Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) praised President Donald Trump’s “instinctual genius” for calling him “Lyin’ Ted” during their 2016 campaigns.
Cruz, who recently confessed his still-strong desire to be president, seemed to work hard to stay in the good graces of the current White House boss on a recent podcast.
Cruz has not committed to a run in 2028 but reportedly has been recruiting workers for a potential campaign.
In an episode of the Trump-friendly “Pod Force One” this week, host Miranda Devine noted how Cruz and Trump seem to be “very pal-y.” She asked the senator if putting the “rancor” of 2016 aside was a “calculated, shrewd decision that there’s no point in being on his bad side.”
“It’s a little different than that,” Cruz answered. “In that 2016 campaign, I was the only candidate who beat him over and over again” while recalling the two exchanged hard punches.
“I don’t think he respects girly men,” Cruz added. “He doesn’t respect people who are weak. He respects people who have strength because, listen, the guy’s got a cast-iron backbone. It’s his single best attribute.”
Devine brought up Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” moniker.
“Oh, yeah!” Cruz replied. “Which I will admit was politically very effective. Look, the man has an instinctual genius. What was so effective about it was my single strongest attribute was that the voters trusted me. … The jujitsu of Trump was to take my greatest strength and make an attack that goes right at it, and I think he does that instinctually in a very effective way.”
It wasn’t the first time Cruz has awkwardly framed Trump’s insults.
In 2016, Cruz earned the second-most Republican delegates behind the eventual president. He endured nasty tactics from Trump, who suggested Cruz’s wife was unattractive and even forwarded a conspiracy theory that Cruz’s father was an associate of John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
At the time, Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar.”
