Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent for Politico Magazine.

It was a sleepy Wednesday morning last June when Ted Cruz tipped his hand.

John McCain had sponsored an amendment to expand the FBI’s online surveillance capabilities, and it was a no-brainer for the many devout constitutionalists on Cruz’s Senate staff. Rand Paul and Mike Lee—two reliable Republican allies in the fight for civil liberties—were adamantly opposed, and it was presumed throughout the upper chamber that Cruz would be too. When the vote came, however, the Texas senator stunned his colleagues by siding with McCain and the GOP leadership. The amendment failed to advance, but Cruz’s vote sent tremors through his Senate office. The previous month he’d quit the 2016 race and returned to Congress, yet he was still in campaign mode, anatomizing daily decisions on calls with his political team. This particular vote—which was influenced, several sources recall, by data suggesting Cruz’s flirtation with libertarianism made him vulnerable on national security during the GOP primary —was the first clear indication that he was making the necessary course corrections to run again, and lent credence to a rumor on Capitol Hill: that his presidential brain trust would annex his Senate office in preparation for reelection in 2018 and a second shot at the White House in 2020.


Any doubts were erased two weeks later when Cruz called a meeting and informed his Senate staffers of a major personnel change. David Polyansky, one of Cruz’s most trusted campaign advisers—and a loyalist of campaign manager Jeff Roe—was being installed as chief of staff despite having no prior legislative experience. Just as notable was the news that Paul Teller, whom Polyansky was replacing, would join several presidential staffers at a newly created non-profit designed to keep the campaign machinery humming by maintaining engagement with massive lists of nearly 500,000 donors and some 5 million activists and supporters. Cruz, banking on a Hillary Clinton victory, wasn’t waiting for the election result to position himself as her chief GOP challenger in 2020, and his team was making no secret of its plan to wage what would effectively be a continuous campaign for the presidency.

And then Donald Trump won the White House.

The ripples are visible across the Republican Party, but nowhere has the shock of Trump’s conquest been felt more acutely than inside the Texas senator’s sprawling electoral enterprise. Having spent the past two years constructing the most sophisticated operation in politics—an outfit that raised more cash than any Republican primary candidate in history—Cruz now has little choice but to garage it. There is no space inside Trump’s GOP for a rival political apparatus of that scale, nor is there money to sustain it.

Cruz can do plenty to engage donors himself; he hosted a reception last Wednesday at the Newseum in Washington for dozens of major contributors to his campaign. And he’ll continue to strategize with his senior team even as they take on new and different projects: They met in D.C. for seven hours Saturday at the office of attorney Chuck Cooper, discussing everything from his flawed media strategy in 2016 to Trump’s potentially unhelpful impact on the 2018 midterms. But for now, everyone understands that Cruz’s pursuit of the presidency is on hiatus. This explains why Roe wanted the job of White House political director; why more than half a dozen former staffers have secured administration posts; and why, according to multiple sources, his non-profit is cutting its staff to zero. The 125 square-foot office Cruz’s team rented last summer at 300 New Jersey Ave., against a breathtaking backdrop of the Capitol, will soon be vacant. The group will be repurposed to assist Cruz with some issue advocacy, but no longer is it a presidential campaign-in-waiting. Its two employees—Teller and Bryan English, Cruz’s Iowa director, who moved his family to D.C. to help run the new organization—expected they’d be joined by a host of new colleagues in the run-up to 2020. Instead, both are looking for work.

Boxing up that office will be the physical manifestation of the abrupt reversal of fortune for Cruz—from potential GOP heir apparent to just another senator with visions of living at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Every cycle is different, and the game continues to change,” says Rick Tyler, the former communications director for Cruz’s 2016 campaign. “But the prospects for Ted Cruz becoming president drastically dimmed on November 9.”

It’s a bitter dose of reality. Cruz is only 46, brimming with brainpower and ambition, and yet he appreciates better than most the difficulty of winning a presidential nomination, much less the White House itself. Eight years is a long time—even the senator’s most bullish associates can’t conjure a scenario in which he’d challenge Trump in 2020—and by then there will be a new cast of talent and phenomena to contend with. What makes the wait so painstaking for Cruz, whose breakneck political metabolism powers an incessant quest for intellectual competition, is less his desire to occupy the Oval Office and more his euphoric addiction to running for president. It resulted in a crash after the campaign; Senate aides characterized him as grumpy and withdrawn, and friends worried he’d grown despondent without the rush of the trail. “It was the most fun I ever had in my life,” Cruz tells me in a recent interview. “I jumped out of bed every day.”

Stepping back from it all and surrendering his near-term presidential aspirations has, however, freed Cruz to consider the opportunities at hand. Trump’s victory means that for the first time in his career, Republicans will be responsible for governing—and will be expected to deliver on the many promises they’ve made in the Obama era. Having spent months reckoning with these new political realities, and feeling a certain weight due to his newfound national following, Cruz has concluded that it’s time to reinvent his role in Washington. The tea-party rebel who came to the Senate in 2013, and who masterfully exploited the GOP’s fratricidal tendencies en route to building a grassroots army, no longer has the luxury of pursuing purity for political gain. With a unified Republican government, and Trump poised to secure a list of policy wins that once seemed improbable, there is little appetite or incentive for ideological brinksmanship. Cruz intuitively understands this, and sees in Trump’s early presidency an opportunity to reset relations with a party establishment he’s battled since 2012.

It’s not that he’s filled with regret. Cruz’s knack for making intra-party enemies and defying the party bosses helped fashion his image as a conservative demigod, and without that he would have never sniffed the GOP nomination. He wore the “wacko bird” label as a badge of honor and bragged about having “food tasters” in the Senate cafeteria. That same reputation, however, starved him of establishment support against Trump at a critical juncture of the campaign and contributed to the crippling narrative that he was incapable of getting anything done in Washington. (While both ran as outsiders, the popular depictions were of Trump the dealmaker and Cruz the arsonist.) Now, as he plots his future at the dawn of a onetime rival’s new administration—with his Senate reelection campaign about to commence, and another presidential bid never distant from his imagination—Cruz is betting he can have it both ways: that he can energize his base by spearheading, rather than stonewalling, the Republican Party’s agenda; and that he can protect his outsider status while playing by the insiders’ rules.

In weeks of conversations with his allies, “team player” was a phrase frequently deployed and with unambiguous purpose. Cruz has always been a partisan—it’s easy to forget he chaired Lawyers for McCain and worked for George W. Bush—and feels, perhaps, that after four years of feuding primarily with his own party there will be some absolution in inflicting punishment on the cartel members from across the aisle. When Cruz visited Trump Tower in mid-November, according to sources present, he told the transition team that with Jeff Sessions’ nomination as attorney general, the new president would need a “champion” in the Senate to lead some of his toughest fights. And then he volunteered.

Cruz showed his fitness for the position in early January when he battered Al Franken and his fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee for their questioning of Sessions one day, then turned around the next and vouched for another Trump cabinet pick, introducing Rex Tillerson, a fellow Texan, to the Foreign Relations Committee. None of this escaped the hopeful eye of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, despite their history of hostilities, singled out the junior senator from Texas during that week’s Senate Republican luncheon. Applauding his efforts, McConnell turned to his onetime nemesis and gave him a nickname: “The new Ted Cruz.”

***

Sitting inside his Senate suite, Cruz smiles when I ask about that remark. He won’t comment on closed-door discussions with his caucus, but acknowledges that we’ll see a different version of him in the post-Obama era. “I think everyone recognizes we are in a markedly different environment today than we were four years ago, or three years ago, or two years ago, or a year ago, or even three months ago,” he tells me, retracing his time in D.C. “And that environment is going to change how everyone approaches getting our job done.”

In Cruz’s case, the new approach means, among other things, embracing the role of enforcer for the Trump administration. He would seem an unconvincing collaborator for the 45th president, who infamously spread unflattering photos of his Cruz’s wife and later linked his father to the JFK assassination, neither of which he ever apologized for. Yet somehow, associates of both men say, they’ve forged a genuine and unique respect for one another. And from Cruz’s perspective, his cooperation with Trump provides a powerful witness as he seeks reintegration with the Republican elite: If he can forgive and forget, why can’t they?

Restitution can be found in doing the little things. Cruz called Trump two weeks ago, for instance, to give a heads-up on legislation he was introducing with Lindsey Graham that would defund the United Nations in retaliation for its resolution on Israeli settlements. It was a deferential show of etiquette that hasn’t exactly been a hallmark of his Senate career. Cruz had previously run the idea through Senate leadership, and then reached out to the unlikeliest of partners in Graham, who has been one of his harshest critics and who joked last year that Cruz could be murdered by colleagues on the Senate floor—and that members of the chamber would vote to acquit. “I want to apologize to Ted for saying he should be killed on the Senate floor,” Graham said during their eyebrow-raising joint appearance on Morning Joe. “I’m sorry, Ted.”

Cruz appears intent on building—and in some cases repairing—personal relationships with Republican senators. He started a weekly basketball game in the Russell Building, for example, and has been urging colleagues to attend. (Cruz is said to be a surprisingly good jump-shooter with miserable form.) Tim Scott has played, and Marco Rubio is said to be joining soon. In another development, Cruz, who has long used his back-corner booth at the Capital Grille to schmooze with activist leaders and think-tankers, has lately been inviting fellow senators. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Dan Sullivan of Alaska ate with Cruz on separate nights recently, and Rubio joined him for a post-campaign meal last year. Here too, the new-and-improved Cruz has been visible: According to multiple people who have dined with him since the election, Cruz— known for his love of red wine over lengthy dinner dialogues—abstained entirely from alcohol. (This isn’t a conversion to teetotaling. Cruz, who grew noticeably heavier during the campaign, is trying to lose weight—and is currently locked in a pound-for-pound competition with Roe.)

For his part, Cruz downplays the degree to which he’s conducting himself differently. He says he took fellow senators out to dinner early in his term, including McCain and Lamar Alexander, and argues that he has worked on plenty of legislation with moderate Republicans and even Democrats. He also disputes the notion that he’s just now trying to forge friendships. “It’s worth remembering, I’ve only been here four years,” Cruz tells me. “Relationships take time to build.”

That said, as he enters the final two-year stretch of his freshman term, Cruz acknowledges “a natural progression” of his career is underway. “I think all of us are learning, or should be learning, every day of our lives. And if you’re not learning, you’re not alive,” Cruz says. A minute later, he adds: “I hope that I'm more effective today than I was a year ago, and I hope that I will be more effective in a year than I am today.”

Nobody will confuse this for a mea culpa, but it’s probably the closest that Cruz—a prideful man, and a politician colored through the lens of ego, self-assurance, even arrogance—will come to publicly admitting that he’s taken the lessons and criticisms of the past four years to heart.

“I think some of this comes with experience. Everyone needs to collaborate with others to get something done, and I think Ted has learned that,” says Carly Fiorina, his former running mate, who became close to the candidate and his wife. “I think he has been seasoned by a tumultuous first term as a U.S. senator—not to mention a presidential candidate—and my expectation is that he will be more effective because of it.”

Some on Capitol Hill remain skeptical. In fact, three of the Senate offices I contacted declined to make their bosses available for an interview about Cruz. His detractors still see a craven opportunist who provoked the very intra-party chaos that invited Trump’s ascent, and worry that a softer, gentler approach is meant only to mask his self-promotional ulterior motives. Others are more charitable, giving Cruz the benefit of the doubt and allowing that a national campaign can alter one’s perspective on governance. Whether his new approach is altruistic, and whether it proves durable, won’t soon be known. But old habits die hard, and in Cruz’s case, so do the brawler’s instincts that made him the most hated man in the Republican Party. Sooner or later the Texas senator will find himself opposed to the president and to his congressional leadership; his tactics at that juncture will say much about this moment of supposed reformation, and even more about his future.

***

Not everyone is excited at the idea of Cruz 2.0. To some of his supporters, especially those concentrated in the Never Trump wing of the Republican Party, the Texas senator might be conservatism’s best hope in the face of a new president who represents an existential threat to its foundational principles. If Cruz wrote the playbook for standing up to one’s own party—and disrupting Washington’s clubby, incestuous atmosphere—this, they say, would be the worst possible time to abandon it. Naturally, these are the same people who were sickened at the sight of him finally endorsing Trump last September—a decision that Cruz agonized over, and one that foreshadowed his new approach to the Senate.

From the moment he exited the presidential primary on May 3, Cruz confronted something of an identity crisis over his future in the GOP. He was forced to choose, in one instance after another, between strengthening his newfound status as a party heavyweight and bolstering his brand of anti-establishment conservatism. Whether it was endorsing Trump (who, despite cribbing many of Cruz’s positions, never convinced him that he held any coherent ideology), or donating to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (which had a history of working against conservative candidates in party primaries), or fundraising on behalf of other GOP senators (who hadn’t lifted a finger to help him head-to-head against Trump), Cruz found himself in a series of lose-lose situations.

What made the process so vexing was that Cruz understood the politically sound decision, in every case, was to side with the party. He also knew that doing so could cost him dearly with his core audience of supporters. This quandary consumed him in the weeks leading up to the Republican convention as he listened to arguments for and against endorsing the party’s nominee. Cruz’s longtime chief strategist Jason Johnson spoke for most members of the inner circle, who were still reeling from their brutal primary tussle with Trump and vehemently opposed supporting him on moral grounds. Roe, representing a vocal minority of advisers and donors who felt Cruz should only speak in Cleveland if he planned to endorse, stressed that supporting the nominee was the safe and smart political play for someone who eventually wants to be president. At one point, a top Cruz donor recalls, the senator looked at him and said of endorsing Trump: “What will people like Steve Deace think?”

Deace, a Christian conservative radio host in Iowa, is a Cruz devotee. He is also a die-hard Never-Trumper who, like others in Cruz’s kitchen cabinet of movement activists, warned the senator that he could lose prestige by capitulating to the party and backing its nominee. “His base didn’t want the endorsement, because Cruz proved we don’t have to make accommodations to get ahead in the system,” Deace says. “What I was telling him was one of the first rules of politics: Don’t betray your base. It’s the hardest thing to build and the easiest thing to lose. And if you don’t have a base, you can’t win.”

Cruz ultimately found himself persuaded by similar sentiments and chose not to endorse Trump in his convention address—which proved to be a profound miscalculation. Not only did his speech conform to the establishment’s caricatures of him—conniving, self-serving—it simultaneously alienated a sizable chunk of Cruz's base that did want him to endorse, the size and fury of which he’d underestimated. It wasn’t just a cadre of fat cat financiers and party elders heaping negative feedback on Cruz; it was the likes of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins and prominent activist Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, among many other longtime allies who, in weeks of emails, texts and phone calls to his team, warned that Cruz was jeopardizing the future of the country and everything he claimed to care about.

Alarmed by the ferocity of the backlash, Cruz took steps toward healing his rift with the party. In mid-September he cut a $100,000 check to the NRSC. Ten days later he penned a Facebook post endorsing Trump. And two weeks after that he threw a massive joint fundraiser in Texas for several endangered GOP senators, including Kelly Ayotte, who earlier that very same day had released a TV ad skewering Cruz (though not by name) for his role in shutting down the government in 2013.

None of this came without consequence. Cruz’s allies in the conservative movement were disgusted with the NRSC donation and Ayotte fundraiser. One major donor who had pledged a six-figure contribution to the new non-profit backed out in response to the Trump endorsement. And everything was made worse when, two weeks after Cruz published his Facebook post, the Access Hollywood tape dropped. It was a nightmare realized for the senator’s team: He couldn’t rescind the endorsement, even though the tape validated some of their original arguments for withholding it. (Levity arrived in the form of a viral photo depicting a supposedly downcast Cruz phone-banking against a backdrop of Trump-Pence signs; his entourage couldn’t help but howl at the image, to the senator’s annoyance.)

Cruz twice declines to answer when I ask whether he regrets his handling of the Trump endorsement. In retrospect, his decision to reverse course might prove to be a career-saver. Had Trump won without his former rival’s support, he likely would be using party resources to recruit a high-powered primary challenger to run against him in Texas. And had Trump lost narrowly without his support, many GOP voters might have never forgiven Cruz for costing them the White House and the Supreme Court.

From a strategic standpoint, Cruz’s willingness to spend significant time and money on behalf of the party was about “not letting the capital [we] built go to waste,” Roe tells me. “We knew we could just say, ‘We got second place, woe is me.’ But instead we said, ‘Let’s go use it. Let’s go campaign for Trump. Let’s do rallies in Texas for state reps and state senators. Let’s do rallies for congressmen and senators who need it. Let’s help keep the majority.’ That’s how you use capital and grow it. You can either reinvest it or sit on it. And he wasn’t willing … to put all his money in a sock drawer and sit on it.”

Of course, there was an expectation of more immediate dividends. Most of Cruz’s team was convinced Clinton would win, hence the flurry of activity last summer geared toward 2020. It’s an ironic twist that Cruz’s reinvention in Trump’s GOP is being engineered by Polyansky, who took over the senator’s D.C. office with the explicit expectation of Trump losing and Cruz subsequently launching another presidential campaign. A former Marine who emphasizes discipline, rules and process, Polyansky is a sharp departure from the two previous chiefs in Cruz’s Senate office, Teller and Chip Roy, both ideological agitators with a penchant for intra-party collision. Polyansky — who, not coincidentally, has overseen significant turnover in the Senate office — is known for preaching communication with leadership and pursuing coalitions beyond the conservative movement where Cruz is most comfortable.

“I think when he came off the presidential campaign there was a newfound respect for Ted and what he could accomplish," says Chris Wilson, who was Cruz’s director of research and analytics, and who last fall summer began sharing an apartment with Polyansky in Washington. “And what David's been able to do is capitalize on that newfound respect and turn it into a legislative and governing strategy.”

Last fall, for example, Polyansky invited Rob Engstrom, the national political director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to Houston for a private steak dinner with him and the senator. Engstrom tells me his relationship with Polyansky—“an absolute gentleman” who has the respect of the donor class—was the bridge to building an alliance with a noticeably more collaborative Cruz. “He’s being constructive, and I think that’s been recognized by folks on the Hill and certainly it’s something I’ve observed,” Engstrom says of the Texas senator. “After running a national campaign and getting so close, you get exposed to all kinds of different parts of the country, and also to different parts of the electorate.”

This kind of talk unnerves some of Cruz’s closest allies, who fear exactly what Engstrom is talking about—that having approached the pinnacle of American politics, only to fall short because of his coalition’s lack of philosophical breadth, Cruz will now abandon his insurgent’s mentality and attempt to expand his appeal at the expense of his base. “I’m hearing some of those concerns,” says Roy, Cruz’s original chief of staff. “Is he still going to fight for the movement? Is he going to become a go-along-to-get-along guy? Is the guy who campaigned on tearing down the curtains and throwing out the silverware going to play nice now?”

Roy says Cruz wants to “give the president his space” at first and not cause any trouble. “But there is going to be a moment when the president overreaches or the Republican leadership doesn't do its job,” Roy cautions, “and what I keep telling people is, he’s going to do it almost instinctively. He’s going to step in and push back when the establishment inevitably ignores the people.” It’s a delicate balancing act. “He’s aging, he’s experiencing, he’s learning the Senate, he’s gone through the motions of a Senate and a presidential campaign, so now he’s going to take all that and feed that into the question of: How can I be a statesman and represent Texas—but still be a fighter?”

When I put this question to Cruz, he lowers his voice and leans forward in his chair. “I don’t think there’s anyone who can look at the past four years and conclude I’m reluctant to stand up and fight for the principles in which I believe—even at times at a significant personal cost to myself,” he says. “I’m here to do a job, and I intend to use every ounce of strength I have to fight to defend the Constitution and freedom.”

***

The Friday afternoon prior to Trump’s inauguration, Cruz sat several feet away from John Cornyn on the stage of a hotel ballroom in Austin. The Texas Public Policy Foundation had arranged a joint interview with both of the state’s senators, and the group’s president, Brooke Rollins, moderated an hour-long kumbaya duet. The two lawmakers have a complicated history —Cruz declined to endorse Cornyn’s leadership bid in 2012, at the same time Cornyn was chairing the NRSC and perceived to be rooting against Cruz in the Texas Senate primary—and their offices have not always seen eye-to-eye. But on this day they joked, agreed, and took turns finishing each others’ thoughts. There was nary a trace of tension: Cruz lauded “the historic opportunity” at hand, promised that the party is “standing together” to confirm what he called “the most conservative Cabinet we’ve seen in decades,” and boasted that he is “working closely with leadership” on tax reform and other legislative priorities in the new Congress.

In the forum’s closing minutes, however, Cruz took an unsolicited opportunity to remind everyone of something. “Each of us have a different role in the Senate,” he said. “John has a role in leadership, he’s the No. 2 member of the Senate on the Republican side, the majority whip. That is a big, big position for the state of Texas.” The crowd delivered a sturdy ovation. Cruz, a waggish grin spreading on his face, then added: “And you know, I kind of like to mix it up sometimes.”

Cornyn let out a knowing laugh. The point Cruz was making wasn’t lost on him—or anyone else in the room. “I think Ted will always be Ted,” Rollins, a longtime friend of the family, tells me afterward. “He’s not going to play by anyone’s rules.”

The scene in Austin foretells Cruz’s great challenge as he enters this new chapter of his political career. He wants to be an impactful player for the Republican team without forfeiting his status as the conscience of the conservative movement—a needle-threading exercise that will prove difficult and occasionally impossible. “One of the hardest things to do in this business is remain effective without losing your soul,” Deace tells me. “And the Ted Cruz I know is bound and determined to figure out whether he can become more effective without losing his soul.”

Conflict, external and internal, is inevitable. There are simply too many debates on the horizon—over infrastructure spending, the specifics of repealing and replacing Obamacare, changes to language in the tax code—that invite ideological confrontation. The question doesn’t seem to be whether Cruz will serve notice of his principles, but on what issue—and in what manner. The senator’s allies stress that what we’re witnessing is not a philosophical realignment but rather a tactical shift. That means, potentially, that even when Cruz draws a line in the sand it could be done behind closed doors. That’s hardly been his style, and some supporters would argue that feuding privately with party leaders defeats the purpose of exposing establishment corruption and rallying the grassroots against it. But that model might prove outdated with a new, populist-minded president atop the party.

“If you’re going to have a fight with Trump, pick it very, very carefully,” says Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center and an early supporter of Cruz’s presidential campaign. “Ted was picking fights just to pick fights. ... He was looking for every opportunity to engage the moderates and the liberals in the Senate. He should not be looking at things that way anymore.” If there’s a principle at stake that requires a fight, Bozell says by way of advice, “then he should fight, but not in a brass-knuckles fashion.”

“People are keenly aware—and Ted Cruz is keenly aware—that Trump won this election, and he won it in a surprising way and he won it with the support of surprising people in surprising places,” Fiorina tells me. “And everyone needs to remember that.”

These warnings are particularly pertinent as Cruz gears up for reelection in Texas. Trump took a smaller share of the vote there—53 percent—than the 57 percent both he and Mitt Romney took in the state’s 2012 Senate and presidential elections, respectively, and Cruz spanked him by 17 points in the primary last March. But the incoming president nonetheless won some 4.7 million votes in Texas in November and has the bully-pulpit ability to cause trouble for Cruz there at a tweet’s notice. That’s the bad news. The good news: Right now there’s not an intimidating opponent in sight. Michael McCaul, the wealthy and well-connected chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, once appeared a threat but now seems unlikely to run. (Just in case, one Cruz adviser tells me they have enough opposition research on McCaul to retire him from Congress.) The Cruz team laughs at the prospect of former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd running as an independent. And though there are talented politicians on the state’s Democratic bench, the demographic winds needed to turn Texas blue in an off-year election don’t appear to be gusting with the force necessary to dethrone a GOP incumbent.

In lieu of a legitimate challenge, the most interesting storyline of Cruz’s reelection might be how different it looks and sounds from his two previous campaigns. Several longtime aides made the point that his 2018 race represents, in many ways, a third phase of Cruz’s political career. His Senate run in 2012 featured outsider infrastructure and outsider rhetoric; his presidential bid in 2016 featured insider infrastructure and outsider rhetoric; his reelection bid might complete the evolution, featuring insider infrastructure and insider rhetoric. It’s tough to imagine Cruz ever relinquishing his anti-Washington routine, and tirades against bureaucracy and big government will always be a staple, but it’s now possible to envision him campaigning on his cooperation with the party rather than his revolt against it.

Conservatives have long found it difficult, after arriving in D.C., to reconcile the tension between their responsibility of operating effectively within the political system and their fantasy of pursuing its destruction. For Cruz, this conflict is embodied by his two top advisers: Roe, the pragmatist who sought a job in Trump’s White House after guiding Cruz’s career to new heights in 2016, and Johnson, the idealist who loathes the new president and has been with Cruz since he was polling at three percent in the 2012 Senate race. Their relationship has become strained, mutual associates say, due to fundamentally divergent philosophies over Cruz’s relationship with the rest of the Republican Party. Cruz is personally closer with Johnson than any other member of his senior staff, but to the extent Washington sees a “new Ted Cruz” in the Trump era, it will be Roe—and Polyansky—exerting the most influence.

Having spent four years as a scourge of the establishment—and, in spite of that, having come closer to the party's nomination than anyone could have predicted—Cruz is betting that removing the rough edges will make him a better legislator, a more respected member of the party and a likelier future president. He knows the risks involved, but believes they are outweighed by the opportunity at hand, both for the party and for himself. He recognizes the things he has fought for (repealing Obamacare, securing the border, rolling back regulations, nominating conservative jurists) are now within the party's grasp, and he realizes the knocks against him (self-serving, ineffective) are potent enough to derail any future presidential campaign. If ever there were a time for putting his conservative credibility on the line and protecting the interests of the Republican Party, it’s now. Even if that means allying himself with President Donald Trump, a man he has called a “sniveling coward,” a “pathological liar,” and—a more potent Cruz insult—a “big-government liberal.”

Cruz shakes his head when I raise this point. “Politics is often a strange and unpredictable journey,” he says, smiling. Then a pause. “Life is often a strange and unpredictable journey.”