Recently, Donald Trump suggested that Ted Cruz’s wife was ugly and hiding terrible secrets, while Cruz’s father was a likely co-conspirator in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Despite this history — and despite Cruz informing him in advance that he had no plans to make an endorsement — Trump allowed Cruz to give a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night. During that speech, Cruz did not make an endorsement, opting instead to say several cryptic things about this fall’s election that could easily be interpreted as a tacit suggestion to vote for Trump — or else, to do the very opposite.
When Cruz implored the convention’s attendees to “vote your conscience,” the convention hall erupted with boos and chants, commanding Cruz to formally endorse the party’s standard-bearer. These boos may or may not have been initiated by Trump himself.
But early dispatches from the convention hall suggest outrage over the snub was felt in virtually every corner of the 2016 GOP’s coalition. From this Evangelical who spoke to the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker:
To the country-club set in their glass boxes:
To the profane populists of the Trumpian proletariat:
To the staffers of the Republican National Committee:
To the hypocrites who deserve every ounce of humiliation they receive:
But at least it played well with the conservative intellectuals who seem to have forgotten that Ted Cruz’s initial primary strategy was to normalize Donald Trump so as to harvest the fruits of his hateful demagoguery once the mogul dropped out:
