“Vote your conscience”, Sen. Ted Cruz wasn’t backing down.
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When a questioner asked Cruz how Trump could bring “constitutionalists on board”, Cruz pointed right back to his speech, calling it an “outline” created to show Trump “how you win”.
Before Cruz spoke, the mood among the Texas delegates who had gathered in the downtown Marriott was conciliatory.
– Donald Trump said Friday he’ll reject Ted Cruz’s endorsement if he makes one. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN that he “totally” disagrees with Trump’s suggestion that USA support could be conditional. It had to shutdown a rebellion that, if successful, would have allowed delegates to vote their consciences.
The ugly and highly personal feud between the top two finishers in the Republican primaries, dormant since Cruz ended his campaign in early May, reignited in dramatic fashion Wednesday at a convention meant to heal the bruised party. It was stomped out in committee last week, and then a protest against the rules package was killed in controversial fashion on the convention’s opening day.
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.
Doubts about experience, temperament and policy consistency have tracked Trump since he entered the race. Cruz returned fire, saying Trump was “utterly amoral”, “a serial philanderer”, and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen”. This was before the convention had been gaveled into session. Her father is Donald Trump, and his world has defined hers.
On Thursday, Ivanka Trump said her father “will fight for equal pay for equal work”.
“I recognize there are some folks here and elsewhere at the convention who are not happy with me”, Cruz said, taking the stage. He doesn’t see what’s so complicated for the resisters.
Throughout his session, Cruz was heckled by members of his own delegation. He was telling people whom to vote for in November while conspicuously excluding even a brief allusion to voting for Trump or voting against Clinton.
Jenkins also raised that other, more bureaucratic ethical question that cuts the other way: Cruz’s obligation to fulfill the pledge he signed a year ago promising to support the nominee. “I don’t intend to say negative things about Donald Trump”.
“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father”, he said Thursday morning when asked if he planned to honour a pledge to support the GOP nominee, which will officially become Trump on Thursday night.
It seemed as if the RNC was a high-school variety show where none of the acts had anything to do with each other, but the parents in the audience knew they had to clap for their kiddos no matter what came out of their mouths.
Republicans spent much of the past year scheming behind closed doors, searching for ways to shut down Trump’s presidential campaign.
Call it the unconventional convention.
“In a family business you are all running toward a common goal”, Ivanka has said about the family business, which applies to the White Houe.
“She’s important to him”, Rose offered. When Trump ridiculed Cruz’s father and wife, the politician grinned externally, while internally he bottled that surge of rage. That’s something that Cruz, in all of his years of political experience, still doesn’t understand! He didn’t buy much into it, being from a blue state.
I like Ivanka because she comes across like every woman.
“This is not inclusiveness”, he said.
This dark scene painted, Mr Trump turned to a scowling attack on the entire post-war consensus that America, as a military and commercial superpower of boundless ingenuity, has more to gain than lose from openness to global trade and skilled migration.
Trump had repeatedly mocked Cruz throughout the campaign as “Lyin’ Ted”, disparaged the appearance of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and insinuated that Cruz’s father had indirect links to John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. “If he wasn’t going to endorse, he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the podium”.
I know The Usual Suspects is a trite comparison, but it’s the best one available in this case.
But Selma Sierra got the message.
All these qualities, Ivanka Trump said, made him the ideal leader for the nation at this moment in time. Is it? * Did Melania Trump lift paragraphs from first lady’s speech?
At the heart of the Cruz speech is the question of party unity. “Clearly people don’t want that”.
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The sense of passionate conflict among Texans Thursday was a microcosm of the friction on the convention floor Wednesday night. Cruz registered their dissent into the record forever.
