The crowd wasn't extraordinary (the few thousand weren't nearly enough to fill the lawn), but the characters onstage were: Sarah Palin (who had words about a unicorn and a kaleidoscope), "Duck Dynasty's" Phil Robertson (who spoke of Jesus coming to Earth as "Jewish flesh") and radio personalities Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
"I was called by Senator Cruz a few days ago and he said, 'You think we can get a really good crowd?'" Trump wasted no time letting everybody know that he had come at Cruz's request. Cruz, who entered with rather less fanfare (the speaker who preceded him begged for money from Trump but referred to Cruz only as "a senator") made sure in his remarks to "thank my friend Donald Trump for joining us," before embracing Trump and sharing some private words on the stage. When Trump and his entourage walked onto the lawn, a spontaneous cheer rose from the crowd and heads turned away from the stage. (Trump, for his part, gets some conservative validation by associating with Cruz.)Īnd so Cruz decided to play the humble warm-up act - inviting Trump to attend the event Wednesday and preceding him onstage. If Trump falters in his bid for the nomination, Cruz will be well positioned to secure Trump's endorsement, and his supporters. But Cruz is a brilliant opportunist, and his courtship of Trump makes sense. On some level, it must kill Cruz to play understudy to the cartoonish tycoon. And, at least at this stage in GOP primary campaign, the gut is winning. Cruz appeals to the conservative mind, while Trump appeals to the conservative gut. This reaction, by a few thousand tea party loyalists braving the 90-degree heat, explains a lot about the relative position of the two men. "We are led by very, very stupid people," Trump proclaimed. Trump's brief speech, if it can be called that, had no form and contained all the subtlety of a weapon of mass destruction. There were a few isolated laughs on the vast West Lawn of the Capitol this wasn't a Camus crowd. "And let me be clear: When he says 'existential,' he doesn't mean a bunch of Frenchmen in black berets chain-smoking." "I agree with Prime Minister Netanyahu that a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to the nation of Israel," the junior senator from Texas told the gathering, organized by the Tea Party Patriots.
But it was more like an eclipse.Ĭruz, the Harvard- and Princeton-educated debater, subjected listeners to a 13-minute speech packed with elegant turns of phrase that sailed right over the heads of his listeners. You could see in the span of 20 minutes Wednesday afternoon why Donald Trump is soaring in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination and why Ted Cruz is struggling.Ĭruz had invited Trump to join him at a Capitol Hill rally against the Iran nuclear deal, an unusual joint appearance for two rivals in which Cruz gambled that he could bask in Trump's glow.
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