"Apprentice producer says they have more & worse. So why not release in 2015? In March? Why wait till October?" Cruz tweeted. | Getty Cruz weighed dumping Trump, chose media attack instead In late-night phone calls, Cruz deliberated with advisers about how to deal with the release of a lewd Trump tape.

ST. LOUIS — For Ted Cruz, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Two weeks after Cruz offered a reluctant and belated endorsement of Donald Trump, the Republican nominee had finally gone too far for the rest of the party. Following the release of a lewd tape in which Trump was overheard bragging about sexually assaulting women, a cascade of Republican lawmakers were jumping ship.


But Cruz had just endorsed, and risked further shredding the reputation he has long sought to cultivate — that of a principled conservative — by backtracking as soon as others in the party did, especially after upsetting a slice of his supporters by endorsing Trump in the first place.

In phone calls with advisers Saturday that stretched well into the night, he debated whether to rescind his endorsement or to try simply changing the subject by going on offense against the media, according to a Cruz source with knowledge of the conversations.

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier denied that there was discussion of any strategic pivot to attacking the media.

Still, on Sunday morning, Cruz tweeted, “NBC had tape 11 yrs. Apprentice producer says they have more & worse. So why not release in 2015? In March? Why wait till October? #MSMBias”

The question of whether to rescind the endorsement had been tabled.

“NBC had tape 11 yrs,” Cruz tweeted. “Apprentice producer says they have more & worse. So why not release in 2015? In March? Why wait till October? #MSMBias”

But while Cruz has thus far kept his endorsement in place, sources haven’t ruled out the possibility of his eventually recalling it. The conversations broke up Saturday night with no conclusions reached, a source said.

“Access Hollywood,” whose former host Billy Bush eggs on Trump in the video, began searching through its archives last week after an Associated Press story quoted former staffers and cast members from “The Apprentice” who said Trump was “lewd and sexist.”

But before "Access Hollywood, which is owned by NBC, and the network’s news division could run their stories, footage of Trump and Bush on a bus in 2005 was leaked to The Washington Post, and the story blew up on Friday.

It broke exactly two weeks after Cruz finally endorsed Trump under considerable pressure from supporters and party leaders, after holding out all summer.

Following a bitter primary fight in which Trump called Cruz’s wife ugly and linked his father to John F. Kennedy assassination theories, Cruz spent months refusing to endorse Trump even as most of his party — and certainly his supporters home in Texas — got in line. At Trump’s Republican National Convention, Cruz took the stage and urged attendees to vote their consciences, rather than support the man the delegates were there to nominate.

But pressure mounted on Cruz following the convention and going into the post-Labor Day stretch. Republican activists back home were furious that their senator wasn’t doing everything he could to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected, and major donors had made their displeasure clear.

In a move that several of his top advisers and friends opposed, Cruz issued a Facebook post on Sept. 23 in which the senator pointed to Trump’s assurances that he would appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, and underlined his commitment to stopping Clinton.

But since then, Trump’s fortunes have taken a hit, and prior to the release of the lewd audio, Cruz found himself in the awkward position of boosting Trump following both a disastrous first debate performance and a week in which the GOP nominee spent much of his time feuding with a former Miss Universe.

When the audio of Trump making deeply derogatory remarks about women, Cruz condemned the content.

“These comments are disturbing and inappropriate, there is simply no excuse for them,” he tweeted. “Every wife, mother, daughter — every person — deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.”

On the campaign trail, Cruz himself had taken issue with Trump’s long history of denigrating remarks about women, and had often championed his own wife, Heidi — a Goldman Sachs executive — and his mother, who had a career as a computer programmer at a time when few women worked in that field. People who know Cruz said he was genuinely and deeply bothered by Trump’s remarks.

There may well be more cause to re-evaluate the endorsement: A former producer of Trump’s reality-TV show tweeted that “far worse” is yet to come out about the Republican nominee.

“As a producer on seasons 1 & 2 of #theapprentice I assure you: when it comes to the #trumptapes there are far worse. #justthebegininng,” Bill Pruitt tweeted on Saturday.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.