Sen. Ted Cruz had decided not to endorse Donald Trump during the Republican National Convention in July. | Getty Cruz: I'm voting for Trump 'Last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word,' Cruz wrote.

Ted Cruz on Friday said he would vote for Donald Trump for president and that he would encourage others to do the same, reversing months of opposition to his bitter primary rival.

"After many months of careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience, I have decided that on Election Day, I will vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump," he wrote in a Facebook post.


Cruz said he endorsed both because of his primary pledge to support the party nominee, as well as his concerns about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"Last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word," Cruz said. "Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary."

A Trump adviser said Trump and Cruz spoke after the endorsement.

For months, Cruz had avoided endorsing Trump, his primary foe in an intensely personal race. People close to him were sharply divided on Friday over the decision, hours before he made his endorsement.

“If he announces he endorses, it destroys his political brand,” said someone who had worked for Cruz's campaign.

Steve Deace, a prominent conservative Iowa radio host who was a major Cruz backer, also tweeted Friday that the senator would endorse Trump. A spokeswoman for Cruz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

"This is gonna be a political disaster," Deace texted after Cruz made his decision official. "Sad. Unavoidable. Entirely self inflicted."

Trump responded in a statement that he was "greatly honored" by the nod. "We have fought the battle and he was a tough and brilliant opponent," Trump said. "I look forward to working with him for many years to come in order to make America great again."

Cruz had previously gone as far as to tell Republicans to “vote your conscience” at the Republican National Convention, rather than urging them to get behind the nominee. Since then, Cruz, who may face a primary challenge in his 2018 Senate reelection campaign, has come under mounting pressure to get behind Trump, though many Cruz loyalists see an endorsement as unacceptable.

At the outset of the Republican primary, Cruz went out of his way to praise Trump, expecting that the real estate mogul’s support would crumble, and Cruz would be the beneficiary. But as the primary continued and Trump moved into an increasingly strong position in the race, Cruz sought to fashion himself as the conservative alternative to Trump, repeatedly describing his opponent as a liberal who had few differences with Hillary Clinton.

The race turned increasingly personal between the two, with Trump attacking Cruz’s wife and seeking to link Cruz’s father to conspiracy theories about assassinating former President John F. Kennedy. On the day that he dropped out of the race, Cruz took his criticism of Trump to a new level, accusing him of being a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer” and an “utterly amoral” “bully.”

The personal differences between the two of them, as well as Trump’s willingness to flaunt conservative orthodoxy that many Cruz loyalists embrace, has made supporting the nominee a nonstarter for many of the senator’s most committed backers.

But slowly, other conservative leaders, including many who backed Cruz in the primary, have gotten on board with Trump, and have made clear publicly that Cruz should do the same. They view the election as a binary election between Hillary Clinton and Trump, rather than accepting the more nuanced stance that Cruz took at the convention.

“I think he should give a nod of support,” said Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, who was previously an important Cruz backer. “I think a lot of folks that supported Ted feel that way. Given the choices before us, yeah, I would like to see Ted give his support to Trump at this point.”

The initial calculation at the RNC from many who backed Cruz’s decision was that, assuming Trump went up in flames in November, Cruz would emerge from the election respected as one of the last principled conservatives, willing to serve as the final bulwark against a candidate who violated many of the values conservatives hold dear. Supporting Trump would tie Cruz’s fortunes more closely to his, a possible complication for Cruz, whose fans have long wanted him to look at running for president again in 2020.

But there is a more urgent need to attend to: Cruz’s unwillingness to support Trump has become an issue in his home state as he prepares for Senate re-election. The morning after he refused to support Trump at the RNC, the Texas delegation breakfast broke out into chaos as delegates split over whether or not Cruz should support the nominee.

Since then, Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), a possible Cruz primary challenger for Cruz’s Senate seat, has been using the senator’s unwillingness to support Trump as a means of attacking Cruz.

McCaul attacked Cruz on the Laura Ingraham Show this week for breaking his pledge to support the nominee, declaring he was “very angry” about the dissension.

“He broke his word,” said McCaul, the wealthy chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The Texas senator has been gradually making moves to soothe his often poor relations with fellow senators since his primary loss, helping raise money for at-risk Republicans and donating $100,000 to the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. But many Republicans on Capitol Hill have prodded him to go further and hold his nose with an endorsement. While several Republicans said Cruz’s bloc of conservative voters could make the difference for Trump, others said any endorsement would be more about helping secure Cruz’s own political standing than Trump’s.

“I don’t think endorsements matter,” said one Republican senator.

Agreed Perkins, “At this point, I think it’s probably more beneficial to Ted than it is to Trump, to show that Ted is a team player. And look, there’s a lot of folks, like myself, [for whom] Donald Trump was not our first choice. But he is working hard to gain the support and confidence of conservatives, and the alternative is clear.”

Of people close to Cruz who disagree with any indication of support for Trump, some say that voting for Trump — but attempting to distinguish between a vote and an endorsement, as senators such as Kelly Ayotte have done — might be forgivable. But a full-on endorsement, especially one that would entail campaigning for the Republican nominee, would be harder to stomach.

Cruz’s move toward his former rival takes away the most prominent anti-Trump holdout in Congress, leaving Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mark Kirk of Illinois and Mike Lee of Utah as the remaining senators who either oppose or haven’t supported Trump.

Few have shown any inclination to follow Cruz’s lead.

“I’m against Hillary Clinton for president, that’s where I am,” Heller said Thursday. “We’ll go through the debate and see how it plays out.”

Lee, Cruz’s strongest defender and closest friend in the Senate, indicated he has no plans to follow Cruz’s lead. In a statement, Lee said he is watching “each candidate's grasp of — and willingness to work tirelessly to restore — federalism and separation of powers.

“I am always eager to support any candidate willing to make those structural constitutional protections a priority. In this race and in every other, I will continue to use the same criteria,” Lee said.

But Trump has made some overtures to Lee, on Friday including him on a list of his potential choices for a Supreme Court nomination.

Lee was not interested.

Asked about a possible endorsement of Trump, Jason Johnson, Cruz’s chief strategist on the campaign, responded with what appeared to be a photo of himself, with his hand over his face.

Matthew Nussbaum, Seung Min Kim and Shane Goldmacher contributed to this report.