There aren’t a lot of silver linings to take away from the fact that Donald Trump—a living timeshare presentation that we are all eternally stuck in—just claimed the Republican presidential nomination, and now has a permanent and remarkably undeserved place in American history. It’s a goddamn tragedy. Just think about how many times President Trump will preempt live TV to brag about buying a yacht. Christ.

But if you’d like to feel good about something this morning, you oughta take solace in the fact that Trump has prevailed by defeating Ted Cruz in the most degrading, humiliating fashion possible.

If we were talking about ANY OTHER LIVING BEING, you would have sympathy for what Cruz just endured. Trump called his wife ugly. Trump accused his father of helping to assassinate JFK. And voters got in on the heckling too, as evidenced here. Even his children run away from him on the podium. This would be a horrible thing to watch if, again, it were not Ted Cruz we were talking about. No one, aside from Ted Cruz, deserves to be stripped of their dignity. No one, aside from Ted Cruz, deserves to be so horribly slandered.

But it is Ted Cruz suffering these vicious slurs. And he deserves all of it. He deserves to be chained to a giant wooden wheel and have used toilet paper thrown at him for all eternity. Cruz has spent the past few months trying to present himself as a viable, respectable (HAHAHAHA) alternative to Trump. But the fact is that he set the table for this surreal revolution. Without him, there is no Donald Trump. This is his fault.

It was Cruz who led the Tea Party charge to infiltrate the American government and then destroy it by cutting the power lines. It was Cruz who shut down Congress and left us on the brink of default for two weeks back in 2013. This is a faction of the Republican Party that demands zero government, and zero compromise in the pursuit of that goal. And Cruz, as much as anybody, has whipped them into the kind of irrational froth that Trump now manufactures on an hourly basis. No one plays the “no surrender” card better or more often than Trump. And the concocted Tea Party faction, Cruz included, lives for that kind of shit. That’s why, when the dust has settled, Cruz will slither back into the fray and be right there at Trump’s side come July. They are of a kind.

In his brief (and God I hope it stays brief) political career, Cruz has likened Obamacare to Nazism, denied global warming, accused President Obama of deliberately trying to destroy the Constitution (an absurd claim that is now a mainstay of right wing talk), made an enemy of virtually every colleague he has come into contact with, and generally treated reality as a nuisance. All by design, mind you. And THIS was the somewhat respectable alternative to Trump. Listen to New York magazine fartsniffer Jonathan Chait trying to rationalize Cruz in today’s campaign obit:

Even if that order took the form of the extremist Ted Cruz wrenching the nomination in some kind of chaotic scene, the Republican Party would still have wound up fulfilling the basic threshold duty of a functioning party.

It would? A chaotic scene that results in THAT guy being the standard-bearer is “functional”? That’s nonsense. Dysfunction was always the goal here. There are a million autopsies being done today from within the Republican Party, and I promise you that none of those autopsies will come to the conclusion, “Hey, maybe we should stop being the Party Of Assholes. Maybe our talk radio hosts shouldn’t have their HARUMPH dial turned up to eleven 24 hours a day.” No no. That’s wishful thinking. The people who opposed Trump from within the party have opposed him for the exact wrong reasons: because he’s not conservative enough, and he’s too undisciplined.