Team Cruz on Trump’s immigration shift: Told you so

Source: Politico | August 24, 2016 | Katie Glueck

The conservative senator, eyes on 2018 and 2020, warned voters Trump was a liberal in disguise.

As Donald Trump soft-pedals his once-hard-line immigration rhetoric, supporters of his vanquished primary foe Ted Cruz have one message for Republican voters: We told you so.

Cruz spent the final months of his unsuccessful presidential primary run arguing that Trump was a not-so-closeted liberal whose conservative language on immigration was not to be trusted. Now, Trump says he is open to “softening” the approach to some undocumented immigrants already in this country, a departure from his previous calls for a deportation force.

And as Ted Cruz eyes his 2018 reelection bid, with some of his supporters holding out hopes for a 2020 presidential run, Cruz world feels vindicated.

“Everything Trump promises comes with an expiration date,” said Cruz’s former Senate communications director, Amanda Carpenter. “We knew it during the primary, and now it is apparent he has duped his most loyal supporters on the issue they care about most, immigration. Don’t say we didn’t warn them.”

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But Trump’s rhetorical contortions on immigration this week are giving Cruz supporters in and around his orbit more hope that anger over the RNC speech, and over his broader opposition to Trump, will fade. They are optimistic that the deeply conservative Cruz will emerge from November looking prescient in his warnings that Trump couldn’t be trusted to defend core GOP values, and say that Trump’s shifting on immigration language this week only proves Cruz’s point.

“It vindicates the speech, it vindicates what Ted Cruz warned would happen during the course of the campaign,” said Chris Wilson, the director of research, analytics and digital strategy on Cruz’s campaign and a top Cruz adviser who has always argued that the RNC speech would be remembered favorably. He went on to add, “I do think, yes, the immigration point is another data point that he was right, it’s another data point that leads people to understand Ted Cruz knew what he was talking about, he was making the right decision.”

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Cruz backers are quick to characterize Trump’s emerging position as amnesty.

“From what I have seen, he is now the pro-amnesty candidate,” said Rick Tyler, a former campaign communications director for Cruz. “If Trump is insistent on reversing himself on amnesty, then he will have fooled his entire base. He would have fooled enough people who voted for him to make him the Republican nominee. It’s deceitful; it was a betrayal.”

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“I’m not really surprised by it, and I don’t think he’ll lose any supporters,” said Stephen Cox, a friend of Cruz’s, about Trump’s shifting tone. “Maybe Ann Coulter will be upset.”

But Cruz’s backers do say they think Trump’s rhetorical adjustment justifies Cruz’s refusal to endorse him, having instead urged Republicans to vote their “conscience.”

“What it bolsters is why some of Trump’s supporters felt the need to boo Ted Cruz when he told them to vote their conscience up and down the ballot, though he never mentioned Trump’s name,” said Steve Deace, an influential conservative Iowa radio host who helped Cruz win the Iowa caucuses. “It … proves their own consciences knew when they were going against their belief system. It proves Ted Cruz was right not to waste political capital on a lost cause, the way some other people have in this campaign.”

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“It’s a mistake by the Trump campaign; it seems to be this attitude that the way to win a presidential campaign is to follow the playbook the Republicans enacted over the last few cycles: move to the middle during the general election,” Wilson said. “It’s not the campaign Ted Cruz would have run. It’s why we said from the very beginning, to win a general election, we need to nominate a conservative.”

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