Ted Cruz just tipped off something about where Donald Trump’s impeachment is headed
As Donald Trump’s presidency becomes more untenable by the day, Republican Senators increasingly find themselves trying to calculate whether their own personal career prospects would be better off by keeping Trump around or ousting him. Mitt Romney clearly wants Trump gone. Lindsey Graham seems willing to ride the Trump train all the way off the cliff. Notably, Ted Cruz is playing both sides – and it tells us something about where this may be headed.
Ted Cruz appeared on Face The Nation today and criticized Donald Trump for trying to get foreign nations to meddle in the 2020 election. He also said he’s a “long way” from supporting Trump’s impeachment. What stands out here is that Cruz isn’t actually defending Trump against impeachment; he’s merely saying he’s not there yet. Cruz is also pushing for Rudy Giuliani to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Even though Trump’s puppet Graham runs that committee, the Democrats would get their chance to grill Rudy as well – and his erratic answers would likely end up hurting Trump badly.
Ted Cruz is a creepy weirdo, but when it comes to political maneuvering, he’s savvy enough to understand that he’s feeding Trump to the wolves by supporting Graham’s crazy plan to have Rudy testify. So what’s Cruz doing? On the one hand, he needs to keep his far-right supporters in Texas happy by not being seen as leading the charge in trying to take Trump down. On the other hand, Cruz has the benefit of not having to run for reelection for another five years, and by that time Trump will be well into his prison sentence and largely forgotten.
Ted Cruz knows what Mitt Romney knows: if the Trump-Pence regime crashes and burns before the election, it’ll allow for a wide open field in the 2020 Republican presidential primary. If Trump is gone, Romney will obviously run. Cruz would probably run as well; he’s run before, and he has no reason not to run again. So sure, Ted Cruz would love to see Donald Trump take a fall. Cruz just doesn’t want to be seen as the one who pushed him off the ledge.
