CLEVELAND — Sen. Ted Cruz stunned the Republican National Convention on Wednesday when he failed to explicitly endorse Donald Trump for president, evoking angry shouts and denouncements from the crowded convention floor.
Delegates who were hoping Cruz would use the opportunity to unite the party around the nominee instead were left shaking their heads in disgust after they booed the Texan off the stage, shocked by a speech that appeared to build to an endorsement but then never did.
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“I can’t even believe it,” Nikki Bufalino, a Trump supporter and a delegate from Memphis, Tenn. “I just thought he would have taken the high road and tried to unite everybody. I just don’t understand. I’m a little bit shocked right now.”
Cruz walked onto the stage to thunderous applause. As the number-two finisher in the primary, he earned hundreds of delegates and up until a few weeks ago, some delegates still harbored hope he could prevail in a convention floor fight.
But Wednesday night was supposed to be about Trump’s former rivals getting behind him. Before Cruz took the stage, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., both offered tepid endorsements of Trump in their addresses to the convention, which was enough to satisfy the delegates.
Cruz instead told the delegates “vote your conscience,” and from there his speech became increasingly drowned out by angry delegates shouting for Trump in one part of the arena and delegates cheering for Cruz from other parts of the convention floor.
The speech appeared to blow apart a very frail detente between the the pro- and anti-Trump delegates.
“He called him a liar — ‘Lyin’ Ted’ throughout this campaign,” Cruz supporter and Colorado delegate Justin Everett told the Washington Examiner. “And why would you endorse?”
Everett wondered why “Someone who’s been a principled conservative like Ted Cruz” would endorse the nominee “when you have someone like Donald Trump that doesn’t represent those values. It’s very hard to endorse.”
Before speaking to the Washington Examiner on the convention floor, Everett was in a face-to-face shouting match with a Trump supporter who argued that Cruz should have backed Trump out of party unity.
Furious delegates say Cruz’s public non-endorsement of Trump has jeopardized not only the effort to repair fractured party unity, but Cruz’s own political future.
Aaron Delmar, a delegate from Illinois, said Trump was not his first choice for president, but he’s supporting him now that he has won the nomination, and Cruz should have given his endorsement, as all the GOP candidates promised to do earlier this year.
“He made a commitment to support the nominee no matter who it was,” Delmar said. “He thinks he’s going to sit out for years and then come back and run for president? He’s got another thing coming. He’s not supportive of the party, the party is not going to be supportive of him.”
Shaun Ireland, a Trump delegate from Texas, voted for Cruz for Senate but said he’s no longer backing him.
“If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency because of this, Ted Cruz will not be a senator in January 2019,” Ireland said.
Up until his non-endorsement, Cruz’s speech was a crowd-pleaser that focused on key conservative issues.
“It was good except it lacked one thing, he didn’t endorse our nominee,” House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers, R-Ky., told the Examiner. “He should have endorsed him.”
Philip Klein contributed to this report.
