

When Cruz first ran for the Senate in 2011, he boasted about fighting against the Bush administration in court as Texas’s solicitor general to make clear his willingness to stand up to politicians from either party when they violated the Constitution. They have asked themselves and each other how the candidate who began his political career as an unwavering “constitutional conservative” could allow himself to fall in line with Trump’s fraudulent and delusional election challenge how the man they once viewed as deeply principled has been so willing to behave so cravenly. They say their former boss has become unrecognizable to them. Intelligencer spoke to more than half a dozen former Cruz staffers who have spent the past week trying to reconcile the man they once believed in with the politician they saw on January 6 when - hours after a mob tore through the Capitol - Cruz voted to throw out electoral votes from states that voted for Joe Biden, just as the rioters and Trump wanted.


As another former aide put it, “Everyone is upset with the direction things have gone, and the longer they’ve been with the senator, the more distaste they are expressing.” Even so, his staffers have tended to hold him in high regard as a kind and geeky man who treated his underlings well even while his fellow senators loathed him. Now, though, “most of Cruzworld is pretty disgusted” with the senator for choosing to back Donald Trump’s absurd claims of widespread election fraud, in the words of one former aide. Ted Cruz h as long had a public reputation as an unctuous asshole.
