Texas Senator Ted Cruz was on Fox and Friends this morning and the subject of the Russia probe came up in the context of David Brooks’s New York Times column on the subject:

There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual collusion are meager.

There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and proudly pro-Putin. And so far nothing we know of these meetings proves or even indicates collusion.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be an investigation into potential Russia-Trump links. Russia’s attack on American democracy was truly heinous, and if the Trump people were involved, that would be treason. I’m saying first, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and assume that this link exists.

This is what Cruz had to say:

SEN. TED CRUZ: This is all a political circus at this point. Democrats, and much of the liberal media are using this as an an excuse just to attack the president. They want this president to fail, they want the administration to fail. That is really unfortunate.

There is an amazing divide.

When you are in Washington D.C., the only question any reporter wants to ask about is about Russia, impeachment, attacking the president. When I go home to Texas I travel the state, I answer questions from people across the state, nobody asks about that.

They ask about Obamacare: Are you going to repeal this disastrous law so my premiums go down and I can afford health care… People outside of Washington are interested in real policies that are going to produce jobs and raise wages. They are not interested in the circus., the nonsense, the attack game of personal destruction that consumes Washington.

Other than not casting his net for usual suspects sufficiently wide, Cruz has this exactly right. The Russia probe has precisely one objective: to hamstring the Trump administration. Everything from Robert Mueller employing a platoon of Democrat donors as his senior staff to Adam Schiff blocking Paul Manafort and Carter Page from giving public testimony says this is a political vendetta. In the last two public hearings, the subject of collusion has not even been mentioned. And it is hard to imagine what Mueller is going to discover about “collusion” that the intelligence community and FBI haven’t already uncovered as that investigation has been underway for eleven months.

The objective here is to keep a cloud over the administration in order to maximize Democrat gains in 2018. That Trump is a willing assistant in his own political execution doesn’t diminish one iota the nature of what is going on.