Ted Cruz is a strong conservative and champion of limited government, who took on his own party when almost nobody else would. I supported his campaign for president and believed in him. I will still support him, but his endorsement of Donald Trump is bitterly disappointing, as it reinforces Cruz’s reputation for calculation.

I’m just going to give Ted Cruz one good, solid whack here — which he richly deserves — and then see if I can manage to let it go.

Here is Ted Cruz in a rare moment of throwing caution to the wind and showing an utterly genuine side: the morning of May 3, 2016 — the day Donald Trump secured the GOP nomination, and the day I stopped being a Republican. Every word Cruz says here hits home. (Thanks to Leon Wolf for the transcription.)

Cruz: I’m going to do something I haven’t done for the entire campaign, for those of y’all who have traveled with me all across the country. I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump. This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And, in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.

He accuses everybody on that debate stage of lying, and it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing.

The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level – I don’t think this country’s ever seen. Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and goes, “Dude, what’s your problem?” Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald.

And he combines being a pathological liar… and I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon, and one thing in the evening, all contradictory, and he’d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling at that minute, he believes it.

But the man is utterly amoral. [Reporter starts a question] Let, let me finish this, please. The man is utterly amoral. Morality does not exist for him. It’s why he went after Heidi directly and smeared my wife. Attacked her. Apparently she’s not pretty enough for Donald Trump. I may be biased but I think if he’s making that allegation, he’s also legally blind.

But Donald is a bully. You know, we just visited with fifth graders. Every one of us knew bullies in elementary school. Bullies don’t come from strength, bullies come from weakness. Bullies come from a deep, yawning cavern of insecurity. There is a reason Donald builds giant buildings and puts his name on them everywhere he goes.

And I will say, there are millions of people in this country who are angry. They’re angry at Washington, they’re angry at politicians who have lied to them, I understand that anger. I share that anger. And Donald is cynically exploiting that anger, and he is lying to his supporters.

Donald will betray his supporters on every issue. If you care about immigration, Donald is laughing at you. And he’s telling the moneyed elites that he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, he’s not gonna build a wall – that’s what he told the New York Times, he will betray you on every issue across the board.

True, true, and true. Now let’s look at just one paragraph of what Ted Cruz said yesterday on Facebook:

Fourth, immigration. Clinton would continue and even expand President Obama’s lawless executive amnesty. Trump has promised that he would revoke those illegal executive orders.

Yes, he has. But if you care about immigration, Donald is laughing at you. He is lying to his supporters, and he will betray his supporters on every issue. Someone told me that once.

Now that I have that out of my system, I’ll still support Ted Cruz because he’s one of the strongest advocates for limited government in Congress. I try not to let one mistake, however huge, become a reason to wash my hands of someone forever — especially when their track record is as strong as Cruz’s is.

But Cruz deserves the beating he’s taking now. Because his stance is the complete opposite of what he said that day he threw aside the politician’s mask, and said: “I’m going to tell you what I really think.”

That’s the guy we wanted, Ted: the guy who tells us what he really thinks, and damn the consequences. You’re going to have a rough time convincing us again that you’re that guy.

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