Psst. Ted. You’re blowing it.
You’re shanking the ball. You’re fumbling the pass. You’re faking the Ice Bucket Challenge.* You have the opportunity of your lifetime, and you’re spending precious moments sucking up to a ‘roid-crazed Trump while he flails away every remaining shred of goodwill for the GOP.
Weren’t you supposed to be destined to become President one day? When exactly do you see that happening now, Ted? A flip of the Senate is an increasingly solid possibility, which means the GOP won’t be able to simply spend four years blocking all economic progress and then swoop in demanding tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everyone else when 2024 rolls around.
President Biden will piss people off with strict coronavirus restrictions for the first six weeks, sure. But then he benefits from a post-epidemic economic boom, not to mention the epidemic itself finally getting under control, people not dying quite so much, and everyone noticing how nice it is not to feel like they’re constantly having IQ points drained away while they’re being jabbed in the adrenal glands at increasingly rapid intervals.
The bar for Biden is at ankle-height right now, Ted. And Trump has finally started turning off even the most die-hard Boomers, which means that they’re joining Gen X in leaning left — or at least away from you — as a generation. And coming up behind them? Millennials and Gen Z, who believe that loathing the Republican party is a fundamental part of being a decent and reasonably intelligent person. And here you stand with the stink of Trump all over you.
When does Destiny kick in for you, Ted? Once Biden is in, either he or Harris has lock on 2024. Is 2028 your first crack? Probably not, since the Democrats have finally stopped being so polite about investigating dirtballs across the aisle. Trump owes a hell of a lot of money to somebody, and boy oh boy, has he had a lot of private slumber party phone calls with Putin. Not to mention all the Russian money that has allegedly made its way into an awful lot of GOP campaigns.
Trump has spent the last four years establishing the GOP as the party of white supremacists, and the next four will only change that picture in the public mind by adding corruption and — allegedly — treason to the mix.
I ask you again, Ted: When is your shot? On average, it takes a population 30–40 years to forget the hard lessons of a tragedy and make a previous dumb mistake all over again. Are you going to make a run at 81? At 89? Beard or no beard, it looks like your divinely ordained Presidential destiny is about to eat it hard unless you can figure something out.
Another reality: Texas is getting bluer and less white. If your GOP pals in the legislature lose their grip on the voter suppression efforts for even a second, you’re not even going to be Senator much longer.
Trump isn’t just pissing away his own votes, Ted, he’s pissing away yours. For decades.
So what are you going to do about it?
I suggest you return to your original brand. The one that got you into the Senate in the first place.
If you will recall, Ted, you used to have your own special thing before you pivoted to spending your career oiling up the shoulders of the man who attacked your wife and father. That thing was, if I may be indelicate, being a raging asshole. I know you feel a certain feeble obligation to protest that publicly, but come on, Ted. You know this. You have always known this. You made your way up the ladder by attending meetings to which you had not been invited. If that’s not conscious assholery, I don’t know what is.
You may not want to say it right out loud, but you know it’s true, Ted: It’s not just some personality quirk. Your God-given talent is being an asshole, and you have been leaning into that for your entire life. You were once a proud asshole. And with a little effort, you occasionally passed as a principled asshole. No one likes having a principled asshole around any more than they like hanging out with the other types, but most people recognize that principled assholes at least occasionally have some have value.
Unfortunately, during the 2016 Republican Convention, you crumbled. You decided to draft behind Trump instead of leading in the exquisitely punchable way you were born to do. That’s where you blew the long game, Ted. You could have been The Guy Who Cared Too Much about America to Endorse Trump. You would be a leader by now, either spearheading Project Lincoln or blowing it straight out of the water with your own Bruce Lee–worthy combinations of next-level dick moves.
But what have you done instead? You’ve dropped down several rungs of the asshole food chain and became a craven asshole, with neither the courage to endorse Trump nor the gonads to tell him to take his kindergarten understanding of civics and pound sand with it.
A craven asshole does nobody any good, Ted. Trump leaves four particles of oxygen left in the room on any given day and Mitch McConnell steals three of them. The other one goes to a rotating cast of idiots like Rudy Giuliani, and where does that leave you? Whining about the press and letting Trump use your name in his doomed grifter fundraising e-mails.
Is this your destiny, Ted? Is this who you were meant to be? Do you really want to sit by and suck up while Trump coattails your fellow Republicans into the ground, hands off the Senate, and ushers in the era of corruption investigations so explosive that even FOX can’t ignore them?
Or do you want to play to your strengths, go Full Righteous Asshole, and save Republicanism itself from 40 powerless years in exile as the Criminal Racist Yuckabuck party?
You have two weeks, Ted. You have to make them count. Heat yourself a bowl of Chunky and dig your sack back out of that trunk in the attic.
I genuinely don’t know how sincere your Christianity is, but I do know that it has been loud. You know how redemption stories work. It’s time to craft one for yourself, with a whiplash turnaround after seeing the light.
And then burn it all down, Ted. Burn down Trump and take his Evangelical support with you. Throw in few of his biggest, least useful idiots for good measure. You can talk and think circles around Ron Johnson and Devin Nunes: Why not take them out before they pull you down the drain with them? Giuliani has essentially become the guy next to you on public transportation who won’t shut up about ancient aliens. He’s an embarrassment. Are you really going to scruple at throwing him under the bus for the good of your predestined ascendance?
The GOP won’t win the presidency, no. But your leadership could give other Republicans who are up for election or re-election an alternative to the howling void of running on a ticket with Trump. They could say “I’m a Ted Cruz Republican!” and maybe scrape enough votes out of the trash to keep the Senate. It’s a slim chance, but it is your only chance. For decades.
It’ll suck for a few months, and Trump and his bizarre cultists will scream at you for every minute of that. But then you get to be the bold and shining leader of the GOP comeback.
You’ll lay down a soporific fog of rhetoric about how it wasn’t the Republican Party that courted Nazis and tried to take away health care during a pandemic and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans through sheer idiocy and negligence, it was that awful Mr. Trump. Stupid and patently false? Absolutely. But you know full well that most of the media will swallow and repeat it with nary a struggle. FOX execs will weep with relief. Think of the airtime, Ted.
And, most importantly, think of your first even remotely possible successful Presidential bid moving up to 2028.
It’s your choice, Ted. Go down simpering praise at a man who is not fit to clean the mud off your disingenuous cowboy boots or give your true asshole nature free rein and learn what being the savior of the GOP feels like.
Think about it, Ted.
But you’d better think fast. Or say goodbye to that shiny destiny.
[*] Seriously, Ted. The timing of your scream is off and there’s not one cube in that tub.
