Donald Trump Is the Most Offensive but Ted Cruz is the Most Dangerous to America
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by Steven Rosenfeld
As the 2016 primary season continues, the notion that Ted Cruz might be the Republican Party’s last best chance to save itself from Donald Trump’s takeover is a spectacle all by itself. Cruz, the most mistrusted and reviled Republican senator, a serial liar who led the 2013 government shutdown and called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a fraud on the Senate floor, is now the party’s great savior?
It may be that Republicans would prefer the right-wing devil they know rather than the one they do not. Their fears of Trump resemble wide swings of a pendulum. On some issues it’s his ugly, bigoted and juvenile rhetoric and strongman posturing that repulses. On the other extreme lurks a sneaking suspicion among GOP luminaries that he might be too liberal and malleable, not just unpredictable, for conservatives to stomach.
Trump is the more offensive presidential candidate, but Cruz is far more dangerous. As Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, wrote in December, “If Ted Cruz is the Republican Party’s cure for Donald Trump, the antidote may be worse than the poison.”
That verdict is not unique. Cruz is not just a serial exaggerator and liar. He’s a conniving, uncompromising, power-hungry demagogue whose antics and beliefs would be right at home in the crusades of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s America, many campaign fact-checking websites, longtime politicos and pundits have warily noted.
That’s why former president Jimmy Carter recently told the British House of Lords, “I think I would choose Trump… which may surprise some of you, but the reason is Trump has proven already that he’s completely malleable. I don’t think he has any fixed opinions that he would really go to the White House and fight for.”
Indeed, there’s much more to this than merely pointing out that Cruz is more extremist than Trump. Trump may pledge to order U.S. troops to torture any suspected enemy and break international laws of war, but Cruz implied he’d use nuclear arms to make the Middle East’s desert sands “glow in the dark.” Trump said he would defund Planned Parenthood as long as it provides abortions, though he notes it provides other valuable women’s health care. Cruz not only wants to defund and shut down Planned Parenthood, he wants to prosecute the organization. That’s what he said last summer after doctored videos appeared making allegations that Planned Parenthood was selling aborted baby parts. A Texas Court found this claim such a lie it indicted the videomakers on criminal charges.
The reasons Cruz is a bigger liar than Trump start with a basic fact noted by Robert Reich in January: “He’s more fanatical.”
“Trump is a bully and bigot but doesn’t hew to any sharp ideological line,” Reich wrote. “Cruz is a fierce ideologue: He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the Second Amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns, doesn’t believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, opposes international agreements, embraces a confrontational foreign policy, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of ‘every blessed word of Obamacare,’ and takes a strict ‘originalist’ view of the meaning of the Constitution.”
Cruz not only believes that and more, he eagerly embraces whatever rhetorical or political tactic he can to try to impose an ultra-right-wing social agenda and equally right-wing pro-corporate agenda on others. Trump says whatever seems to pop into his mind at the moment. Cruz, in contrast, has been a skilled debater since college and intuitively twists and exaggerates facts or spouts inflammatory lies, all in the service of promoting himself and his beliefs.
There are almost too many examples to categorize and count. After a mass shooting and killings at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in November, by a man who reportedly told police he was motivated by the faked video, Cruz toldreporters before the Iowa caucuses the murderer was a “transgendered leftist activist.” In this same category of toxically mistaken beliefs, Cruz told the Conservative Political Action Conference that Democrats threatened the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.” Politifactcalled this remark “both incorrect and ridiculous.”
As the Nation noted, “Cruz said ISIS is ‘right now crucifying Christians in Iraq, literally nailing Christians to trees.’ It wasn’t, and Cruz wasn’t able to offer any evidence. Cruz described a “strong bipartisan majority” in the House that voted to repeal Obamacare; two Democrats had joined the Republicans. He bluntly claimed that “the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws, almost without exception… have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.” This isnot true.
These examples were from the early days of his presidential bid. Since then, as Politifact.com has documented, it’s only gotten worse. Politifact shows he’s a serial distorter of anything inflamatory, such as Trump’s political contributions to Hillary Clinton’s past campaigns; Arizona’s social welfare cuts as a purported result of tougher immigration enforcement; Trump on supposedly supporting socialized health care; Cruz saying it’s a tradition that Supreme Court nominees don’t get confirmed in presidential years; exaggerating how much incomes rose under Ronald Reagan; or saying Obama’s 2013 immigration bill would ease up on background checks.
His outright lies have grown, too. According to Politifact, he lied about Ben Carson leaving the race just days before the Iowa caucus; that Obamacare is the biggest job-killer in the U.S.; that gun control proponents want to confiscate all guns; that Obama hasn’t bombed ISIL’s oil fields because he’s worried about global warming; that most violent criminals are Democrats; that under Obama the median wage for women fell; that Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal lets Iranians self-inspect, and more.
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They’re all a bunch of nutters from what I’ve seen and heard
The conservatives certainly are. The liberals are surprisingly sane.
I’ve long held that Ted Cruz is a dangerous ideologue who should never have been elected to the US Senate. A Tea Party hack that is a religious fanatic and a far right lunatic.