Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, disputed the premise. He told Cruz that giving a convention speech without endorsing the nominee could be disastrous. For a man who still harbored burning ambitions for the presidency, there was too much risk. Roe believed Cruz should speak and, at the very least, assure the convention delegates that he personally would be voting for Trump. But Roe was in the minority. Most of the members of Cruz’s inner circle, movement conservatives with decades of ideological skin in the game, were too acutely offended by Trump to entertain the possibility of an endorsement. They encouraged Cruz to accept the invitation to speak; once it arrived, they lobbied him to withhold his support for the nominee.
It wasn’t a difficult decision for Cruz. While he usually hung on Roe’s advice, and had come to appreciate his manager’s pragmatic streak, he told his confidants that there was “no way in hell” he was prepared to subjugate himself to Trump in front of tens of millions of viewers. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told friends while crafting his speech.
The Republican nominee had insulted his wife, his father, his family. An endorsement would make Cruz look weak—and worse, it would make him look like the soulless, calculating swindler his detractors painted him as. He would not endorse Trump in Cleveland, and he was confident that the convention delegates would respect his decision.
He was wrong.
Cruz walked onto the stage Wednesday evening, July 20, to a thunderous ovation from the party faithful. It was the most anticipated speech of the convention, in prime time, and the packed house inside Quicken Loans Arena delivered a lengthy, raucous salute to the 2016 runner-up. The senator lifted a hand to the masses and nodded his head, basking in a moment that he believed should have been his and his alone.
“I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination,” Cruz said, earning booming applause.3 The audience expected an endorsement, and understandably so: It was inside that very arena, the previous August, where all the Republican candidates (save for Trump) had agreed that they would support the eventual nominee.
Instead, it was the last time Cruz would mention Trump’s name. The senator’s address, which emphasized the theme of “freedom,” was sharp, steady, and well received until its closing minutes. “We deserve leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values, cast aside anger for love. That is the standard we should expect from everybody,” Cruz said.
As the arena began to buzz, Cruz delivered two fateful lines. First: “And to those listening, please, don’t stay home in November.” The audience erupted with cheers. Then, Cruz added: “Stand and speak and vote your conscience. Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution.”
It was a stunning turn of phrase. “Vote your conscience” had been the anti-Trump rallying cry all summer, only for Reince Priebus and his allies inside the RNC to crush the rebellion in Cleveland just days earlier—with Mike Lee, Cruz’s closest friend in the Senate, leading the last gasp of the mutiny. Cruz would later swear that he didn’t appreciate the implications of his wording, but Trump’s supporters inside the convention hall weren’t about to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Tipped off in advance by Paul Manafort, who had seen a copy of Cruz’s speech and knew he wouldn’t be endorsing, the sprawling New York delegation, which sat front and center in the arena due to Trump’s native son status, detonated with boos. The ruckus tore across the convention floor and climbed all the way up to the second and third decks.
Meanwhile, Trump himself had just entered the arena on a cue from his staff, hoping to mess with Cruz by gawping at him from an offstage wing. Necks craned to see him. The decibel level spiked all the higher. For Trump, a longtime fan of professional wrestling, this was a page out of Vince McMahon’s playbook: the hero emerging just as the crowd turned against the villain.
Cruz had four short paragraphs left in his speech, words that paid homage to his mother and father and to a slain Dallas police officer. But they were difficult to hear. It was anarchy on the convention floor: The heckiers became shriller and nastier; in response, pockets of Cruz loyalists began shouting back in a futile attempt to drown them out. Cruz continued on, voice shaky, as the noise swallowed him whole.
When he had uttered his final words—“God bless each and every one of you, and may God bless the United States of America”—he was showered with deafening, cascading boos that seemed to rain all the way down from the rafters. The senator stepped away from the lectern yet remained on the stage for several moments, waving and smiling awkwardly, trying not to appear paralyzed by the unmitigated nightmare playing out before him. His wife, Heidi, had to be escorted off the convention floor by security officials concerned for her safety. The senator and his team quickly bunkered down in a hotel suite, assessing the extensive damage and plotting his next move.
Back in February, standing inside a pole barn at the Iowa state fairgrounds, Cruz had previewed his acceptance speech: “This July, in Cleveland, you will hear these words spoken from the podium of the unified Republican convention,” he said. “‘Tonight, I want to say to every member of the Democratic Party who believes in limited government, in personal opportunity and the United States Constitution, and a safe and secure America, come home.’”4
Nearly six months later, Cruz had the opportunity to heal divisions in the party and help create a “unified Republican convention” on behalf of his former rival. He declined. And it didn’t go over well.
Several of Cruz’s biggest financial backers turned on him, saying the senator had broken the promise he had made to support the party’s nominee. Among them were Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who had pumped more than $10 million into a flotilla of super PACs supporting Cruz.5 In a show of their anger, the media-shy Mercers upbraided Cruz in a statement to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times.6 The article quoted Kellyanne Conway, the pro-Cruz strategist turned Trump adviser, who said of the Mercers, “They supported Ted because they thought he was a man of his word who, like them, would place love of country over personal feelings or political ambition.”
The morning after his convention speech, Cruz was booed and jeered by members of the Texas delegation when he arrived at their breakfast. They called him a liar and a sore loser. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who have attacked my wife and attacked my father,” Cruz told them. “And that pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go slander and attack Heidi, then I’m not going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father.’”
It was a paradox: Never had Cruz been so authentic, yet never had he been so despised.
FOR ALL TRUMP’S FAMILIARITY WITH SHOW BUSINESS, HIS CONVENTION wasn’t the smoothest production. There was plagiarism and pettifoggery; grudge matches and goonery; ugly exchanges and awkward embraces. Just hours before Trump took the stage to deliver his acceptance speech, a pro-Clinton super PAC obtained and leaked the transcript. It was a fitting capstone to a convention defined by the party’s squabbling disunity, enhanced by the Trump campaign’s disorganization and repeated political miscalculations.