Ted Cruz’s Nasty Game

By Frank Bruni

CLEVELAND — Is it possible to stand up to Donald Trump, make clear what a false prophet he is and somehow come across as an even less endurable narcissist?

Ted Cruz managed it.

In the Republican National Convention’s most bizarre twist yet, Cruz used a prime-time speech on Wednesday night not to endorse Trump or to say anything positive about him but to play a mischievous, misanthropic game of subverted expectations.

And it was clearly a game to Cruz, who constructed his remarks in a manner designed to leave the audience guessing for as long as possible about whether he’d ever work his way around to even the tiniest, most tentative pitch for the party’s nominee.

There was a flickering promise of it at the start. “I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night,” Cruz said. “And like each of you, I want to see the principles that our party believes prevail in November.”

But while he detailed those principles, he never did connect them to Trump. “Congratulate” was the sum of his good will — and the end of it. It didn’t foretell anything more specific. It didn’t build to anything grander.

When Trump supporters finally realized that it wouldn’t and that Cruz was just running out the clock, they booed him, loudly enough to drown out some of his final sentences. It was stunning to behold.

And it wasn’t the last surprise. Just then, Trump decided to make his entrance into the arena, pulling the attention — and the cameras — away from Cruz. The boos turned into applause. The cameras didn’t even bother with Cruz’s exit from the stage.

But Cruz had made his point and done his damage, providing the latest (and most vivid) illustration of how little control Trump has been able to exert over his own coronation, how much rancor he has failed to exorcise, how few bridges he has succeeded in repairing, how far short he has fallen in making these four days in Cleveland as dazzling and exciting as he’d long promised they would be.

They were a bust already before Wednesday night, as The Times’s Adam Nagourney and Jeremy W. Peters chronicled, pointing to the nonsensical order of speakers, the shaky adherence to themes, the unintended disruptions, the self-inflicted distractions, the empty seats in the arena, the hollow emotion on the stage. To read their damning portrait of the convention is to see and hear a big, festive balloon with the air rushing out of it.

Cruz took that balloon and stomped on it, smiling all the while and turning a dull affair into a freak show. At the conclusion of his remarks, his wife, Heidi, had to be escorted from the convention floor by security officers as some delegates screamed at her.

Cruz had been invited to speak because, well, he had to be, given how much support and how many delegates he’d amassed during the Republican primaries. He’d earned the right, and there were people in the arena eager to hear from him.

But he had no obligation to accept that invitation, not to a convention that was being skipped by so many of Trump’s other vanquished rivals, including John Kasich, the Ohio governor, whose own state was playing host to the event.

By saying yes, Cruz was suggesting that he’d play nice and play along, or at least that’s what he should have been telegraphing. If his convictions precluded such obedience, he could have stayed home. He could have stayed mum. That would have spoken plenty loudly.

But Cruz isn’t much for mum. It violates his very nature to resist an audience of millions of television viewers and the chance to make an elaborate show of principle, even if it’s a much greater exhibit of self-regard.

Bygones were not bygones. He didn’t update his onetime description of Trump as “utterly amoral” with anything newer and gentler. He talked of himself, of America and of Election Day, saying: “We deserve leaders who stand for principle, unite us all behind shared values, cast aside anger for love.”

He clearly wasn’t evoking Trump, and he seemed not to realize that he was listing virtues that he was ignoring at the very moment, with those very words.

“Please,” he said, “don’t stay home in November. Stand, and speak, and vote your conscience.” It was then that his smile was naughtiest, because he’d put “your conscience” where he could so easily have tucked “for Trump.”

“Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution,” he continued. Candidates plural. Not the singular candidate whom the evening was supposed to exalt.

Later, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, made his big convention speech, but it was doomed before it started, because there was no way it could garner the attention that Cruz’s did. Cruz had to know that. It didn’t throw him off his revenge, and it threw this mess of a convention ever further off the rails.

Frank Bruni is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

