Cruz on PBD: Blue-Collar Voters Decided 2016

Patrick Bet-David sat down with Ted Cruz this week for PBD Podcast #851. The title is the tease: what Trump told him behind closed doors. The conversation is longer than that. Cruz walks back through 2016, through working with Trump as president, and through the family story he uses to explain why he does not talk like a country-club Republican. Bet-David keeps circling 2028. Cruz will not announce. He will describe the argument.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Three stretches do the work. How 2016 broke, including the poll Cruz trusted and the nickname that cut. What the relationship looks like in the Oval — including the afternoon Elon Musk tweeted that Trump was on the Epstein list. And the biography: financially independent since seventeen, no trust fund, a standing fight with country-club Republicans. The close is 2028, and JD Vance.

2016: the poll, the shakeout, the nickname

Seventeen Republicans entered. Cruz asks you to lay odds in New York or Washington in spring 2015. Nobody would have bet on Trump. Nobody would have bet on him either — a first-term senator at one or two percent. The other end of the race was treated as settled. “At the time, people thought Hillary was this unbeatable juggernaut.” His path against her was blue-collar voters and evangelicals who had stayed home in 2008 and 2012. Turn them out and the map is Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.

The poll he trusted was one cross-tab: truck drivers, steel workers, cops, firefighters, waitresses. In almost every state, Trump was first among those voters and Cruz second, or the reverse. Not Marco, not Jeb, not Kasich. That is how he says the race turned out. Twelve states where he was first with that group. Twenty-four where Trump was. Kasich took Ohio. Rubio took Minnesota. Everyone else was a rounding error. Rubio’s problem, as Cruz frames it, was Gang of Eight. Cruz raised $92 million. Trump got more than $3 billion in free media. A joint ticket polled before Florida is the road he still thinks about. Rubio canceled the motel meeting.

Then the name. Cruz’s team tried to invent one. Crooked Donald was on the whiteboard before Trump used Crooked Hillary. Cruz killed the exercise. “It’s just not me.” Lyin’ Ted landed. “Trump has a marketing genius that is instinctual.” Cruz’s strength was trust. The nickname went straight at it. “It did real damage.” He suspended after Indiana. On election night he was already out, in Houston. Trump took the states Cruz had been naming. Heidi said she would be damned.

Once Trump is president

Cruz talks to Trump every week, sometimes every day. On foreign policy he says the president has listened most of the time, not all of the time. He calls himself Trump’s strongest ally in the Senate. One tariff call after the market dropped: Cruz pushed a pause, Trump told him to get lost — Cruz repeats the word — and paused the next day anyway.

The meeting that derails is early in the second term. Cruz is in the Oval pitching school choice as a civil-rights play for kids in failing schools. Mid-pitch, Elon Musk tweets that Trump is on the Epstein list. An aide prints it. Cruz sees the knuckles go white. “I learned some curse words I didn’t even know.” School choice stops. The meeting leaves the rails.

The bill did not die in that room. Cruz rewrote the language for the Byrd rule and told John Thune he would burn the package if the provision came out. It stayed. Trump Accounts and no tax on tips sit next to it. Cruz says he is friends with both men now. The fight between them, he says, was not good for the country.

The biography he keeps using

Rafael Cruz left Cuba in 1957 after prison and a warning from his father. Ferry to Key West. Greyhound to Austin. A hundred dollars sewn into his underwear. The oil business later collapsed. The family went bankrupt.

Ted says he has been financially independent since he was seventeen. No trust fund. “That is not my world.” He finished school with about a hundred thousand dollars of debt — “a mortgage but I didn’t have a house” — and paid it off at thirty-eight.

He has spent his Senate career, he says, fighting country-club Republicans. His people are the truck driver and the steel worker. The 2016 cross-tab and the biography are the same claim. The party that talks like a club loses that voter. The party that talks like a job keeps him.

2028, and Vance

Bet-David keeps asking if Cruz is running. “I don’t have an announcement about ’28. I am right now not running for ’28.” He calls the next race free agency. There is no Never Trump lane that matters — “maybe Liz Cheney and six people.” He does not treat the field as settled behind JD Vance.

He likes Vance. He barnstormed Ohio for him. The split he will name is policy. Small government versus the instinct to spend. A non-interventionist hawk versus isolation. He objects to an Iran memorandum Vance negotiated that Cruz says would have moved hundreds of billions toward Tehran.

Vance’s chances are real because he already sits on the coalition. They are not locked because 2028 is an argument about what that coalition believes. Cruz’s lane, if he takes it, is the voter he has been naming since Iowa. Voters will sort the rest.

The other line he draws

The rest of the hour is a different fight. Cruz calls Tucker Carlson “the single most dangerous demagogue in America.” He says Tucker treats Trump as the Antichrist, that the shows run at Israel and Jews, and that antisemitism is “the gateway drug to anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism.” Matt Gaetz, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie sit in one sentence as the cloud around Tucker — telling young people to hate Israel and hate Trump, “and they’re very quickly getting to and they hate America too.” That last step is Cruz’s. Gaetz’s actual place in that crowd is the Tucker studio and the America First break over Israel, not a signed manifesto.

A few other names get a pass. AOC and Newsom as the Democratic front-runners. Rubio as smart, likable, a gifted communicator. Elon as the smartest man Cruz has met, a man who does not know there is a box. Cruz is not just retelling 2016. He is drawing a line through the right and naming who he thinks is on the wrong side of it.