Why Ted Cruz’s Trump warning remains 'highly relevant' after 7 years: analyst

05 December 2023

MSNBC's Steve Benen seldom agrees with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). But in his December 4 column, the MaddowBlog editor and "Rachel Maddow" producer explains why one of Cruz's 2016 attacks on Donald Trump remains "highly relevant" seven years later.

Before Cruz flip-flopped and became a strident Trump defender, he was a scathing critic. The far-right Texas senator slammed Trump as a "pathological liar" in May 2016, when they were fighting a bitter, ugly battle for the GOP presidential nomination.

Cruz said of Trump, "He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.... Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing."

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Cruz's May 2016 warning, Benen emphasizes, is no less accurate in late 2023, which finds Trump pushing "an authoritarian-style vision for the United States" while claiming that President Joe Biden is a "destroyer of American democracy" who seeks to "criminalize dissent."

"The point of rhetoric like this is to muddy the political waters," Benen warns. "The Republican wants to create conditions in which average voters — who might not keep up on day-to-day developments in the news — grow lost in a cacophony of accusations. One party says Politician X is attacking democracy; the other party says Politician Y is attacking democracy. And many are left to assume that the truth is somewhere in between. Except, it's not."

Benen continues, "Trump's critics are telling the truth about his authoritarian-style vision, while the former president himself is simply accusing his opponents of doing what he's doing…. In fact, that's what he always does…. Accused of racism, Trump said his critics are racist…. When prosecutors accused the former president of committing crimes, he accused them of committing crimes."

Steve Benen's full MSNBC column is available at this link.

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