Aug. 25, 2017
Ted Cruz
LOGAN EVANS
campus editor
When a historic winter storm devastated Texas and left millions cold, scared and without power, Senator Ted Cruz booked a flight to Cancun. He was met with widespread backlash, and he’s responding with a page out of the Donald Trump playbook — play it up, and they can’t hurt you.
Last week, Cruz spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, his first major appearance since the controversy.
“Orlando is awesome!” Cruz screamed with uncharacteristic energy. “Not as nice as Cancun, but it’s nice,” he joked.
For nearly 20 minutes, Cruz leaped around the stage hurling conservative buzzwords and pop culture references, often in the same breath. His performance was brash, animated, angry — a far cry from the stately act he put on for his 2016 presidential run. The notable change was pulled together by his newly-cultivated mullet and rouge troubadour beard.
In 2016, Cruz tried to be a clean-cut alternative to Trump. When Trump became a serious threat in that election, Cruz drew a hard line between himself and the eventual president by fake-earnestly-squinting-and-nodding his way through appeals to “reason” in the face of Trumpism. He tried to come off as the sane guy.
Now, Cruz has abandoned that act to dance in the spirit of Trump.
“Let me tell you right now,” Cruz said at CPAC. “Donald Trump ain’t going anywhere.”
It sounds like Cruz is referring to Trump as an idea. He knows that much of his party wants the soul of the former president to live on — and he’s angling to be the body it lives in.
Such a calculated change in only five years begs the question — is it possible for a politician to make their name in a post-Trump world without becoming a cartoon character?
I’m not naive enough to think that elected officials haven’t always been playing characters, or that those characters haven’t grown increasingly more cartoonish when needed. I just wish Cruz was drawn better.
