Book Excerpt: How Ted Cruz was converted to Trumpism

Sen. Ted Cruz and former President Donald Trump have a rather cordial and productive relationship. They talked on the phone often and form policy decisions, but only after Cruz came around to accepting Trump following a heated 2016 presidential primary race.

Cruz was not just absorbing the loss of a presidential campaign, which was bad enough. He was having an existential crisis. Though critical of the Republican establishment, he still thought of the Republican Party as his party. And grassroots Republicans? The voters who were cheering him on as he fought the GOP establishment? Cruz had been their hero. After his "vote your conscience" speech at Donald Trump’s coronation in Cleveland, the senator was excommunicated by both. Mulling the future in Park City, Cruz candidly confessed to Johnson that he wasn’t even sure he could win reelection to the Senate in 2018, an insecurity that proved prescient.  

Yes, Cruz was reelected. But he nearly wasn’t, defeating Democrat Beto O’Rourke by 2.6 percentage points. And Cruz had to recast himself as a pragmatic legislator, focused on, as the old trope goes, "getting things done," to buy himself that extra 2.6 percent. The break with the old, uncompromising Cruz was stark. In early July 2017, I covered the senator for the Washington Examiner as he met with constituents during a town hall meeting in McKinney, an exurban community of approximately two hundred thousand people about thirty-five miles north of Dallas. The amount of time Cruz spent detailing his proposal to repeal and replace Obamacare, and the emphasis he placed on his willingness to compromise with colleagues to pass legislation in the Senate, sounded, stylistically, nothing like the Cruz I had covered up close for nearly five years.