I’m describing it like it’s a bad thing. But it was curiously disarming. “He’s actually kind of cute,” my wife said. Cruz looks like a kid when he does it—a sweet, lonely kid, whose only friends are adults. He looks like the kind of kid who hangs out with the mom in the kitchen while all the other kids are playing games in the yard during a birthday party; the kid who was abandoned by his alcoholic father when he was just a toddler, only to be reunited with him two years later; the kind of kid who impresses his parents with a recitation of the Constitution. He looks like a lonely misfit.

Bertrand Russell, parroting Nietzsche, has argued that the desire to moralize is a desire for cruelty. If you’ll allow me a little armchair psychology, I suspect that it is Cruz’s failures in Washington—failures that began when he was passed over for choice appointments in the early administration of George W. Bush—that have solidified his worst qualities: his resentment, his anger, his hatred, his desire to fight back, his cruelty. All of those deeper feelings manifest themselves in the desire to moralize, to wave the banner of Christian conservative, to be the dogmatist ideologue, the one true good guy.



At an event in Adventure Christian Church in a little town in Iowa, Cruz came in from the back, behind us. He walked through the audience, shaking hands on his way to the front. I realized I was accidentally standing in the receiving line.

“Shake his hand,” my wife said.

When he passed me, I took his hand and shook it. He didn’t look me in the eye. My wife was behind us, filming the exchange and laughing. She was laughing more than was polite, in part because the atmosphere was getting hysterical.

He opened with his standard line-up of the five things he’d do on his first day in office. Move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and begin a criminal investigation into Planned Parenthood. After each point, he did his routine: gaze, point, smile, teeth. Little tucked chin neck bob. My wife and I imitated him. Then something unusual happened.

We noticed that he was staring at us. Very clearly staring straight at us. As we—I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it—shamelessly mocked the odd way that he laughed. He had very clearly observed that we had been mocking him. More, he clearly cared that we were mocking him.

Of course it could have been in our imaginations. But in that moment, Ted Cruz became human. He was vulnerable, and for just an instant or two I saw a Ted Cruz who could be loved. Who you wanted to love. It’s a quality that both Rubio and Trump share that seems to have simply eluded Cruz so far: It’s important, at least sometimes, to be vulnerable. Yes, everyone wants a strong leader—and especially the Republican Party. But in all of his talk about being hated, being an outsider, Cruz never lets us know what that feels like: to be the wallflower, lonely guy looking for a few friends. He has, unfortunately, just the opposite tendency: He tends to make us feel like he doesn’t want or need our affection or support. And it was interesting, and maybe not so surprising, that it took being picked on to bring out this side of him.

As we drove away from the event my wife turned to me. “I’m a little worried about Ted Cruz. He seemed a little down today. He said the whole point of getting elected is to be hated.”

No one supposed Ted Cruz was presidential material before he won Iowa. Now that Cruz is the clear number 2 for the Republican nomination, it also seems equally clear—as clear as the mud of politics can ever be—that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. But one thing that I want to emphasize here, a point that I think is appreciated by many far-right Republican commentators but missed by people like me on the left, is that Cruz and Trump are fundamentally different candidates with fundamentally different sources of appeal. Trump supporters don’t care whether he is consistent or polite or cool or even particularly presidential. Trump supporters like Trump. In many ways, the Trump supporters of today remind me of the Obama supporters in 2008. Obama’s mantra: “Change!” Trump’s: “Win!” Cruz’s supporters, as I’ve emphasized here, don’t necessarily like the man, but I think they respect him. More importantly, they identify with him. And if you want to have your beliefs confirmed, he is, relatively speaking, consistent, reliable, even trustworthy.

At his Iowa victory speech, Cruz had on his politician mask. The aspect of Cruz that had appealed to me—the awkward kid, the nerd, the man who was upset when he saw we didn’t like him—was already gone.

Standing in the audience, my wife and I realized there’d been a tremendous, and perhaps crucial, upset, we sensed something we hadn’t picked up on before. Victory affects Cruz one way, and it affects his followers another. The speech went on and on, and so we decided it was time to go. Making our way out through the crowd, with Ted Cruz speaking, in our press badges, we perceived something new among Cruz’s supporters: hostility. This was the first time we had actually worn press badges during our time following Cruz, and so we could be identified as the enemy, and the enemy had just lost.

My wife said later that it was the first time she recognized the very real danger of Cruz’s candidacy. It was built, in subtle ways, on hate, on resentment. And when it gained momentum, those subtleties became unsubtle. And we could feel it. There was cruelty in the air, and it wasn’t coming from Cruz.

Whatever your worries may be about the possibility of a Trump presidency, perhaps you can take comfort, as I do, that the confusion of the Trump supporter is less dangerous than the conviction of the voters who support Ted Cruz. Trump supporters are looking for answers, Cruz supporters already know the answers. A fearful person may be made dangerous, but a cruel person is already there.