Cogan noted how, on popular websites such as Cracked and theChive, slideshows of Putin’s legend were labeled “The World’s Craziest Badass” and “The Real Life Most Interesting Man in the World,” drawing millions of eyeballs and enhancing the reputation of Russian’s tyrant among a certain segment of red-blooded American males.
Observing this very phenomenon in early 2014, the conservative author Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “Obama’s subordinates violate the law by going after the communications of a Fox reporter’s parents; Putin himself threatens to cut off the testicles of a rude journalist.”18
Still, Trump’s insistence on toadying to the virile Russian tyrant was strange, even for Trump. The GOP nominee had freely shunned European allies, talked tough on China and Japan, and emasculated America’s two intracontinental allies. Yet he was going out of his way to avoid any utterance of negativity about Vladimir Putin. Nobody knew quite what to make of it.
On ABC’s This Week, when host George Stephanopoulos raised the allegations of Putin murdering his opponents, the GOP front-runner grew defensive.
“Have you been able to prove that? Do you know the names of the reporters he has killed?” Trump responded.19 “He’s always denied it. It’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody. So, you know, you’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. At least, in our country.”
Chapter Twelve
January 2016
“My party is committing suicide on national television.”
CUPPING HIS HAND, PALM FACING DOWNWARD, ROTATING IT FROM nine o’clock to three o’clock, Ted Cruz would reassure them, “There’s a natural arc to Donald Trump’s candidacy.” It was the same speech he had been giving—to friends, staffers, donors, anyone who would listen, really—since June 16, 2015, the day Trump descended his gilded escalator in Manhattan.
Cruz had come to Washington intent on making enemies, using his first two years in Congress to compile an unrivaled record of aggression toward the political class and its conventions. Yet he could no longer be considered the preeminent instigator in the GOP field. Trump offered the same arsenious approach as Cruz but without the professional constraints. Cruz was still a politician, after all, one who had to worry about long-term career prospects and constituents back in Texas even while chasing the presidency. His opponent was free of such concerns. Anything Cruz said, Trump could say with triple the bombast; anything Cruz did, Trump could do more aggressively, more emphatically, more audaciously. If Cruz was bringing a knife to the Republican primary fight, Trump was packing a nuclear-tipped bazooka.
This distressed the senator’s allies. Believing that his capacity for winning the nomination stemmed from his distinction as the insurgent in the race, some urged Cruz to confront Trump head-on, calling attention to his decades of commentary that strayed from conservative orthodoxy. The senator had accumulated ample credibility on the right as an equal-opportunity truth teller, someone unafraid to reveal the ideological doublespeak practiced by the most powerful members of his own party. Why not, having turned the right against the likes of Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell, do the same to Donald Trump?
Because, Cruz believed, Trump was not built to last. His poll numbers would rise with the tide of free media, but once political gravity took hold and the news coverage exploited his obvious lack of preparation for the job, Trump would suffer a mass defection of supporters. They would be looking for the next-best wrecking ball to swing at Washington, and Cruz would be their obvious choice.
Trump’s candidacy was fanning the flames of the very anti-establishment mood Cruz needed to win the nomination and ultimately the White House. There was nothing to be gained by attacking someone who was “renting” his supporters, Cruz argued, especially when Trump had shown a proficiency for emasculating whichever rival (Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry) had dared to engage him.
“I like Donald Trump. I’m glad he’s in the race. I think he is having many beneficial effects on the race,” Cruz had said that summer. “He is attracting significant crowds and significant passion of people who are ticked off at Washington, fed up with politicians who say one thing and do another. The last thing I want to do is have a bunch of Washington politicians insulting and condescending to these hardworking Americans who are rightly and understandably frustrated with the direction this country is going.”
Cruz added, “Many of the Republican candidates have gone out of their way to take a two-by-four to Donald Trump. I think that’s a mistake. I have deliberately declined to do so, and indeed have bent over backward to sing his praises.”
That strategy made sense—for a time.
With seventeen candidates in the field, and weaker prey such as Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush to target, Cruz could afford to be patient. Many Republicans believed, in the summer and fall of 2015, that Trump’s campaign was a publicity stunt; that he was generating huge ratings to promote his hotels, particularly his new project in Washington, and feed his business ego; that he would never actually compete in Iowa or New Hampshire, much less go the distance and win the party’s nomination. It was defensible, then, for Cruz to focus his fire elsewhere. “There are seasons to a campaign,” he told his allies. “We will deal with Trump if and when necessary.”
The problem with Cruz’s approach was that it undermined his own brand. He was a brawler, but also a dispenser of brutal honesty, someone whose word could be taken to the bank. (“TrusTed,” his campaign banners read.) Cruz didn’t just lay off Trump; he spent the months of June through December lavishing praise on his opponent in the hope of seducing the supporters whom Cruz believed would not, could not, ultimately pull the lever for such a man. But many conservative voters didn’t see the Trump whom Cruz saw, a soulless, philosophically hollow showman. They saw a brash renegade taking on a broken system on their behalf, someone whose credibility had been vouched for by leading figures on the right, including Cruz himself.
In mid-December, Cruz spoke to me at length about his team’s considered outlook of the race: He believed he would win the Iowa caucuses, and predicted that Rubio, who had become the favorite to emerge from the “moderate lane,” would need to win the New Hampshire primary to keep pace. Never once did Cruz mention Trump’s name; it was as though the front-runner could be wished out of existence.
This was telling. Despite a race that was unconventional in every sense, Cruz was clinging to his original, most conventional view of it. He took to reminding anxious donors and friends that America had never elected someone with neither political experience nor military experience. Despite the media’s obsession with Trump, Cruz insisted, the primary contest would still come down to a collision between an establishment favorite and a conservative favorite, with Trump’s supporters abandoning him long before that day arrived.
Trump knew better. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” he said in Iowa the following month. “It’s like, incredible.”
NOBODY KNEW WHAT TO MAKE OF RUBIO’S CAMPAIGN.
As a candidate, he was the total package: intelligence, personal magnetism, stirring oratory, policy chops, a gripping biography, and a message that could unite the GOP’s disparate factions. But his campaign did little to accentuate these strengths. For much of 2015, while most of his Republican rivals stumped their way across the early states, Rubio was nowhere to be found. He had enjoyed a solid bounce from his mid-April launch, but he was doing nothing to build on it. Rubio spent much of the summer avoiding voters so conspicuously that opposing campaign officials would ask reporters of his whereabouts. Officially, Rubio aides claimed that he was on fund-raising swings. And yet, for the entire third quarter of 2015, he raised less than $6 million,1 a haul dwarfed by those of Bush, Cruz, and Ben Carson. Even Carly Fiorina had raised more.