Half a mile east of the U.S. Capitol stands a handsome three-story townhouse with red-brick siding, copper oriel windows, and a corner entrance inscribed with the name of its owner, the innocuous-sounding Conservative Partnership Institute. Most passersby likely have no idea that Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election was largely coordinated behind these stately walls. So was the January 6 rally that turned into a violent assault on the Capitol. In recent years the CPI has spent tens of millions of dollars recruiting and training operatives to staff what its leaders hope will be a second Trump administration. If the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 provides the battle plan, the CPI represents the staging ground.
Late on a balmy night this summer, though, the CPI headquarters was largely empty except for a cramped basement recording studio, where Texas senator Ted Cruz was preparing to tape the latest episode of his podcast. Casually dressed in shirtsleeves and jeans, sporting black-rimmed reading glasses and a full salt-and-pepper beard, Cruz called to mind a college professor holding office hours. A little after ten o’clock, he settled into a swivel chair and donned a headset.
This would be an unusual episode because Cruz had just done something unusual, at least for him. Earlier that day he had introduced a bipartisan bill, the Take It Down Act, which would require social media companies to remove pornographic “deep fakes”—AI-generated images purporting to show real individuals, often young women, in compromising poses. The issue attracted national attention when fabricated nude photos of Taylor Swift flooded the internet in January. “Because Taylor Swift is a global superstar, she spoke out, and Big Tech took it all down,” Cruz said. “But if you’re just an ordinary kid, you’re powerless.”
The Take It Down Act is a key element in one of the most audacious rebranding efforts in Texas political history. Facing a tough election this November against Democrat Colin Allred, a centrist Dallas-area congressman and former NFL linebacker, Cruz is trying to transform his image from far-right provocateur to serious legislator. He has good reason to do so. Six years ago, Cruz won reelection by less than three points, narrowly beating a previously little-known El Paso congressman named Beto O’Rourke. It was the closest any Texas Republican had come to losing a statewide election in two decades.
Cruz’s brush with political death shouldn’t have come as a surprise. He spent his first term in the Senate largely ignoring his home state in favor of building a national brand. In 2013, eight months after taking office, Cruz played an outsized role in shutting down the federal government—a doomed but profile-raising attempt to gut the Affordable Care Act. The effort had no chance of success, but Cruz’s antics, including a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor featuring a reading of Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, made him famous. Other than engaging in similar acts of performative obstruction, he showed little interest in governing, introducing just two bills that passed in six years. Instead he poured his energy into an ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign that ended in personal and professional humiliation.
“He was moving so fast that he kind of lost sight of where he was,” said veteran Texas lobbyist Bill Miller, who has worked with Republicans and Democrats. “I think that close race with Beto made him get back to the basics of what you do as an elected official. You take care of your home base, you announce stuff, you get stuff done—or you take credit for it, anyway.”
Cruz seems to have gotten the message. Leading up to this fall’s election, he has partnered with Democrats to pass several significant bills, including legislation securing the latest reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration and facilitating the construction of two new international bridges—and the expansion of a third—across the Rio Grande to bolster trade. In an effort to broaden his appeal, his campaign launched Democrats for Cruz. The group debuted online with a video featuring a dozen Texas Democratic voters discussing their concerns about immigration and crime. “Democrats are not the way they were,” growls one elderly rancher. “Nowadays they’re too damn liberal.”
But Cruz has had trouble sticking to the bipartisan script. At the Republican National Convention, in July, he delivered an incendiary speech accusing the Democratic Party of welcoming an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants because the party “decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.”
The speech won enthusiastic applause from RNC delegates. But it was also a
reminder of why Cruz, over his two terms in the Senate, has become one of the most polarizing politicians in America. The televangelist-style delivery. The self-righteousness. The shameless dishonesty. (There is no credible evidence that undocumented immigrants vote in American elections in significant numbers.) “Fundamentally, he’s just not a likable person,” said one leading Texas Republican, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. “He’s got a problem. There’s a reason he ran way behind the rest of the Republican field in 2018.” Of the statewide Republican candidates that year, only Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was under indictment for securities fraud, received a smaller share of the vote than Cruz.
Whether Cruz can overcome his personal unpopularity to win a third term in the Senate depends in part on his ability to attract swing voters. A June poll conducted by the University of Texas at Austin found that just 25 percent of self-described independents approved of Cruz’s job performance; 51 percent disapproved, and the rest had no opinion. (Independents make up about 10 percent of the Texas electorate.) But wooing undecided voters while maintaining support from Republicans is proving to be a tricky balancing act. It took Cruz years to repair his relationship with the GOP base after the legendarily nasty 2016 Republican presidential primary. During that campaign, Trump insulted Cruz’s wife and falsely accused his father of participating in the JFK assassination.
The Texas senator responded by calling Trump “utterly amoral,” “a pathological liar,” and “a serial philanderer.” When Cruz refused to endorse Trump at the Republican convention, he was booed off the stage. Desperate to save his political career, Cruz backed down. Two months later, he endorsed Trump for president. Four years after that, he took a leading role in the effort to overturn the presidential election on Trump’s behalf. Cruz was unable to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden, but he was successful in another sense: he had provided definitive proof to a sometimes wary Republican voter base that he will do anything for Trump.
The Cruz campaign granted Texas Monthly substantial access for this profile. In Houston I attended campaign events and interviewed more than a
dozen of the senator’s colleagues, staffers, supporters, and friends. In Washington, D.C., I shadowed the senator for two days as he cast votes, grilled witnesses at committee hearings, held press conferences, and interacted with constituents. In private, I found Cruz surprisingly thoughtful and self-deprecating, with a dorky sense of humor and a genuine love of pop culture. (His favorite movie is The Princess Bride, which he can quote at length.) “He’s a very serious man who doesn’t take himself too seriously,” Michael Knowles, Cruz’s original podcast cohost, told me.
I also saw another side of Cruz. During a tense phone interview, Cruz became enraged as I frequently interrupted his evasive, filibustering answers to my questions. When I cut short a monologue about his work to champion in vitro fertilization access to remind him I’d asked about his stance on abortion, he accused me of parroting Democratic talking points, suggesting that Congressman Allred had supplied my questions. When I pushed back against his misleading assertion that 11.5 million undocumented immigrants have entered the country under Biden, he dug in his heels. (In June the New York Times found that since Biden took office, 9.6 million migrants have been encountered nationwide, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. An estimated 25 to 60 percent of migrants apprehended are repeat crossers, and the Biden administration has turned away or deported more than 4 million migrants.)
I was left with a mystery. Who is Ted Cruz in 2024? The intelligent, well-read Harvard Law graduate or the belligerent, fact-challenged troll? Could he reconcile the two identities to pull off one more electoral victory?
To say that nobody likes Ted Cruz would be incorrect. On a hot, cloudless Saturday afternoon this summer, several dozen of the senator’s biggest fans filled the backyard of a picture-perfect suburban home in Jacobs Reserve, an upscale subdivision north of Houston. This was the latest stop in what Cruz was calling his cul-de-sac tour, a series of intimate events in private residences around Texas. In some ways the tour was a throwback to the beginning of Cruz’s political career, in 2011, when he crisscrossed the state in a rental car, speaking to local tea party groups.
Perhaps not coincidentally, holding small neighborhood events has allowed Cruz to dodge the demonstrations that often accompany his larger political rallies. For years Cruz’s Houston home has been regularly picketed by protesters, most recently for his unconditional support for Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians. In the spring, those protests became so intense that Cruz emailed his neighbors to apologize for the disruption.
At the Jacobs Reserve gathering, Cruz began his remarks by thanking his host, Jessica Hart Steinmann, the general counsel at the America First Policy Institute, a Fort Worth–based think tank staffed by former Trump administration officials. Then he dived into his standard stump speech, which paints a dark vision of a nation in mortal peril. “I have never seen so much damage done to our country in such a short period of time,” Cruz gravely intoned. “In 2021 Joe Biden came into the White House, and he inherited peace and prosperity. And in almost every direction things have gone the wrong way.”
As Cruz surely knows, the country was mired in a pandemic-induced economic slump when Biden succeeded Trump in January 2021. Since then, the U.S. has added 15 million jobs, unemployment has fallen from 6.3 percent to 4.3 percent, and the S&P 500 stock index has risen 49 percent. Even inflation, which under the Biden administration peaked above 9 percent in June 2022, has now fallen below 3 percent. But to hear Cruz tell it, things have never been worse. Crime was up instead of down. Filling up your gas tank practically required a home mortgage. Widespread voter fraud was an existential threat rather than a myth rejected by every court that has examined it. In recent years, such falsehoods have become articles of faith among many Republicans.
Cruz knows what fires up the Republican base, and it isn’t legislative solutions. “Look at the chaos on the southern border,” he instructed the crowd at Jacobs Reserve. “I gotta tell you, when you see the human suffering, when you see the people who are dying, when you look at the eyes of a girl or a little boy who’s been brutalized by human traffickers, when you see the women who have been repeatedly sexually assaulted, when you see the people die of drug overdoses.” He didn’t quite finish the thought but rattled off disturbing statistics for his audience.
Polls show that immigration is the top issue for Texas voters. Yet Cruz recently voted against a bipartisan border security bill—one of the toughest in decades—that would have significantly limited asylum claims and allowed the president to close the border if crossing numbers had averaged five thousand per day. At the time, Cruz said the bill didn’t go far enough. But Trump had reportedly ordered the bill killed so that Republicans could continue campaigning against a “broken border.”
Since Trump descended a gilded escalator in 2015 to decry Mexican migrants as rapists and drug smugglers, nativist hate speech has become a staple of many Republican politicians. But few have pushed the envelope as far as Cruz. Despite being the Canadian-born son of a Cuban refugee, Cruz has made unhinged xenophobia the leitmotif of his 2024 Senate campaign. He regularly describes undocumented immigrants as an invading horde. Like Trump, he is fixated on retelling lurid stories of brown-skinned migrants raping and murdering innocent, usually white, American women.
I asked Cruz about the similarities between his language and the rhetoric of mass shooters such as the 21-year-old white supremacist who killed 23 people and wounded 22 more at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. Shortly before the massacre, the shooter released a four-page manifesto presenting himself as a defender of American values against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
“That racist lunatic was a mass murderer,” Cruz shot back.
“Where do you think he got his ideas?” I asked. Cruz, in response, demanded to know my opinion of the Bernie Sanders supporter who shot Republican representative Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice in 2017.
At the backyard campaign event, Cruz described the U.S.-Mexico border as a lawless hellscape overrun by human traffickers and drug smugglers: “As bad as you think it might be, it’s worse.” But anyone who has spent real time in South Texas, instead of popping by for photo ops with U.S. Border Patrol agents, knows that the state’s border counties are remarkably peaceful. FBI data shows that El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen rank among the safest cities in the country. That’s not surprising, as researchers know that immigrants, both documented and not, commit far fewer crimes per capita than native-born American citizens. (Most migrants who are in the country illegally try to avoid police attention, not attract it.)
Later, when I pointed this out to Cruz, he became incensed. “That is an absolute logical fallacy!” he shouted. “Yes, it is true, we have murderers in America. And by the way, what should we do with the murderers in America? We should lock them up and put them in jail to protect our families. . . . It is utterly bizarre that today’s Democrats, supported by their media cheerleaders, want 11.5 million people to come into this country illegally, with no idea how many are murderers, rapists, child molesters. How many are gang members? How many are terrorists?”
I thought back to the senator’s 2015 campaign memoir, A Time for Truth, which describes his father Rafael Cruz’s adolescence in Cuba. As a teenager, Rafael joined Fidel Castro’s armed communist insurgency against dictator Fulgencio Batista. In 1956, Cruz wrote, Rafael was part of a rebel group assigned to attack an army base. At the last minute, the raid was canceled. Later, Rafael was arrested and tortured by Batista’s agents. After his release, fearing for his life, he applied for and received a student visa to attend the University of Texas at Austin. But given his inability to speak English and his participation in an insurrection, I couldn’t help wondering if Rafael would have been permitted into the country under the draconian restrictions favored by his son, who has repeatedly called for stricter screening of legal immigrants.
“When your father came to the United States, was he vetted?” I asked.
Cruz paused for a moment. “My father was admitted legally on a student visa,” he finally said.
“But was he vetted?”
“You would have to ask the State Department that. I was not alive. But there is a right way to come to this country, and it is legally. It is following the rules.”
Cruz’s reverence for rules has always been selective.
“In my first conscious memory, I was causing trouble,” he writes in his memoir. “I was in the grocery store as I put a kazoo in my mouth and blew it, repeatedly, loudly, and to the growing irritation of my mother.” The family was living in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada, where Cruz’s parents, Eleanor and Rafael, owned an oil-field-services company. Rafael had converted from pro-Castro revolutionary to anti-Castro conservative on his road to becoming a naturalized American citizen. Eleanor, a second-generation American of Italian and Irish ancestry, earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Rice University before becoming a computer programmer. The future senator was born Rafael Edward Cruz, in 1970, but everyone called him Felito—“little Rafael”—until he rechristened himself Ted in junior high.
In Cruz’s retelling of the grocery store incident, Eleanor warned him that she would take him home and spank him if he didn’t stop making noise. He kept blowing, so she picked him up and carried him out of the store. During the car ride home, Cruz recalls, he desperately tried “to turn the hand of fate. To strike up a conversation with her. To tell a joke. Anything to talk my way out of the punishment. But my mother bested me in determination. She also was a woman of her word. My spanking was forthcoming.”
Cruz has been tooting his own horn, pissing people off, and trying to escape the consequences ever since. By third grade, he was already starting to think of himself as the smartest person in any room. “The teacher would give the kids some homework, and Ted would do it in five minutes. Then he would go try to help all the other kids,” Rafael, who is 85, recently told me. “It was getting him into trouble—the fact that he was so bright, he was using it to basically influence other people and disrupt the class.” The teacher solved the problem by assigning Cruz extra work.
At the age of nine, Cruz could hold his own in family political discussions. His parents had moved the family to Houston, where Rafael joined the board of the Religious Roundtable, a right-wing organization that supported Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. “Our conversation at the dinner table was all about why we had to get rid of this leftist, Jimmy Carter, and replace him with a constitutional conservative like Reagan,” Rafael recalled. “Ted always wanted to participate and put his two cents in, make comments, ask questions, and so forth.”
That love of argument may have been welcome at home, but it made Cruz few friends at school. In junior high, he embarked on a quest to make himself more likable. “I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he writes. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of the night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’ ” It was the first of Cruz’s attempts at reinvention.
In his bid for popularity, Cruz joined his school’s basketball, football, and soccer teams. He got his braces removed, started wearing contacts, and saw a dermatologist to treat his acne. He “tried to be less cocky. When I received a test exam back, even though I’d probably done well, I would simply put it away.” Then came the name change, which infuriated his father, who considered it a rejection of his Cuban heritage. For years Rafael refused to call his son by his chosen name.
Cruz may have dropped Rafael’s name, but he fully adopted his father’s conservative politics. In high school, he became involved with a Houston organization called the Free Enterprise Education Center. Founded by retired oil-and-gas executive Rolland Storey, the group drilled students in “the ten pillars of economic wisdom.” (Second pillar: “Government is never a source of goods. Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people it must first take from the people.”)
Storey paid for Cruz and other participants to travel around the state delivering twenty-minute orations based on the ten pillars to local Rotary Clubs and chambers of commerce. Cruz also delivered lectures on the meaning of the Constitution and the dangers of socialism as part of another Storey-backed venture, the Constitutional Corroborators. Over the course of his high school career, Cruz gave around eighty such speeches.
By his senior year, Cruz had his future mapped out. “Upon graduation Ted hopes to attend Princeton University and major in Political Science and Economics,” reads the biographical blurb in a program for one of his Constitutional Corroborators talks. “From there he wants to attend law school (possibly Harvard) and achieve a successful law practice. He then wants to pursue his real goal—a career in politics. Ted would like to run for various offices and eventually achieve a strong enough reputation and track record to run for—and win—President of the United States.”
Except for a few details—Cruz ended up studying public policy at Princeton—that forecast proved eerily accurate. In 2015, when the 44-year-old Cruz formally launched his presidential campaign at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, in Virginia, he appeared to be on his way to achieving his ultimate ambition. Just three years earlier, the insurgent tea party movement had boosted Cruz to victory in a hard-fought campaign to replace retiring U.S. senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. In Washington, Cruz’s incessant showboating repelled many fellow lawmakers in both parties but delighted his tea party supporters. His rancorous battles with Republican congressional leaders such as Speaker of the House John Boehner, who once said he’d “never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch,” only made him more popular with the GOP base.
“Much of what he did as a U.S. senator upon election in 2012 was oriented toward the prize of the presidency,” said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones. “He adopted a national persona that was focused on both fighting the Obama administration and reaching out to movement conservatives across the country.” More than any other 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, Cruz seemed in tune with the angry mood of conservatives after eight years under America’s first Black president.
Then Donald Trump came down the golden escalator and ruined everything.
For the first eleven months of Trump’s Republican primary campaign, Cruz deliberately avoided criticizing the New York businessman turned television personality. Like most political observers, he considered Trump’s campaign a publicity stunt that would collapse under the weight of its absurdity.
The strategy worked, until it didn’t. In February 2016, Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, the first primary contest. The effort he put into cultivating strong evangelical support and building a sophisticated, well-financed campaign apparatus had paid off. Trump came in second but claimed, in a preview of things to come, that he had won.
The Cruz campaign had cheated, he said, by sending a misleading email to supporters on Election Day implying that fellow GOP candidate Ben Carson was dropping out. After Iowa, Trump debuted a nickname for the man who was now his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination: “Lyin’ Ted.” In the following months, as candidate after candidate flamed out, the field narrowed to Cruz and Trump.
That’s when things got ugly—and personal. Trump took shots at Cruz’s wife and father; Cruz held an impromptu press conference and called Trump a “pathological liar.” Later that day, Cruz announced his withdrawal after Trump beat him by sixteen points in Indiana. “When he dropped out, he was so broken that he could not even come out and address all of his supporters,” recalled Rafael, who was accompanying his son on the campaign trail. “He just made a statement and went to the back, because he couldn’t contain the tears. He was in tears all evening. Just so disappointed.”
Cruz had no one to blame but himself. In the Senate, he had pioneered the flamboyant, hyperpartisan style of politics that Trump used so successfully against him. The New York real estate mogul was simply better at it. In subsequent years, political trolls such as Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene employed similar showmanship—coupled with a disdain for legislating—to establish their brands in the lucrative right-wing ecosystem. Although these politicians are often seen as mini Trumps, they were following a path blazed by Cruz.
In the months after his withdrawal from the presidential race, Cruz went uncharacteristically silent. He spent a week with family and friends in Mexico—a country whose inhabitants he had spent the previous year deriding as dangerous criminals—sipping margaritas and licking his wounds. Despite mounting pressure from the Republican Party, he refused to endorse Trump. “History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s coat,” he is quoted as telling friends in Tim Alberta’s book American Carnage. During his speech at the Republican National Convention, in July 2016, he encouraged conservatives to “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.” The arena exploded in jeers.
It was, in retrospect, the pivotal moment of Cruz’s political life. Until then, he had enjoyed what seemed like an unbreakable bond with the base of the Republican Party. Now he faced a choice. Stick to his principles and risk his political career or endorse an authoritarian with little respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, or basic human decency.
Cruz could see which way the wind was blowing in Texas. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick reportedly threatened to run a primary challenger against Cruz if the senator failed to get in line. Cruz did just that and has spent the past eight years trying to make up for his near-fatal mistake of asking conservatives to vote their consciences.
He put two conditions on his endorsement. Cruz wanted Trump to commit to choosing a nominee to replace Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia from a list of right-wing jurists. And he wanted Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican and Cruz’s close friend in Congress, added to that list. Trump agreed. In 2018 Trump unveiled a new nickname for his former rival. “He’s not ‘Lyin’ Ted’ anymore,” he told reporters. “He’s ‘Beautiful Ted.’ ”
Today Cruz explains his loyalty to Trump by pointing to the former
president’s record in office, particularly his judicial appointments. Because of his seat on the Judiciary Committee, Cruz wielded particular influence over Trump’s appointments to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which holds jurisdiction over Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Three of Trump’s six appointments to the Fifth Circuit were right-wing Texans: James Ho, Andrew Oldham, and Don Willett.
“Those three people travel in the same circles as Cruz,” said Josh Blackman, a conservative legal scholar at the South Texas College of Law Houston. “Cruz definitely put his imprimatur on them.” By the end of his term, Trump had appointed three Supreme Court justices and nearly a third of the active judges on the thirteen circuit courts. In the following years, those judges transformed the American legal system in areas ranging from reproductive rights to environmental regulation.
But none of this quite explains the lengths to which Cruz went in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Most congressional Republicans, whether from conviction or convenience, supported Trump’s unfounded claim that the election was stolen; 147 were willing to vote against certifying Biden’s victory. But only a few could be described as principal organizers of the plot to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. Ted Cruz was one of those few.
Cruz had experience challenging a presidential election. Two decades earlier, he was a junior member of the all-star Republican legal team in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush. So it was no surprise when, after losing the 2020 election, Trump turned to the Texas senator for help. “I told President Trump that he needed a team of world-class litigators, the kind you hire in multi-billion-dollar bet-the-company lawsuits,” Cruz would later recall.
At Trump’s request, Cruz tried to recruit just such a team, only to be turned down, he wrote, by every lawyer he approached. The president was left with his old friend Rudy Giuliani leading a team of Keystone Cop attorneys who managed to lose every case they filed—including ones heard by Trump-appointed judges. Cruz focused on amplifying Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud on social media and cable television, stoking Republican voters’ distrust of elections.
Throughout the fall, Cruz continued providing Trump with informal legal advice. He even agreed to represent the Trump campaign before the Supreme Court in two long-shot lawsuits whose constitutional claims he privately doubted. When the conservative-dominated Supreme Court declined to hear the cases, Cruz decided that the American legal system was shirking its responsibility. “Something else needed to be done,” he concluded.
The Texas senator proposed that Congress establish an electoral commission to conduct an audit of the election results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all of which narrowly went for Biden. Under his proposal, those states’ legislatures, all but one (Nevada) controlled by Republicans, would then have the power to overturn the will of the voters and deliver their electoral votes to Trump. The former Constitutional Corroborator was laying the groundwork for the legal equivalent of a coup d’état.
On January 6, Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over a joint session of Congress, began running through each state’s presidential electors in alphabetical order. When he reached Arizona, Congressman Paul Gosar, a far-right Republican who represents a district stretching from Phoenix to the Nevada border, rose to object. Under the Electoral Count Act, such an objection must be joined by at least one senator.
“Is the objection in writing and signed by a senator?” Pence asked.
Cruz stood up, as he had promised. “It is,” he said. Cheers and groans filled the chamber.
Even as violent insurrectionists overran the Capitol, sending Cruz and his colleagues fleeing the chamber, the senator remained determined to challenge the results. While hiding in a supply closet, in a secure location somewhere in the bowels of the Capitol, some of his coconspirators got cold feet. Not Cruz. When the Senate finally reconvened, he made one last unsuccessful attempt to rally enough votes to challenge the Biden electors. In the early morning of January 7, Pence certified the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States.
Cruz’s actions on January 6 lost him the respect of some of his most valued friends. Former federal appeals court judge Michael Luttig, a conservative legal icon for whom Cruz had clerked after law school, publicly blamed him for the mob attack on the Capitol. “Once Ted Cruz promised to object, January 6 was all but foreordained,” Luttig told the Washington Post in 2022. “Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen.” In his 2022 book, Justice Corrupted, Cruz describes an unnamed close family friend who ended his relationship with the Cruzes. “Our lifelong friendship, which I deeply, deeply treasured—and for which I grieve to this day—was discarded as yet another casualty of these angry, divided times.”
Cruz has never accepted any responsibility for the January 6 attack, which resulted in injuries to at least 140 police officers and the death of one Trump supporter, who was shot by police. In the senator’s version of events, a “small number of people” committed violent acts while the majority of Trump supporters were “peaceful protesters” who gathered in D.C. “to speak up for their nation and to defend President Trump.” He rejects the characterization of the attack on the Capitol as an insurrection. “An insurrection is an armed rebellion organized to overthrow the government,” he later wrote. “What happened on January 6 does not remotely meet that definition.”
During our interview, Cruz grew angry at my repeated questions about that day’s events. “The only people obsessed with January 6 are reporters who hate Trump,” he informed me, appearing to forget that Trump himself brings up the failed insurrection at nearly every rally. Like so much else about Cruz’s past, January 6 was merely a repressed memory, a bad dream that would go away if he closed his eyes. What mattered, what folks ought to be talking about, was the glorious future Cruz saw for himself.
Just over a month after January 6, however, Cruz committed what may come to be seen as an even greater political blunder. He fled to the tropical resort city of Cancún, Mexico, during a record-breaking winter storm that brought down Texas’s fragile, lightly regulated electrical grid in 2021. Like many Texans, I spent much of the blackout in my bed, trying to keep warm under multiple blankets. When I learned that Cruz had left the country, I drove to his house, in Houston’s wealthy River Oaks neighborhood, to see whether it had lost power. In talking with neighbors, I verified that Cruz’s block had indeed gone dark. I was getting back in my car to drive home when I spotted a small, forlorn-looking dog behind the glass panes of his front door. I snapped a photo from inside my car and posted it on Twitter. “Ted appears to have left behind the family poodle,” I wrote.
Social media exploded in indignation. Everyone wanted to know how the Cruz family could have left their beloved pet—whose name turned out to be Snowflake—alone in a freezing house. Cruz later explained that a dog watcher had been taking care of Snowflake, but the optics were damning: he had abandoned the poodle, it seemed, just as he’d abandoned his constituents. Colin Allred, Cruz’s opponent in this November’s election, has used the Cancún trip as an example of Cruz putting his comfort and interests over those of the Texans he should be serving.
Yet another political vulnerability for Cruz is his longtime opposition to reproductive rights. After the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the case that established a constitutional right to an abortion, fourteen states, including Texas, passed total abortion bans. Polling shows that these bans are deeply unpopular, including in Texas. With pregnant Texas women regularly being denied medical care even when they face death or serious injury, pressure is building on the state GOP. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that 26,000 Texas women have given birth as a result of rape in the years since the state outlawed nearly all abortions.
Allred supports federal legislation that would reinstate Roe v. Wade’s protections. A Democratic bill expressing support for those protections was blocked by Cruz and other Senate Republicans in July. “There’s no one more responsible in the state of Texas than Ted Cruz for the situation we’re in now,” Allred told me. “He is someone who has championed extreme abortion bans for some time. He’s championed every extreme policy you can talk about when it comes to this.”
In the past, Cruz has expressed support for banning abortion without exceptions for rape or incest. During his current Senate campaign, however, he has declined to go beyond his mantra that reproductive rights should be determined by each state. “Abortion is an issue on which people of good faith can disagree,” Cruz told me. “The particular restrictions that the state legislatures adopt reflect the values of the citizens of each state.”
“Does the Texas law reflect your values?” I asked.
“At the federal level, we’re not making those determinations,” he carefully replied.
Rather than discuss his position on abortion, Cruz preferred to highlight a bill he’d introduced earlier in the year purporting to guarantee national access to in vitro fertilization, which has been used by millions of American parents who have struggled to conceive a child. But Cruz’s bill simply made states that banned the treatment ineligible for Medicaid funding. This would likely be little deterrent to the ten Republican-led states, including Texas, that have already turned down billions of dollars in additional Medicaid funds offered by the Affordable Care Act because of their ideological opposition to “Obamacare.”
After touting his IVF bill, Cruz pivoted to blaming Democrats for being too extreme on reproductive rights. I brought up a recent University of Texas poll showing that just 11 percent of Texans supported an abortion ban in cases of rape, and 12 percent supported a ban in cases of incest. Wasn’t it Cruz’s position on abortion that was extreme? “My position is let the voters of Texas decide,” he responded. “If you think letting the voters of Texas decide is extreme, then maybe you’ve been a reporter for too long.”
Allred’s attacks appear to be working. A University of Houston/Texas Southern University poll from early August showed Cruz leading by just two points. Allred has raised more money than Cruz so far, collecting $38.1 million in donations to Cruz’s $26 million. The national Democratic Party has poured money into the race, which it believes represents its best chance at flipping a Senate seat from red to blue.
Cruz warned his supporters in Jacobs Reserve that the election would be close. “My biggest challenge in this race is complacency,” he said. “People say, ‘Look, it’s Texas, it’s a reelection, you’re a Republican. This is easy, this is a layup.’ And I think that’s just objectively false.”
These days, the pursuit that seems to give Cruz the most pleasure is not legislating or campaigning but podcasting. During our conversations, he came to life when discussing his burgeoning broadcast career. “For years I had been telling my team, ‘Let’s figure out a way to do this,’ ” Cruz told me. “We’ve got to communicate with people—we’ve got to go directly to them. And then as podcasts emerged, that became an obvious way to do it.”
Verdict With Ted Cruz launched in 2020, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, topping the iTunes chart in its first week. Since then Cruz has recorded nearly five hundred shows. New podcasts are released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, supplemented by occasional special episodes prompted by major news events. Verdict remains one of the top political podcasts in the country, attracting an average of 60,000 listeners per episode, according to Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers Magazine, the industry’s leading trade journal.
For the first two years, Cruz cohosted the show with conservative political commentator Michael Knowles. In 2022 the show was picked up by San Antonio–based iHeartMedia, the nation’s biggest radio and podcasting company. “They provide tremendous economics of scale, tremendous muscle, and tremendous know-how,” said Harrison. “They also provide tremendous legitimacy and prestige.”
To replace Knowles, who was under contract at right-wing media platform the Daily Wire, Cruz chose his longtime friend Ben Ferguson, a native Tennessean who now lives in Houston and hosts his own podcast on iHeartMedia. “I wanted people to get to know the Ted Cruz I know,” Ferguson told me. “The one that’s actually really funny and personable and sincere. I don’t think people get to see that side of him.”
The show is produced around Cruz’s schedule. His podcasting equipment travels everywhere with him, packed neatly inside a black carry-on case. Shows typically tape between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m., after Cruz finishes his congressional business. In Washington, D.C., Cruz often records at his townhouse, which he described to me as a bachelor pad littered with empty pizza boxes. In Houston, he records at his home studio after his family has gone to bed. “Other than his wife and kids, I probably spend the most one-on-one time with him,” Ferguson said.
On each approximately 45-minute episode, Ferguson acts as Cruz’s setup man, serving him softball questions about the news of the day and amplifying Cruz’s arguments. On show days, they text back and forth about potential topics of discussion before choosing to focus on three or four issues. Because little postproduction work is needed, podcasts are released within a matter of hours.
Cruz does not receive a salary for the show, but he benefits in other ways. Since 2022 iHeartMedia has contributed more than $787,000 of advertising revenue from the show to a pro-Cruz super PAC. The Cruz campaign, which is prohibited from coordinating with the super PAC, denies directing iHeartMedia to make these payments. But in April, two D.C.-based groups filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that Cruz had “brazenly violated” campaign finance laws. The FEC has yet to rule on the complaint.
“It’s highly improbable to me that iHeartMedia would just come up with the idea to send ad revenue to a super PAC that supports Cruz all on their own,” said Andrew Cates, a Texas campaign-finance attorney. “There’s got to be some kind of written agreement in place.” Cates said he had never heard of a similar arrangement. “It’s clever, and it’s new. But these types of things were bound to happen at some point.”
Cruz told me that he records the podcast as a public service for his constituents—a way to keep Texans informed about what’s going on in D.C. But he spends the vast majority of his time talking about national politics and culture-war issues. Nearly every episode features a section on the conservative outrage du jour, from university protests against Israel to the Paris Olympics opening-night telecast supposedly mocking the Last Supper. The show’s content is almost indistinguishable from what you might find on Fox News—including frequent ads for “antiwoke” companies such as Blackout Coffee Co. and Patriot Mobile—except that the host is a sitting U.S. senator. The more I listened to the podcast, the more I wondered whether Cruz was a legislator moonlighting as a podcaster or a podcaster moonlighting as a legislator.
On the campaign trail, Allred has repeatedly hammered Cruz over the podcast. “Senator Cruz has spent his time doing everything he can to advance his own career, to advance his own notoriety, often at the expense of Texans,” he told me. “The point of his podcast isn’t to inform, or to try and shed light on something that folks might not understand. It’s just a platform to advance himself and the kind of extreme issues he’s most interested in.”
The amount of time and energy Cruz devotes to the podcast has led some observers to wonder whether he plans a future in right-wing media if and when he leaves the Senate. “I have no doubt that Ted Cruz would be able to go forward with a broadcast career if his political career came to an end,” said Harrison. “He’s quite talented.”
But the podcast presents a challenge for Cruz’s rebranding effort. Anyone who listens to a few episodes will quickly realize that he’s still the same far-right bomb thrower who burst onto the political scene in 2012. “He made his name by being a hyperpartisan, divisive person in the Senate,” said Matt Angle, director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic PAC. “And the fact that he’s trying to rebrand just shows his audacity and willingness to lie with a straight face.”
Throughout my reporting of this story, I was struck by the ease with which Ted Cruz slips from one identity into another. All politicians dissimulate. Many adopt a public persona far removed from their private self. But few politicians seem as comfortable changing their positions as Cruz—a man who sounded just as sincere calling Trump a pathological liar as he now does calling him “a strong leader” who “fights for American people.” “Ted Cruz would be a communist if communism got him to the top,” said Angle. “He would be a fascist if fascism got him to the top.”
On a Monday evening in June, as the sun set over the nation’s capital, I tagged along behind Cruz as he exited the Senate chamber and descended the grand stone staircase leading to the east side of the Capitol grounds. He paused for a moment to gaze toward the Supreme Court, where he had once been a law clerk and where he had argued eight cases during his tenure as Texas solicitor general. To the southeast, hidden behind the facade of the Library of Congress, was the Conservative Partnership Institute building, where he would record his podcast later that night. “I try to walk down these stairs at least once a day,” he told me. “If this view ever gets old, you’ve been in Washington, D.C., too long.”
It had been nearly four years since a violent mob, seeking to stop the certification of a presidential election, had charged up these very stairs on their way to ransacking the Capitol. But if Cruz was thinking of January 6, he didn’t show it. He jogged down the remaining steps, climbed into the back of a Mercedes sedan, and disappeared into the twilight.
Grooming by Tara Cooper
A version of this article appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Ted Cruz Would Like to Reintroduce Himself.” Subscribe today.
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