Donald Trump is heading to Texas to campaign for the man he spent months calling Lyin’ Ted. And Ted Cruz is gratefully accepting campaign help from the man he once called a “pathological liar” and a “sniveling coward.” Virtually nobody is so naive as to believe anything but self-interest is operating on either side of Monday night's campaign rally in Houston. Theories about what’s going on differ, though.
That Cruz needs Trump is fairly obvious—he now has a polling lead on Rep. Beto O’Rourke, but he still needs to turn out the base. But why is Trump going? CNN’s Chris Cillizza (I know, gag) suggests that Trump is enjoying the dominance move of having yet another Republican former critic kissing the ring. According to the Washington Post:
Both sides claim the other reached out first, and there has been some light grumbling. Some in Trump’s orbit believe he is doing Cruz a favor — “It’s the middle of October,” said a senior White House official. “Do we really want to be spending our time in Texas?” — while least one Cruz ally surmised that Trump wants to claim credit now that it appears likely Cruz will win.
But this is also the culmination of a lot of efforts by Cruz to get on Trump’s good side, while Trump may recognize that Cruz has been a good soldier in the Senate of late, helping out with Trump’s agenda minus much of the grandstanding that had characterized his early years in the Senate.
“I still don’t know that they have a relationship in the way that you would think of two people that are friends. They have a transactional relationship, and it’s working for now,” a former Cruz spokesman said, perhaps unintentionally implying that either Donald Trump or Ted Cruz ever has any relationship that is anything but transactional.
Will any lingering animosity come out in Trump’s speech Monday night? Stay tuned …
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