Ted Cruz slammed Mitch McConnell on Monday.
“Mitch would rather be leader than have a Republican majority,” Cruz said on his podcast. “If there’s a Republican who can win and he’s not going to support Mitch, the truth of the matter is he’d rather the Democrat win.”
Where, well, wow!
Cruz was also part of a small group of Republican senators pushing to delay the leadership election until after the Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia. Asked Tuesday by CNN if he would support McConnell as Senate GOP leader, he declined to answer.
How to explain Cruz’s rhetoric about McConnell? Comfortably. It’s politics.
Cruz has made no secret of his political ambitions. He finished second to Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary. Although he and Trump ended that race on acrimonious terms — Trump falsely suggested that Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and attacked his wife – Cruz eventually endorsed Trump and became one of the former president’s staunchest defenders in the Senate.
The lesson Cruz has learned in this evolving relationship with Trump is that the Republican base absolutely loves the former president and has zero interest in a candidate who opposes him. (Whether that calculus has changed after a disappointing midterm election result for Republicans remains to be seen.)
And so, Cruz has gotten as close as possible to Trump in recent years — as he tries to repair ill will from the 2016 race.
When you see Cruz’s overreaction to the 2022 election – and the speed with which he blamed McConnell – through this Trumpian lens, things start to make more sense.
Trump has been relentless in criticizing — and bullying — McConnell in the wake of the midterm elections.
“It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,” Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social website after Democrats secured control of the Senate. “He dropped the in-betweens, and everyone despises him.”
And as CNN recently reported, Trump is pushing his allies to indict McConnell as well:
“In phone calls with allies, elected officials and new members of Congress, the former President accused McConnell of spending recklessly in states where Republicans faced significant adversity to the detriment of candidates in more competitive contests.”
So Cruz is just following Trump’s instructions. He knows—because he can tell—that no one is going to beat McConnell in the race for Senate Republican leader. But that’s not what really matters to Cruz.
What matters is that Trump’s base is virtue-stating that it thinks McConnell has done a bad job — and that it’s angry about it.
It’s also worth noting that the animosity between Cruz and McConnell isn’t new. McConnell was openly frustrated when Cruz forced a government shutdown in 2013 over then-President Barack Obama’s health care law — a strategy the GOP leader saw as completely self-serving and counterproductive to the party’s broader efforts.
Trump is widely expected to announce his third run for president on Tuesday night. It’s hard to see there being room for the Texas senator in a field that includes former president and maybe (probably?) Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis.
But Cruz might well want to be in the running mix if Trump ends up as the GOP nominee in 2024. Either way, Cruz is betting that being firmly in Trump’s camp (rather than McConnell’s ) will pay future political dividends for him.
