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Ted Cruz Won By Endorsing Donald Trump: Here’s How

By Aric Mitchell
Published on: 17:50 PST, Sep 23, 2016

Ted Cruz, as many of you are now aware, endorsed his one-time adversary Donald Trump for president on Friday.

Over the next few days, the Hillary Clinton campaign will get a lot of mileage out of that. They will say Ted Cruz flip-flopped; that he’s not as principled as his followers believed him to be; that Cruz is the “servile puppy dog” he claimed not to be when he urged the Cleveland audience at the Republican National Convention to “vote your conscience” instead of the party nominee.

To a public that pays more attention to headlines than reality, all of these things may seem true. However, when you dig beyond soundbites, Ted Cruz is actually coming out of this thing in better shape than before. It just may take a few years for people to realize it.

You do have to read his entire Facebook post endorsing Donald Trump in order to get there, and while many may be unwilling to do that, it’s not really on Cruz if people are cherry-picking his statement.

For starters, Ted Cruz saves his face in the endorsement by first acknowledging that he had deep personal differences with Donald Trump during the primary, and it’s taken him a lot of introspection to get to a place where he can support his opponent’s bid for the White House.

“After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience,” Cruz writes, “I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.”

Ted Cruz explains his decision to do so because a) he said that he would in the infamous pledge at the very first debate; and b) he had areas “of significant disagreement with our nominee,” but “by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable.”

The current U.S. senator from Texas then offers six individual issues of importance in which he is either in agreement or sees Trump as the best chance of upholding Republican principles.

For Cruz, there are the U.S. Supreme Court picks, the desire to see Obamacare repealed, the protection of coal and other energies that Clinton has declared war on, illegal immigration and the need to stop amnesty, America’s increasingly porous national security, and internet freedom.

In all of these cases, Clinton is a certainty to go against what conservatives like Ted Cruz want for the country. By drawing from Trump’s words, Cruz has managed to align with the few things in Trump’s campaign promises that he has remained consistent on.

Ted Cruz’s ability to justify his vote with these policy agreements, his hesitancy to endorse Trump at the RNC, and his closing remarks — that Hillary Clinton “is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way” — best sums up and justifies not only his own endorsement, but also the hesitant endorsements of millions of other Americans, who hoped for a more constitutional conservative but didn’t get it when Trump won the nomination.

Of course, the long game here — and what many believe in their hearts — is that Ted Cruz is trying to find the best path forward for a future presidential bid.

By hanging with Donald Trump throughout the primary and being one of the few campaigns to actually beat him in some states, Cruz showed strength and resolve.

By tying his endorsement to the principles he has consistently fought to uphold, he has shown a steady hand of leadership.

By qualifying the repercussions of a Hillary Clinton administration, he has justified his support while building the case against HRC and elevating his image with the Republican base.

And by waiting this long to offer an endorsement to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz has shown this to be more about his feelings for the country than his differences with an individual.

But what do you think, readers?

Has Ted Cruz saved his political future with this endorsement? Sound off in the comments section.

[Featured Image by Gage Skidmore | Flickr | Cropped and resized | CC BY-SA 2.0]

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