The evolving rhetoric of Ted Cruz and his legacy at Princeton

Without a doubt, the Trump phenomenon has taken this year’s Republican presidential nomination race by storm. Many wrote the businessman’s campaign off as being some manner of practical joke, a delusional stab at power by an egoist. Some even suggested it was an elaborate publicity stunt for the next series of The Apprentice. Yet now, few are still laughing as the TV star currently enjoys a commanding 739 of the Republican delegates in the primaries, placing him only 498 delegates shy of securing the nomination.

Yet Trump is far from the only surprise of the GOP race. The party core’s sweetheart, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, dropped out of the race after securing only 27 percent of the vote in his home state, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz has emerged as the only somewhat credible resistance to the rise of The Donald, being the only candidate still in the race to have defeated Trump in more than one Republican primary.

Princeton alumnus and Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, started his campaign modestly, with few predicting that he would pose a serious threat to the chances of more popular candidates, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. But after increasingly strong showings in the cycle of candidate debates, Cruz’s campaign built a head of steam to present himself as an exemplary candidate for traditional conservatives.

Accomplished: Cruz’s Princeton yearbook entry shows off an extensive resumé of extracurricular activities, as well as an emotional tribute to his parents, preceded by a quotation from Sir Thomas Buxton

A November radio advertisement published by Courageous Conservatives PAC declared, in an inadvertently sardonic manner, “Ted Cruz makes things happen – After Sandy Hook, [he] stopped Obama’s push for new gun-control laws.” This momentum built to fever pitch in time for the first Republican caucus in Iowa, which he won in a shock result, claiming 27.6 percent of the votes and stealing the limelight from Donald Trump.

But even with this support, the task of overtaking Donald Trump to the nomination via the delegates is appearing nigh on impossible for Senator Cruz. His only hope lies on the west coast in the Golden State. California’s 127 delegates would almost certainly spell victory for the Trump campaign if he were to triumph in the state’s GOP primaries in late June – a result the Cruz campaign must desperately work to prevent.

Furthermore, even if Cruz were to triumph in California, it likely would not lead to the ends of securing the 1,237 delegates necessary for the nomination, but it would do great damage to Trump’s hopes of securing the nomination before July 18th and avoiding a contested convention. Such a state of affairs presents Cruz with the best chance of securing the GOP nomination, as the brash and uncouth style of Trump, which has been a hit with voters, has far from endeared him to the party’s core. With the lack of party support for Trump, Cruz would realistically only have to face off the challenge of the moderate Ohio Senator, John Kasich, who has not enjoyed nearly the level of support he would likely need to secure the party’s backing. Whether they like it or not, Cruz seems to be the closest thing the party has to a mainstream candidate.

And it would seem they very much don’t like it. Don’t be fooled by the recent endorsements of Cruz by party favorites Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham. All three men made it abundantly clear their stances were not “Vote for Cruz”, but rather, “Don’t Vote for Trump”. Indeed, Lindsey Graham’s endorsement appeared to suggest he’d changed his stance since January, when he answered the question of whom he’d prefer between Cruz or Trump for the nomination with “It’s like being shot or poisoned, what does it really matter?”

Perhaps it’s this apparent lack of faithful support from his party, in the face of the ruthless Trump campaign, that has motivated the recent malicious change in the tone of the Cruz campaign. The mild-mannered rhetoric of the Cruz campaign back in September, when he enjoyed what has been described as a “bromance” with Trump, has morphed into aggressive, borderline radical, no-nonsense bombast, eerily similar to that of the New York billionaire.

The tragic November terrorist attacks in Paris seemed to do wonders for Cruz’s polling average, likely due to his hardline stance on foreign policy, and gave his campaign a much-needed boost at the time. While it’s surely not the Senator’s intention to politically capitalize on such tragic events, his speech appears to increasingly cater to the voters with which such a belligerent stance resonates, with Cruz making promises of “carpet bombing ISIS until the sand glows.” One can’t help but notice the similarity of such macho and virile speech to that of the candidate currently leading him in the polls.

This turn towards more lowbrow, seemingly offhand speech by Princeton alumnus Senator Cruz has resonated unfavorably in certain areas of his alma mater’s campus community. After Cruz’s recent calls for police forces to patrol “Muslim neighborhoods” nationwide in the wake of the recent terror attacks in Brussels, Amir Raja, a representative of Princeton’s Muslim Students’ Association, spoke of how it has “been very difficult for both myself and other Muslims on the campus to digest the incendiary rhetoric Ted Cruz has been spewing.” He went on to declare that Cruz’s “dangerous remarks seem to represent the complete antithesis” of Princeton’s informal motto “In the Nation’s Service and in the Service of all Nations”.

Popular: Cruz posing with a fellow student before the impressive collection of debating silverware amassed in the Whig-Clio Office at Princeton

His disappointment hardly seems to represent a dip in the Senator’s popularity on the New Jersey campus, however. A former classmate of Cruz, who lived in his freshman dorm in Butler College, recently spoke in an article by Ellie Shechet for Jezebel of how the future Senator told her that her “mother was going to hell and was a whore,” after sharing a personal story with him about her mother taking the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy.

Certainly, it seems such apathetic speech has even less of a place on today’s Princeton campus than it did in the dorms of Butler College in 1988. When interviewed by Dom Olivera for The Tab in October, Alana Jaskir – a current member of Colonial: Cruz’s eating club while he was a student – commented that “the club has changed its personality throughout the years” before noting how modern-day Colonial is home to a “pretty open and accepting group.” Her words would suggest that today’s average Princeton student does not share Cruz’s self-acclaimed brand of “courageous conservatism.”

Indeed, not only are today’s Princeton students distancing themselves from the legacy and stances of the Senator from the Class of 1992, but are in fact actively attacking his efforts to attain high office. A campaign named Princeton Against Cruz has recently announced its arrival on campus through the appearance of numerous posters being erected around campus bearing slogans such as “Ted’s a Mess!” and “Better Dead Than Ted” under a vandalized image of the Senator’s face. One design resembles the ciphers left behind by the Zodiac Killer, a notorious serial killer who perpetrated numerous homicides in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a reference to a facetious online joke that suggests Senator Cruz may be the unidentified serial killer.

Remembered: One of many anti-Cruz posters currently hung around the Princeton campus

The campaign’s co-founder and foremost figure, Walker Davis, stated his campaign was dedicated to keeping Cruz out of the Oval Office, even if that meant a Trump Presidency, a prospect that he admitted was also unsavory, but as much as were Cruz sworn in as the next president. He justified his stance by declaring “I think a lot of times in American politics we have to make a bad decision, given what we have at the time.” His campaign represents a more vicious anti-Cruz movement on the campus that had not been abundantly clear until this point and it remains to be seen whether such a hostile treatment of the alumnus’s campaign will be endorsed by the wider campus community.

Though the Princeton Against Cruz Campaign may be alone in their outright hostility towards the Senator’s campaign, there are signs that similarly unrepentant anti-Cruz feeling lies not far from the surface in many students who are less politically vocal on campus. This is certainly the case with Raja, who condemned Cruz’s demands for policing of the Muslim community as being “political demagoguery and racist backlash” which represent “unequivocally unconstitutional curtailments of liberty.”

Only time will tell if the American electorate will humor the Senator’s pleas for said “curtailments” to be enacted across the country, but it seems that in the wake of a growing national fear of radical Islamist organizations, Cruz’s hawkish defense policies are being pitched to certain sectors of the electorate at just the right time.

The Princeton University College Republican group are yet to respond to our request for a comment on Senator Cruz’s campaign.

Watch an excerpt from our interview with Princeton Against Cruz co-founder Walker Davis below: