Cruz held back. Having moved to the top of the polls in Iowa, a confrontation with Trump seemed less than ideal. But it soon became apparent that unilateral disarmament was not practical. As the calendar turned to 2016, Trump intensified his attacks, questioning whether Cruz, born in Canada to an American mother, was qualified for the presidency.
Cruz replied to the Birther 2.0 routine by tweeting a clip from Happy Days, suggesting that Trump had jumped the shark. When it became clear that he hadn’t—that the front-runner was gaining ground in Iowa with his insinuations—Cruz finally decided to return fire.
“Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values,” Cruz told a New Hampshire radio host on January 12, finally snapping a seven-month streak of playing nice with the GOP front-runner.7 “The Donald seems to be a little bit rattled.” Cruz repeated these rehearsed lines that night on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program.
By the time the remaining candidates gathered in South Carolina for a debate on January 14, all other story lines were considered side dishes to the delicious, long-awaited main course of Trump versus Cruz. And it did not disappoint.
“Back in September, my friend Donald said he had his lawyer look at this from every which way and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this ‘birther’ issue,” Cruz announced on the stage. “Since September, the Constitution hasn’t changed. But the poll numbers have.”8
The crowd roared with approval. When the moderators pressed Trump on why he was now raising the issue against Cruz, he could only shrug, “Because he’s doing a little bit better.”
Trump would soon have his revenge. When the moderators asked Cruz to explain his cryptic references to “New York values,” he responded, “Most people know exactly what New York values are,” adding that “not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.” Trump was visibly offended by the remark and delivered a devastating counterattack. Standing at an adjacent lectern, he recalled the spirit of New Yorkers in the aftermath of September 11 as a point of national pride. Cruz himself was forced to applaud, and when Trump charged that Cruz’s comments were “insulting,” the Texas senator did not raise an objection. It was Trump’s finest debate showing to date, and Cruz’s worst.
It wasn’t the only tough moment for Cruz. After a prolonged back-and-forth with Rubio over the 2013 immigration bill, a dispute that had become increasingly heated between the two senators, Rubio unloaded on Cruz. He accused the Texan of sticking a finger in the wind not only on immigration, but also on ethanol subsidies and national security, saying he had joined with Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders in voting for a defense budget that slashes military spending. “That is not consistent conservatism,” Rubio said. “That is political calculation.”
Cruz smirked. “I appreciate you dumping your oppo research file on the debate stage,” he said.
The sparring between Cruz and Rubio would make for compelling melodrama in the months ahead. But more than eleven million people had tuned in on this occasion to watch the clash of the titans: Trump versus Cruz. It was clear now, with three weeks remaining until the Iowa caucuses, that the gloves were off. “I guess,” Trump told CNN following the debate, “the bromance is over.”
WHAT WOULD THE 2016 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL RACE HAVE looked like without Trump?
The January 28 debate in Iowa, the final gathering of the candidates before votes were cast, offered a glimpse into this alternative history. Because Fox News was hosting, and due to the bad “blood” still lingering with Megyn Kelly, Trump skipped the event, choosing instead to hold a rally for veterans just down the road, in Des Moines.
The debate was undeniably duller without him: fewer outbursts, fewer eyeballs, fewer clicks. For the journalistic establishment’s eternal virtue-signaling about all things Trump, in truth, it had grown reliant on him. Its most trusted properties and personalities spent the campaign milking him like a cash cow, starving the other candidates of oxygen at pivotal junctures in the race. “I didn’t anticipate that Trump would receive over three billion dollars in free media. There is no precedent for that in the history of the United States of America,” Cruz says. “Our campaign raised over ninety-one million, which is the most any Republican primary candidate for president has ever raised. Ninety-one million is a ton of money, unless you’re facing three billion of free media on the other side.”
As then-CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves observed during Trump’s ascent, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”9
Trump may have been wise to stay away that night. Even as his support swelled among a base of populist supporters—including Sarah Palin, who flew to Iowa and gave a memorably strange speech endorsing him—a general panic over his viability was beginning to blanket portions of the American right. Days before the debate, National Review, the esteemed publication of conservative opinion, had announced a special issue of its magazine, “AGAINST TRUMP,” featuring some two dozen essays from leading conservatives voicing their resistance to the Republican front-runner. It was the first real showing of organized opposition to Trump, and it came as a surprise even to some employees of the publication. (At the time, I was National Review’s chief political correspondent, reporting on the straight news of the race, and I was informed of the issue just hours before it published online.)
Cruz assumed the role of archvillain on stage in Trump’s absence, reasserting his preeminence as a provocateur and reminding voters of his legend as the original outsider. His audition as leading man, while beneficial in certain respects, also invited an unprecedented amount of dogpiling. Seemingly everyone on stage took a turn swinging at the Texas senator. It was a favorite pastime in Iowa of late.
For months, Cruz’s bus had been shadowed through the state by an RV owned by America’s Renewable Future, a group targeting his opposition to ethanol subsidies. Then, in mid-January, the New York Times reported that Cruz had not disclosed loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs (where his wife, Heidi, worked) that helped fund his 2012 Senate race.10 His opponents pounced on the chance to expose Cruz, the self-styled populist hero, as a privileged insider. Less than a week later Palin flew into Iowa to endorse Trump; that same day, January 19, legendary Iowa governor Terry Branstad said of Cruz, “I think it would be a big mistake for Iowa to support him.”
Worse yet, he was also coming under attack from evangelicals. After Politico reported that Cruz told a New York fund-raiser that opposing same-sex marriage would not be a top priority,11 Rick Santorum’s campaign said Cruz “makes Mitt Romney and John Kerry look consistent.” When BuzzFeed reported that he tithed nowhere near the biblical 10 percent rate, a pro-Huckabee group ran a TV ad in Iowa labeling Cruz a “phony” Christian.
And then there was Trump.
The front-runner had continued to stage attacks on Cruz: his citizenship, his poor relationships on Capitol Hill, his sweetheart loans for the 2012 campaign. Yet none of this seemed terribly personal—at least, not by Trump’s standards—until late January. In preparation for a major address to Liberty University, the nation’s largest Christian college, Trump asked Tony Perkins for some pointers. Perkins provided a few suggestions, including a verse he jotted down as “2 Corinthians 3:17.” (“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”)