But whatever humor they found in the situation soon dissipated. Two days later, amid a flurry of other hit pieces on Cruz, the Enquirer piled onto its original report by printing the images, eyes blurred out, of five women the Texas senator had allegedly cheated with.7 Three of them, it reported, were former staffers; one was a “sexy” schoolteacher; and the fifth was a DC prostitute.
The tabloid had finally broken through. Mainstream media outlets were forced to cover the allegations and the candidate’s reaction. Google searches for “Ted Cruz affair” spiked. The hashtag #CruzSexScandal went gangbusters on Twitter. Cruz blamed Trump for the onslaught. “I want to be crystal clear: these attacks are garbage,” the candidate wrote on his Facebook page. “For Donald J. Trump to enlist his friends at the National Enquirer and his political henchmen to do his bidding shows you that there is no low Donald won’t go.”
Trump responded, true to form, on his own Facebook page. “I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence,” he wrote. “Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”
Amazingly, this was not the low point of the Trump-Cruz rivalry.
The week prior, an anti-Trump super PAC published a Facebook ad featuring a 2000 photo, taken for British GQ, that showed Melania Trump nude. The ad, which targeted Mormon voters ahead of Utah’s March 22 caucuses, read, “Meet Melania Trump. Your Next First Lady. Or, You Could Support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”8
Infuriated, Trump warned the world via Twitter that he might have to “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz—whatever that meant. Trump later retweeted an unflattering photo of his opponent’s wife that was posted in juxtaposition to a flawless-looking Melania Trump. The caption read, “No need to ‘spill the beans.’ The images are worth a thousand words.”
Cruz finally lost his cool. “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward,” he said during a campaign stop in Wisconsin, looking straight into the camera.9 “Leave Heidi the hell alone.”
The mainstream media couldn’t help but cover the story as the professional wrestling melee that it was—schoolyard taunts, nude women, the “cage match” Cruz had once scoffed at. The National Enquirer had sparked the fracas, a real-time embarrassment for the world’s leading liberal democracy, but its more sophisticated counterparts in the Fourth Estate had fanned the flames, dedicating hours of breathless blow-by-blow coverage. Trump, a master manipulator of the media for so much of his adult life, had done it again.
Ultimately, it wasn’t David Pecker and the National Enquirer that thwarted Cruz’s candidacy. It was Roger Ailes and Fox News.
THE CRUZ CAMPAIGN HAD BEEN NEGOTIATING A SIT-DOWN INTERVIEW with Sean Hannity one day before the National Enquirer story broke alleging the senator’s extramarital adventures. Wanting a forceful response but needing to move on from the story, Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, negotiated a deal with Hannity’s producers. He would ask the candidate a single question, at the top, about the Enquirer report. Then they would turn to substantive matters.
But Hannity had other ideas. When Cruz dismissed the story as nonsense, attempting to pivot to discuss other topics, the Fox News host would not let him. Hannity continued to raise questions about the Enquirer story. Cruz grew angry. Finally, he blew up at Hannity, telling him the story had been planted by one Trump hack, Stone, the fabled “dirty trickster,” in the publication of another Trump hack, Pecker.
Hannity’s response? Stone had assured him, personally, that he had had nothing to do with the Enquirer report.
“Sean,” Cruz exclaimed, “you’re too damn smart to believe that.”
The exchange was hot—so hot that it never aired. When Cruz’s campaign staff tuned in for the segment, the tense back-and-forth wasn’t included. They were mystified. As they discussed the reasoning, they decided that Fox had cut that portion not just because it made Hannity look bad, but because it made Trump look bad.
This was a recurring theme of the campaign, much to the chagrin and bewilderment of Cruz. He had been a mainstay on Fox News for the past three years, earning copious amounts of coverage for his crusade against the party establishment. But now he was being shoved aside. The network had a favorite new iconoclast, someone brasher and even more swashbuckling than he. This was, in its broadest sense, a reflection of the core dynamic between the two candidates.
“What Donald Trump did,” observes Jim DeMint, “is out-Cruz Ted Cruz.”
What Trump also did was out-hustle Cruz. The senator was a demon on the campaign trail, frequently making five or six stops on a bus each day, shaking hundreds of hands and taking more questions—from voters and reporters—than any other canditate. But those long days often turned into late nights. To wind down his brain, Cruz would ask a staffer to go buy a bottle of pinot noir and host the traveling team in his hotel suite, sipping wine and debriefing on the day’s activities. This meant, at the instruction of Cruz himself, no campaign events before ten in the morning and, sometimes, no morning events at all.
By contrast, Trump (who does not drink) was always up before six, and typically dictating the day’s news cycle with his Twitter feed. He met a fraction of the voters Cruz did, but knew, somehow, that it didn’t matter. For a first-time candidate with no real consultants guiding him, Trump’s instincts as a campaigner were phenomenal. And for a septuagenarian who would subsist on fast food and as many as twelve Diet Cokes a day, Trump’s stamina was almost supernatural. He was game to go anywhere, engage anyone, and stay on offense at all hours of the day—an insurgency-style campaign that proved impossible to keep up with.
As the field winnowed down to what was essentially a mano a mano showdown, Fox’s attitude toward Cruz became more pugnacious. In March, two paid contributors to Fox phoned the candidate with an ominous warning. “We’re not allowed to say anything positive about you on air,” they told Cruz. He thought it was a joke; they assured him it was not. “You’ve got to talk to Roger,” one of them said, referring to Ailes. Cruz had already been trying. The senator once enjoyed a friendly relationship with the Fox News chairman, joining him for private breakfasts when he visited New York. But since the end of 2015, Ailes had not been responding to Cruz’s calls.
A year later, when Ailes passed away, Cruz would tell friends, “I think it was Roger’s dying wish to elect Donald Trump president.”
The most galling expression of this, in the eyes of Cruz, came on the evening of April 5. The results of the Wisconsin primary were coming in. It was a huge prize for both candidates, with 42 delegates up for grabs, and an absolute must-win for Cruz. The campaign would move later that month into the northeastern states, Trump’s backyard, and his rival’s only chance was to arrive with a head of steam.
Everything had gone right for Cruz in the state. In populous southeastern Wisconsin, where conservative talk radio was renowned both for its influence and its pragmatic streak, Trump’s negatives had soared sky-high in the polls. Two outside groups, the Club for Growth and Our Principles PAC, blanketed Wisconsin’s airwaves with anti-Trump ads. The state’s GOP establishment, led by Governor Scott Walker, rallied around Cruz as the party’s last, best hope for toppling Trump. (Speaker Paul Ryan, who had spent the last four months ripping the front-runner behind closed doors, remained publicly neutral.) And swarms of pro-Cruz volunteers and super PAC workers descended on the state, seizing upon the lull in the primary schedule to out-organize the competition as they had done in neighboring Iowa. As the primary neared, polls showed Cruz opening up a double-digit lead in Wisconsin.