Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has apparently completely given himself over to Trumpism at this point — completely. During a weekend appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation, he devolved into a raging, lie-filled meltdown about supposed Democratic plots to use the Coronavirus as some kind of political weapon against Donald Trump. There’s zero evidence for his paranoid claims — it’s not like Democratic leaders have come out and explained how, somehow, there’s a secret political agenda behind their very straightforward attempts to impose basic protections for Americans amidst a deadly pandemic. There’s just little if anywhere that Cruz is unwilling to go in defense of his ideology.
It’s worth noting — it’s not like this is the first time that Cruz has appeared on television via a live feed from outside the studio. Yet, for some reason, he was strangely close to the camera that was broadcasting his words out of wherever precisely he was, and he also seemed rather worked up.
He ranted:
‘I am on board with restarting the economy. What Democrats want to do — We’re 100 days out from the presidential election, the only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump and they’ve cynically decided best way to defeat Donald Trump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America. You know, Nancy Pelosi talked about working men and women; what she’s proposing is keeping working men and women from working, and you know, ironically, what she does have in her bill — she has a big tax cut for millionaires and billionaires in blue states.’
Watch his rant below. Republicans seem to have taken his unhinged nonsense seriously.
"We're 100 days out from the presidential election, the only objective Democrats have is to defeat Donald Trump and they've cynically decided best way to defeat @realDonaldTrump is shut down every business in America, shut down every school in America." — @tedcruz
Disgraceful! pic.twitter.com/OdMOuKruSH
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 26, 2020
Cruz’s claim that Pelosi’s proposals are “keeping [people] from working” is a lie. The Republican idea is that if unemployment benefits are higher than what people could be earning on the job, then they’d lose their incentive to go back to work. This is nonsense — we’re talking about comparatively meager differences in income, and it’s not like people can even get unemployment in the first place if they just decided to quit their job. In the last full week for which data was available as of Sunday, over 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits across the country. Over 1.4 million! What’s Cruz’s solution? Meaningless rants about Nancy Pelosi.
The concurrent claim from the Senator that Democrats want to keep American businesses and schools closed amidst the pandemic just to damage Trump politically is an appalling lie. The pandemic is not a political plot! Almost 150,000 Americans are dead as of early Sunday. The delusionally self-centered mindset that just about everything bad is some kind of plot against Trump has helped contribute to those deaths, because it’s given people like Trump’s allies an excuse not to act effectively against the virus.
Really depressing to read a text like this when medical experts are unanimous is saying social distancing remains critical to save lives #DrFauci @CDCgov https://t.co/CwdSW0NEWX
— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) March 26, 2020
Trump has repeatedly peddled this exact idea. Towards the early days of the pandemic, he tweeted:
‘The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!’
This is deadly nonsense.
The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP. We will be stronger than ever before!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2020
