“I appreciate the enthusiasm of the NY delegation”, Cruz ad libbed when delegates from Trump’s home state began shouting for an endorsement.
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Cruz addressed Texas delegates Thursday morning and got furious blowback from Trump supporters and even some of his own backers, as they yelled out at him and demanded answers for why he wouldn’t endorse Trump outright. Cruz’s exhortation for Republicans to “vote their conscience” in November echoed the rhetoric of the hapless would-be saboteurs who unsuccessfully attempted to rejigger the convention rules to deny Donald Trump the nomination, and the loud chorus of boos that greeted Cruz as he smirked his way through his remarks was unlike anything I’d ever seen at a major party’s nominating convention.
It was as if the Texas senator had taken out a contract on himself.
Toomey has tried to avoid talking about Trump during a four-day swing that crisscrossed 13 counties, including several in southwestern Pennsylvania, barely 100 miles from the Republican convention in Cleveland, but Thursday afternoon’s events demonstrated it was hard to completely avoid the controversial nominee. Who has not lived up to his promise to support our nominee.
“I’m not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father”, he said. “And that pledge was not a blanket commit that if you go and slander and attack Heidi that I’m going to come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘ Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father'”.
“I can tell you I am not voting for Hillary”, said Cruz, who also said he was “watching” other candidates. Was it fearless, a move to save the party’s soul after it crashes with Trump at the wheel, as Cruz expects?
Thousands of officers from states and cities across the country have been in Cleveland this week to assist with the convention. The thing about 2016, though, is that it’s utter chaos because of unforced errors.
“They ran Trump’s acceptance speech through a plagiarism app, and it turns out most of it was lifted from Vladimir Putin”, George Takei wrote, while Eric Benet sniped: “#TrumpSpeech I give it 4 out of 5 swastikas.
Trump said he would mention numerous issues that won him support from Republican voters during the primary campaign.
“I’m talking about trade, I’m talking about law and order, I’m going to be talking about borders. We’re weak in so many different ways”, he told ABC News.
“Now it wasn’t my fault, but I think it went like an hour and 25 minutes and the networks didn’t know what to do because they had all of their programming, their big programming”.
‘The one that stuck with me was somebody pointing at her and yelling something about Goldman Sachs, ‘ he said. They agreed, that is, to allow what Trump’s people are now treating as a calamity.
Cruz’s speech seemed to amount to a political bet that Trump will lose the election, and opting not to throw his lot in with the nominee will preserve his fortunes in 2020.
Trump and his aides have offered scant policy details so far at the convention.
“Wow, Ted Cruz got booed off the stage, didn’t honor the pledge!”
Cruz, known as a ideologue of the conservative Tea Party movement who strongly favours small government, has been a controversial figure in the party himself, upsetting fellow Republicans in Congress by plowing his own furrow. Delegates stood up and yelled questions at him. I don’t want to hear about your “conservative principles” anymore.
Manafort told NBC’s “Today” on Thursday that Cruz “understood what the responsibilities are, someone in his position”.
“Real change the kind we haven’t seen in decades is only going to come from outside the system and it is only going to come from a man who has spent his entire life doing what others said couldn’t be done”, Ivanka Trump said.
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The overall tone of the tweets was more positive than negative, at a ratio of about 2.5 to 1, according to social media analytics firm Zoomph.
