How getting stomped by Donald Trump saved Ted Cruz's career

How getting stomped by Donald Trump saved Ted Cruz's career

The junior senator from Texas played his failed run for the White House perfectly.

All the evidence suggests that Cruz was genuinely in it to win the Republican nomination, dropping out only when it became mathematically impossible for him to become the nominee before the Republican National Convention and vanishingly difficult for him to wrest the nomination away from Donald Trump at the convention. He fought hard and executed a clever hug-Trump-until-the-end strategy. Surely, losing to the New York billionaire with shifting values, even among the Christian conservatives Cruz counted as his electoral rock, must have been hard and embarrassing.

But it was also a godsend. Losing to Trump saved Cruz from ruining his political career.

Barring a (not implausible) meltdown among Democrats or their almost certain nominee, Hillary Clinton, Cruz would have lost in November. He is, after all, to the right of Trump on just about every issue and lacks the charm or charisma or ideological flexibility to make his positions palatable to a majority of Americans. But now, Cruz gets to fall back on his cushy $174,000-a-year job as a U.S. senator, with about $9 million left in his campaign war chest and no campaign debt. Presumably, his wife gets to return to her job at Goldman Sachs.

Meanwhile, Cruz has raised his national profile to new heights, and he no longer has to travel the country shaking countless hands, eating terrible food, mangling easy sports references, threatening hecklers with a good spanking, and enduring sharp mockery from Trump, his supporters, and late-night comedians. But those are all fringe benefits. Losing to Trump was a winning proposition for Cruz because winning the Republican nomination would have destroyed Cruz's entire political brand.