Sen. Ted Cruz’s conscience has him working on “defeating Hillary Clinton” in the fall presidential election, months after pointedly declining to endorse Donald Trump at the GOP convention.
“My focus is on defeating Hillary Clinton and helping preserve a Senate Republican majority,” Cruz said Tuesday, according to a report from CNN. Cruz didn’t explicitly endorse Trump.
Still, that’s more than he said at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Cruz, speaking in a primetime slot, congratulated Trump for winning the nomination and then urged Republicans to vote in the fall, for anyone they want.
“If you love your country and you love your children as much as I know that you do, stand and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution,” he said.
Trump’s team whipped the crowd to boo Cruz, who defended the speech the next morning at a Texas convention delegation breakfast. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” he said.
But the speech also angered some of Cruz’s most prominent supporters, to a greater degree than his team expected. “I haven’t talked to any of the seven-figure donors to the super PAC who are happy — this is not good,” one Cruz donor told National Review. “I think he’s — I think this is not going to be easy to get over.”
