But Ryan, despite his charming air of moderation—one not backed up by his actual hard-line conservative policies—was the one presiding at the Convention. He endorsed Trump months ago, and lately seems to have given up even offering alibi-attempting criticisms of Trump’s policies. (Last Thursday, at his weekly press conference, Ryan told reporters that, basically, he’d rather talk about himself.) For all the talk of the Republican establishment’s rejection of Trump, very few of its leaders or its elected officials have been willing to do so publicly. Last week, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland (and R.F.K.’s daughter) excitedly told the world that George H. W. Bush had told her privately that he would vote for Hillary Clinton. Bush’s spokesperson quickly told the press that he would not confirm such a thing. Whatever the elder Bush’s reservations about his party’s nominee might be, he was keeping them private. Only half a dozen Republican senators have come out and opposed Trump, a couple of them in highly hedged terms. There was a fair amount of excitement when Susan Collins joined their ranks in early August. Since then, though, it’s been quiet. For all the complaints about how the press has “normalized” Trump, it is the Republican Party, institutionally, that has done so. Ryan has said that giving Trump a chance to appoint Supreme Court Justices was high among his reasons for voting for him. (Ryan said that soon after Trump suggested that a judge whose family roots were in Mexico could not be trusted to deliver justice, which might give a person pause before letting Trump pick any.) The Supreme Court was also the first reason Cruz listed in his endorsement.
It wasn’t really harder for Cruz than for most of them; if anything, it was easier. He agrees with Trump in most policy areas, and where he doesn’t he is to the right of Trump. Trump has acknowledged that Planned Parenthood provides useful health services; Cruz has portrayed the organization as a criminal gang. (Both, though, would ban abortion in most circumstances.) Cruz has had his own flights of religious bigotry, calling for new police powers to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.” And, although he may have objected to his father’s being linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, via a grainy picture and a lot of illogical leaps, his own rhetoric is rife with plots against America. In his Facebook post, Cruz described “eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration,” and warned that Hillary Clinton “would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism,” in part by “importing” refugees who might be terrorists. “Our country is in crisis,” Cruz wrote. “Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.” That is the same Trump he called a “pathological liar” and a “bully.” “The man is utterly amoral,” Cruz said at a press conference in May. At the time, his tone was viewed as one of outrage. The endorsement suggests that it may have been something more like jealous admiration.
