No one admitted to these Files ever saw Donald Trump more clearly than Ted Cruz, and no one has said so in language that has held up better. In the spring of 2016, with the Republican nomination on the line, the senator from Texas stood in front of reporters and delivered what remains the most precise public description of Donald Trump any American politician has ever produced. He called him a pathological liar who does not know the difference between truth and falsehood. He called him utterly amoral, a man for whom morality simply does not exist. He called him a narcissist at a level the country had never seen, and a serial philanderer, and a bully whose cruelty came not from strength but from a deep cavern of insecurity. He was not improvising. He was diagnosing, and the diagnosis was correct in every particular, and a decade of subsequent history has not falsified a single clause of it.
He also had more personal reason to refuse the man than anyone else who will ever appear in this series. Trump had circulated an unflattering photograph of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and he had gone on national television to float a tabloid fiction that Cruz’s father, Rafael, was somehow connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Trump did not merely defeat Ted Cruz. He smeared his wife and accused his father of a hand in the murder of a president. If there was ever a man with the standing to say no, to stay no, to make refusal the whole of his political identity, it was the one who had just defended his own family from exactly these attacks, in exactly these words, from a podium, on the record, in front of the country.