August 31, 2018

Trump Announces Rally for Lyin’ Ted

Maybe he’ll finally spill the beans.

Lyin' Ted

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom via ZUMA

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On Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump confirmed what Texas Republicans had been hinting for weeks—he’d be coming to the Lone Star State this fall to campaign for Sen. Ted Cruz:

Trump’s visit to Texas is confirmation of what poll after poll has indicated—Cruz, the former tea party star, is in the race of his life against Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Even as Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appears to be cruising to reelection, Cruz is clinging to narrow, single-digit leads. One recent survey put him up just 1 point. In a place that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide since the mid-1990s, O’Rourke has made inroads among the kinds of suburban voters who have long kept Texas red. But as the large numbers of potential Abbott–O’Rourke voters suggest, he’s also benefiting from the simplest of contrasts: Beto is easy to like, and Ted Cruz is easy to hate.

It’s fitting, then, that Trump is coming to rescue Cruz, because no one has ever played to voters’ dislike of Cruz quite as effectively as Trump did during the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Trump branded his opponent “Lyin’ Ted.” He touted a National Enquirer story alleging that the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, had participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And most infamously, he promised to “spill the beans” on the senator’s wife, Heidi Cruz. In another tweet, he contrasted an unflattering photo of her with a glamor shot of Melania Trump:

At a press conference the next day in Wisconsin, Cruz—acknowledging he wasn’t usually such an emotional open-book—addressed the future president directly: “Donald, you’re a sniveling coward.”

During his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Cruz told voters to vote their conscience and refrained from endorsing Trump. The next morning he defended his decision to a room full of angry Texas delegates; he couldn’t in good conscience back a candidate who had disparaged his father and wife.

Then, a few months later, he allowed himself to be filmed at a local party office phone-banking with Trump-Pence signs in the background. Maybe, in the end, that’s what his conscience told him to do. Or maybe he’d just stopped listening to it.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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