Cruz, who was raised in the evangelical sub-culture after his father Raphael was saved from alcoholism, was booed by delegates at the gathering in Cleveland on Wednesday night when he gave a speech but did not endorse Trump. “Either you’re supporting the Republican nominee or you’re supporting Hillary Clinton”, he insisted.
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But many in the crowd were unsatisfied with his explanations for not endorsing Trump. And in some recent conventions the tone of those attacks has become more personal.
“And that pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go and slander and attack Heidi, I’m going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say thank you very much for maligning my wife and my father”, he added.
After a contentious week for delegates and speakers on the convention floor, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s speech Thursday might be the most important one of his life, according to Lee Hamilton, an IU professor and expert on Congress, foreign policy and national security. But Gingrich’s prepared remarks simply assumed that Cruz was going to make an endorsement he hadn’t promised to make, and Gingrich had to wing his response – a response that none of the other people in Trumpworld echoed.
After Wednesday night, Cruz remerged Thursday morning to bring the Texas delegation to its feet at a downtown Cleveland hotel ballroom when he said he could have “turned tail and run, but that ain’t going to happen”.
Deputy national press secretary Jesse Ferguson, meanwhile, used the occasion to remind his Twitter followers of others who haven’t endorsed Trump, including “any GOP former president” and “the 2012 GOP nominee for president”.
“Cruz’s broken pledge to support the will of the people tonight was one of those career-ending “read my lips” moments”.
Ivey Burgess, a junior at Meredith College in Raleigh who says she supported Trump in the primary, thought the Cruz speech was rude. “I don’t think we have a right to lecture”, he said.
Still, Cruz said he didn’t encourage anyone to write his name in in November. “Stand and speak, and vote your conscience”.
Defending Freedom. Staying faithful to the constitution. It’s not even about Hillary Clinton. Marco Rubio spoke and showed support for Trump, but did so through a video and did not attend the convention.
Pence made the most important statement of the night when he said Democrats and the news media really don’t understand Trump’s appeal to those voters.
CLEVELAND | One of the GOP’s top financial backers said Thursday that Donald Trump has not yet made overtures to woo the party’s big donors, but she said there’s plenty of interest in helping down-ticket Republicans win their races. “It’s Cruz who is the little bitch who can’t get over it”.
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Cruz then signaled to a man in the back of the room. We are still over three months from the general election. Newt Gingrich, speaking after Cruz, was smart enough to know that it would be a mistake to rebuke him frontally. And they did it to vote for Trump, who they see as just the kind of volatile person to truly shake up a status quo that’s left them out of the economic prosperity the salaried and investment classes have enjoyed and the increasingly generous safety net the unemployed and minimum-wage earning class has received.
