bully Biff Tannen—“a caricature of a braggadocious, arrogant buffoon,” and allegedly based on Donald Trump—and said that “we are looking potentially at the Biff Tannen presidency.”
Then there was this part about Trump and sex stuff. “Donald Trump is a serial philanderer and he boasts about it,” Cruz said. “This is not a secret. He’s proud of being a serial philanderer. I want everyone to think about your teenage kids. The president of the United States talks about how great it is to commit adultery, how proud he is, describes his battles with venereal disease as his ‘own personal Vietnam.’ ”
“The entire country is looking to you right now,” Cruz pleaded. “It is only Indiana that can pull us back. It is only the good sense and good judgment of Indiana that can pull us back.”
This may be a tedious thing to keep pointing out, but Cruz spent the first six or seven months of Trump’s candidacy as Trump’s biggest booster and validator to the conservative grassroots. There’s always been some truth to the moniker of “Lyin’ Ted.” His greatest lie of all was pretending that he ever thought there was a decent bone in Trump’s body, and he went much further than that. “I’m grateful that he’s in the race,” Cruz said late last summer.
Trump, for his part, seems delighted. “Ted Cruz is a desperate candidate trying to save his failing campaign,” Trump said in a statement released by his campaign.
It is no surprise he has resorted to his usual tactics of over-the-top rhetoric that nobody believes. Over the last week, I have watched Lyin’ Ted become more and more unhinged as he is unable to react under the pressure and stress of losing, in all cases by landslides, the last six primary elections—in fact, coming in last place in all but one of them. Today’s ridiculous outburst only proves what I have been saying for a long time, that Ted Cruz does not have the temperament to be President of the United States.
Watch Cruz’s full remarks here:
