Ted Cruz faces brutal mockery after saying he is 'next in line' to win the GOP presidential nomination

Countless pundits are predicting that former President Donald Trump will decide to run for president in 2024 and win the GOP presidential nomination. But Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, during an interview with the right-wing Truth Gazette, didn’t sound convinced that Trump is going to run in 2024 — and he made it clear that he is open to running again, insisting that he would have a good shot at winning the Republican nomination.

Asked if he would consider running for president again, Cruz responded, “Absolutely. In a heartbeat.”

Cruz was the runner up in 2016’s GOP presidential primary, ultimately loosing to Trump. After Trump won the nomination and the general election, the far-right senator went from being a scathing Trump critic to being an obsequious Trump sycophant.

During the Truth Gazette interview, Cruz argued that runners-up in presidential elections are likely to do well if they decide to run again at some point.

Cruz told the Truth Gazette, “You know, I ran in 2016. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. We had a very crowded field. We had 17 candidates in the race — a very strong field. And I ended up placing second…. There’s a reason, historically, that the runner-up is almost always the next nominee. And that’s been true going back to Nixon or Reagan or McCain or Romney that has played out repeatedly. You come in with just an enormous base of support.”

But New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore finds Cruz’s “runner-up” theory problematic.

“If you want to argue that a non-disastrous prior presidential run is, all other things being equal, an asset for a candidate, that’s hard to deny,” Kilgore writes in an article published on December 22. “But finishing second and thus becoming ‘next in line’ hasn’t necessarily been a qualifier.”

According to Kilgore, “(Sen. John) McCain’s nomination in 2008 was really the closest approximation of the next-in-line scenario one can find: He had finished second in 2000, winning New Hampshire, and reprised that New Hampshire win in 2008 en route to the nomination. But anyone familiar with the actual contest understands that McCain won the nomination after a demolition derby in which he was more the survivor than the victor.”

Here’s what some Twitter users have had to say about the possibility of Cruz running for president in 2024: