“Cruz is finished”, said NY delegate Sal Calise, who said the Texas senator had been his second choice in the presidential primary behind Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
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Even as chaotic, disorganized and occasionally hapless as Donald Trump’s campaign team has been all along, there’s no way they were caught off-guard or even disappointed by Ted Cruz’s speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday night.
In his remarks, Cruz only congratulated Trump on his nomination, and told delegates they should “vote their conscience” in November.
Cruz, infamous in the Senate for looking out only for himself, proved again that he was willing to go it alone as the party rallied around Trump during an evening of speeches from Republican heavyweights and some of its most ambitious politicians. They then returned to interrupting any speaker who paused to take a breath with angry anti-Hillary Clinton chants of “Lock her up!”.
“I love the media”, Trump said with a smile as he tested the microphone.
With just one day left in the convention and the biggest speech of all still remaining, the discord within the party and disagreement over why to back Trump has been a consistent theme. Another former presidential candidate and Florida Sen. Because Ted Cruz has decided that he knows better? What specifically did he say that ignited such a tumultuous uproar that Heidi Cruz needed to be escorted from the convention floor for safety concerns? Not all of the 51 percent of Republicans who felt otherwise were enthusiastic about the prospect of a Trump candidacy either.
Eric Trump, speaking on NBC’s Today show, said some people believe Cruz committed “political suicide”.
But beyond the slogans and the slurs, the American people are still trying to picture what a Trump presidency would look like. He also called for a ban on Muslims coming to the USA, suggested Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers, and argued a federal judge should recuse himself from a case involving Trump University because of his Mexican heritage. “The convention crowd may have booed Cruz, but the Republicans at home that Trump is reaching out to were cheering, according to our data”.
Trump’s roller-coaster campaign defeated 16 rivals and steamrolled stubborn party opposition after being written off as a joke, the real estate tycoon having never held elected office. Friday morning Trump spent about six minutes commenting on the speech, calling Cruz’s decision to alter it after it was submitted for vetting “dishonorable”.
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Though the Republican Party appears to be united in opposition against the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hamilton said he noticed obvious rifts in the party’s support of their own candidate. “It presents a terribly challenging speech for Trump to try to turn that around”. “Every action I take, I will ask myself: does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America”.
