Brooks cites Cruz's 'dark and satanic tones'

Ted Cruz may have made great inroads with Christian evangelicals, but conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks isn’t buying the candidate’s “dark and satanic tones.”

In an interview this weekend with PBS, Brooks tells host Judy Woodruff that Cruz’s world is “combative,” “angry,” and “apocalyptic.” And while he continues to rise in state and national polls, Brooks said other candidates, like Marco Rubio, are starting to use similar rhetoric.


"Ted Cruz is making headway. There's ... you begin to see little signs of liftoff. Trump has sort of ceiling-ed out. Carson is collapsing. And Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere," Brooks said. "And so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio is doing a little by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has."

He continues: “If you watch a Cruz speech, it’s like, we have got this enemy, we have got that enemy, we’re going to stomp on this person, we’re going to crush that person, we’re going to destroy that person."

Co-panelist David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, said he believed the satanic tones actually come from Cruz’s dad, Rafael Cruz, who is an evangelical pastor.

Brooks continued, saying the Republicans “need a tough guy to beat that back,” in a way offering up candidate Marco Rubio as an alternative, should he not adopt the same rhetoric as Cruz.

“He’s a sunny … he’s been running the youthful optimism campaign, but he’s beginning, to prevent Cruz from getting liftoff, to mimic sort of that, get a piece of that,” Brooks said. “I mean, if Rubio starts to go like Cruz, he just doesn’t look like himself, and that bothers people."