How sucking up to The Donald for months has backfired on the Texas senator
Cruz needed to think of Trump's behavior as Highlander, not Fonzie. There can be only One. Trump won't relinquish his hold on the lead, it has to be taken from him. The irony of the hated "moderate" Jeb Bush being the only candidate putting real money behind ads hitting Trump (far too little, far too late, and featuring an idiotic detour attacking Marco Rubio), is rich. Cruz has the resources and the conservative pedigree to bring a case against Trump, but his political calculus has been so wrong for so long that he merely delayed the Donald's strike against him.
When the strike came, the Trump Troll Party went into overdrive against Cruz. Ted Cruz, a man who checked every box on their agenda (and was perfectly acceptable as long as his lips were planted firmly on Trump's posterior) was suddenly anathema. Cruz made a political category error in assessing the Trump supporters he so coveted; he thought they were driven by the talk-radio and fever-swamp media complex and a hatred of the Establishment alone. He was wrong; they're also driven by their desire to be part of Trump's personality cult. If there's one thing no one will ever mistake Ted Cruz for, it's a charismatic cult leader. Cruz scans more as the accountant for the charismatic cult leader than the guy ladling out the Kool Aid.
Cruz also believed that the weaponized purity-posse of Breitbart "News" and the rest of the birther-truther-ScamPAC rage-driven infrastructure that feeds off the credulous and the cretinous, would never turn on him.
He should have been paying attention; many of these outlets have stopped being about advancing conservatism or serving as a counterweight to liberal media. They're about monetizing fury, even if it means marginalizing candidates and messages that could make it possible to achieve a governing conservative majority and retake the White House. They've advocated for the last six months that all candidates not named Donald Trump must be destroyed. Not for ideological or political reasons, but because no one else brings in those sweet clicks, that ad revenue, and that ROI on the ScamPAC email lists...Also read:
For the good of the Republican party, both Trump and Cruz must lose
Rubio's anti-Cruz gambit may pay off
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