Cruz probably just wanted to hit Trump’s once and future social liberalism, to make him sound alien to Iowans. But his line struck a nerve because, well, it’s absolutely correct. You can’t understand the Trump phenomenon without understanding how “New York values” have made his candidacy possible.

This starts with the New York media’s longstanding love affair with Trump, his intimate relationship with the city’s glossy magazines and tabloids and networks.

Why do Americans believe in the idea of Trump as the World’s Greatest Businessman, the playboy with the Midas touch? Because that’s the story that a New York-based media — not talk radio but Time and Vanity Fair, not alt-right bloggers but prime-time TV — spent years and decades selling them.

Writing for The Intercept earlier this year, Jim Lewis pointed out that “… it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fund-raisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo.”

This gave Trump a huge advantage when he started pandering to the right-wing fever swamps. If some drawling southerner in an ill-fitting suit had showed up on TV promising to send investigators to hunt down the president’s real birth certificate, much of the media would have covered him as a cross between late-career Sarah Palin and David Duke.