Eight years ago this month, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) was in the waning days of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, watching Donald Trump scoop up increasing shares of delegates on his way to becoming the presumptive nominee. At the convention that summer, Cruz earned boos for his non-endorsement of Trump \u2014 but by October was dutifully phone-banking on behalf of his erstwhile opponent. Then Trump became president and the party collapsed into line behind him, Cruz included.<\/p>\n
This outcome would have been hard to predict in April 2016. Not only had Trump dubbed Cruz \u201cLyin\u2019 Ted\u201d \u2014 a nickname downstream from Trump\u2019s effort to undercut his loss in the Iowa elections \u2014 but the fight between the two had been particularly nasty as the field narrowed and Cruz stuck around.<\/p>\n
In mid-April 2016, the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Cruz\u2019s father, Rafael, had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald in the days before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. This was a ridiculous claim, one Cruz brushed off. (\u201cYes,\u201d he said at an event in Indiana, \u201cmy dad killed JFK, he is secretly Elvis, and Jimmy Hoffa is buried in his backyard.\u201d) But Trump seized on it the following month after Rafael Cruz attacked him.<\/p>\n
Cruz\u2019s \u201cfather, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald\u2019s, you know, being shot,\u201d he said in an interview on Fox News\u2019s \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d mixing up the details a bit. \u201cWhat was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death?\u201d he added. \u201cBefore the shooting? It\u2019s horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n
That story, it turns out, ran with the blessing of Michael Cohen, Trump\u2019s attorney-slash-fixer. That detail emerged as former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified in Trump\u2019s criminal trial in Manhattan. Pecker met with Cohen and Trump in August 2015, he testified, agreeing to aid Trump\u2019s campaign by running useful stories and killing problematic ones (like the one at the heart of the criminal indictment against Trump). The Cruz-JFK story was one product of that agreement.<\/p>\n
Cohen would at times pitch stories, Pecker testified, and the magazine would share stories before they ran to get Cohen\u2019s thoughts. Pecker insisted that he didn\u2019t work with Trump on the stories; whether Trump was apprised of the stories by Cohen can be evaluated based on other evidence.<\/p>\n
That story was the most memorable targeting Cruz. But another story, published in March 2016, was far dirtier.<\/p>\n
\u201cTED CRUZ SEX SCANDAL \u2014 5 SECRET MISTRESSES\u201d the front page of the Enquirer trumpeted. Inside, a story alleging that Cruz had been unfaithful to his wife, with alleged paramours described in broad strokes. On a CNN panel, a Trump ally accused another participant of being one of the five. She denied it categorically \u2014 since it was invented from whole cloth.<\/p>\n
That was Cruz\u2019s response.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CEO of the National Enquirer is an individual named David Pecker,\u201d Cruz said at a campaign event. \u201cWell, David is good friends with Donald Trump. In fact, the National Enquirer has endorsed Donald Trump, has said he must be president.\u201d The senator lamented that his young daughters would someday \u201cread these lies, these attacks that Donald and his henchmen, that his buddies at the National Enquirer spread\u201d about their father.<\/p>\n
Cruz was slightly off the mark, identifying Trump aide Roger Stone and not Cohen as the source of the story. Stone, he said, \u201chad for months been foreshadowing that this attack was coming.\u201d Perhaps that was a function of the story being open knowledge among Trump\u2019s inner circle.<\/p>\n
But otherwise, Cruz was right. Trump\u2019s denial at the time aged less well.<\/p>\n
\u201cI did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it,\u201d Trump claimed. \u201cLikewise, I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin\u2019 Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence.\u201d He noted that the Enquirer had, in years past, occasionally broken real stories \u2014 unsubtly suggesting that this might be another such occurrence.<\/p>\n
From the witness stand, Pecker identified other stories targeting Trump\u2019s primary opponents in that cycle: one about neurosurgeon Ben Carson \u2014 that the doctor essentially admitted \u2014 and one making a similar claim about an alleged extramarital dalliance by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s telling that the stories identified by Pecker as having been coordinated with Cohen to undermine Trump\u2019s opponents centered on extramarital affairs. Trump\u2019s defenders have argued that the story that is the centerpiece of the Manhattan indictment \u2014 involving Trump\u2019s alleged interaction with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels \u2014 was buried by Cohen (after being tipped off by Pecker) as a matter of course, and not because of the campaign. Pecker, though, testified that his agreement with Cohen and Trump in August 2015 was specifically centered on the campaign. That stories about extramarital affairs were seen as ways to damage Trump\u2019s opponents politically indicates an understanding that the Daniels story was similarly damaging.<\/p>\n
Pecker\u2019s testimony also theoretically provided Ted Cruz an opportunity to take an eight-year-delayed victory lap: His assessment of the involvement of Trump\u2019s allies with the \u201cmistresses\u201d story was on the mark.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for the senator, he\u2019s now too closely allied with Trump to actually take that victory lap. Politics, like love, is a complicated thing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Eight years ago this month, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) was in the waning days of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, watching Donald Trump scoop up increasing shares of delegates on his way to becoming the presumptive nominee. At the convention that summer, Cruz earned boos for his non-endorsement of Trump \u2014 but by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}