This is the fifth\u00a0article in a five-part series on the 2016 GOP nomination<\/a>. The Buckley Club ran a piece<\/a> several days ago that made similar arguments.<\/em><\/p>\n Ted Cruz\u2019s role was less direct\u00a0than those of his rivals, but perhaps more pernicious: Cruz ran a four-year campaign for the White House that focused on delegitimizing and destroying the Republican establishment.<\/p>\n If the institutional Republican Party has lost credibility over the last decade, its failures–and reliance on <\/span>\u201cfailure theater\u201d<\/span><\/a>–would surely deserve responsibility. Oftentimes, instead of using institutional power to obstruct Obama, they would create some setup where they could avoid <\/span>stopping<\/span><\/i> President Obama while making it <\/span>look like<\/span><\/i> they were resisting him. A great example of this is the Iran deal. The Senate essentially <\/span>flipped the advice-and-consent provision<\/span><\/a> of the constitution on its head, requiring that the Senate pass a resolution of <\/span>disapproval<\/span><\/i>, rather than affirming the deal with a two-thirds majority. Thus Republicans could bash the deal without obstructing it.<\/span><\/p>\n People can be fooled for a while, but not forever. Of course, Ted Cruz saw his holy mission as one that required that he unmask the venal politicians of the Republican Party, and built a Rolodex worth of enemies in his time in the Senate. He ran a <\/span>pointless suicide charge<\/span><\/a> against the Affordable Care Act in 2013 and condemned Republicans who sat out. He called Mitch McConnell <\/span>a liar on the Senate floor<\/span><\/a> and railed against McConnell on <\/span>debt ceiling machinations<\/span><\/a>. Through it all, Cruz became one of the most popular politicians on the Right: Cruz was calling out the hypocrisy and the lies where he saw them, and he alone was fighting the good fight. Ironically, while criticizing failure theater implicitly, Cruz was offering a different kind of politically motivated play: what we might call \u201ccombat theater.\u201d Cruz\u2019s fights led nowhere and bred a sort of political nihilism on the Right: Cruz is a man of principle. I<\/em><\/span>f only Cruz had more Republican allies<\/span><\/i> then we\u2019d win again.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus, with the help of talk radio, the institutional GOP was utterly delegitimized among rank-and-file Republican primary voters. This is clearest in polling numbers; the GOP favorability rating among Republicans declined from a high of 89 percent in 2012 to 68 percent in April 2016, <\/span>according to Pew<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Cruz, in other words, was the miner and sapper of the bulwark of a stable political party: he attacked public support for what we could call the GOP being a \u201cmeasured nuisance\u201d to Obama\u2019s political agenda, instead demanding utter purity. This was <\/span>in spite of<\/span><\/i> the fact that under the much-maligned Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, Republicans essentially <\/span>won the spending wars<\/span><\/a> with the White House, as detailed by writer Matthias Shapiro.<\/span><\/p>\n Cruz\u2019s mining and sapping resulted in him being widely loathed, but an arbiter of <\/span>true conservatism<\/span><\/i>, a man that talk radio and the \u201centertainment establishment\u201d could rely on.<\/span><\/p>\n So, when Trump emerged on the Right as a genuine presidential candidate, bolstered by affect and <\/span>ressentiment<\/a><\/span><\/i>, Cruz had an opportunity: he could have denounced Trump for his conservative heresies on Rush Limbaugh\u2019s show, or Sean Hannity\u2019s show, and hoped to bring talk radio along. Instead, what did Cruz do? He went on <\/span>FOX News<\/span><\/a> and offered effusive praise for Trump, noting, “When it comes to Donald Trump, I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific. I think he’s brash. I think he speaks the truth.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Rick Perry delivered an <\/span>important anti-Trump speech<\/span><\/a> in July, calling Trump a \u201csower of discord\u201d (harking back to the Book of Proverbs, in what may well have been a coded message to Evangelicals), \u201ctoxic,\u201d and a \u201ccarnival barker.\u201d Did Cruz back up Perry to bring the radio establishment on board to an ecumenical anti-Trump message? Nope. Crickets. Perry was out on a limb on his own.<\/span><\/p>\n Republican strategist and consistent Trump antagonist Rick Wilson <\/span>nailed this dynamic<\/span><\/a> back in January:<\/span><\/p>\n In August of last year, I described Cruz\u2019s behavior toward Trump as \u201cfeeding the alligator in hopes that it eats him last.\u201d As painful as it is for his fans to admit it, there\u2019s only one person to blame for the situation in which Cruz now finds himself and that\u2019s Ted Cruz. For six months now, Cruz has played the role of eager understudy and Trump lickspittle, praising nearly everything that spews from Trump\u2019s mouth. Not only did Cruz set a land-speed record racing off to Trump Tower to pay obeisance to The Donald early in the process, he has taken almost every opportunity to lavish praise on even Trump\u2019s most ridiculous and politically deadly policies. He has embraced and amplified messages that are poisonous among women, Hispanics, and even limited-government conservatives. Cruz has occasionally stepped back from the brink, but always while shoveling on fulsome praise for the notorious game-show host and con artist leading the Republican field.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Cruz continued to draft off of Trump for months, hoping that Trump would fade or drop out and that he could pick up Trump\u2019s supporters. Indeed, as late as December, Cruz was mocking those who wished he would take on Trump. Certainly, Cruz\u2019s interlocutors didn\u2019t necessarily have Cruz\u2019s best interests in mind, but again, we\u2019re talking about opportunities and contingency. Cruz <\/span>could have<\/span><\/i> decided that Trump was dangerous to the long-term conservative project, to the fight against abortion, to the fight for markets and against cronyism. Instead, he offered perhaps his most famous tweet:<\/span><\/p>\n The Establishment's only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. <\/p>\n Sorry to disappoint — @realDonaldTrump<\/a> is terrific. #DealWithIt<\/a><\/p>\n — Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 11, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n