By design, presumably, the structure of the annual TIME 100 Most Influential List is at least as interesting as its contents. Yes, there are 100 grandiose, koan-laden blurbs about the year's very important newsmakers, but also, each one is written by another one of the year's very important newsmakers. Cardi B, by Taraji P. Henson! Prince Harry, by Elton John! The Parkland teens, by Barack Freakin' Obama! The brand of praise bestowed upon a given cultural luminary by a peer can reveal as much about the author as it does about their assigned subject.

This year's tribute to Donald Trump, a fawning, two-paragraph pastoral that christens him "a flash-bang grenade thrown into Washington by the forgotten men and women of America," comes courtesy of Texas senator and noted non-president Ted Cruz.

"The same cultural safe spaces that blinkered coastal elites to candidate Trump’s popularity have rendered them blind to President Trump’s achievements," writes Cruz, twice invoking the name of the man who accused his elderly father of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. "While pundits obsessed over tweets, he worked with Congress to cut taxes for struggling families," Cruz proclaims, making no mention of that one tweet in which Trump called Cruz's wife ugly. (He would make her attend a dinner with the Trumps several months later.)

"President Trump is doing what he was elected to do: disrupt the status quo," Cruz concludes, heaping effusive praise upon a former rival whom he once called a "serial philanderer," a "sniveling coward," and a "pathological liar," and before whom he now regularly prostrates himself in a craven attempt to secure the Cabinet appointment or Supreme Court nomination which, deep down, he knows will never come.

Since his election to the Senate in 2012, Cruz's once-promising political career has devolved into a sort of sad, morbid spectacle, like watching a much-hyped baseball prospect get quietly shipped back to the minors after going oh-for-September. Despite launching his shadow presidential campaign on the day he arrived in Washington, Cruz never evolved into the political force that he and his once-enthusiastic boosters imagined he'd become. Today, he is stuck in a strange limbo, leaning into petty humiliations like this one in the hopes that proximity to the Oval Office might feel half as good as being it it himself. Even if he wins his reelection bid this fall, Ted Cruz will remain a disappointment, a man who dedicated his life to the pursuit of a goal that everyone but him now sees is well beyond his reach.

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Trump is Finished