Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz is perhaps the most disliked man in Washington — and he's built a career on it. His own Republican colleagues have openly despised him: Lindsey Graham said "If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you." John Boehner called him "Lucifer in the flesh." George W. Bush simply said "I just don't like the guy." Yet Cruz has survived and thrived because Texas oil money doesn't care if you're likeable — it cares if you vote right. Born in Calgary, Canada (yes, Canada) to a Cuban father and American mother, Cruz was a debate champion at Princeton and Harvard Law, where Professor Alan Dershowitz called him "off-the-charts brilliant." He clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist, served as Texas Solicitor General, and won his Senate seat in 2012 as a Tea Party insurgent, defeating the establishment favorite David Dewhurst with the help of Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund. His legal intellect is genuine; his populist persona is manufactured. Cruz's key relationships are overwhelmingly transactional. Robert Mercer, the secretive hedge fund billionaire behind Cambridge Analytica, was his 2016 presidential kingmaker — spending $15 million through super PACs. Kelcy Warren (Energy Transfer Partners, the Dakota Access Pipeline company) is his most important Texas donor, giving $1 million to a Cruz super PAC right before a pipeline vote. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, fracking billionaires and Christian reconstructionists, are major funders. His wife Heidi is a managing director at Goldman Sachs, a connection that proved embarrassing when Cruz failed to disclose a Goldman Sachs loan that funded his 2012 Senate campaign. The contradictions are legendary. Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar," "utterly amoral," and "a sniveling coward" who insulted his wife — Trump posted an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz and suggested Ted's father was involved in the JFK assassination. Cruz then phone-banked for Trump's reelection. He rails against "coastal elites" while being a Princeton/Harvard graduate married to a Goldman Sachs managing director. He fled to Cancun during the 2021 Texas freeze while his constituents froze to death — then blamed his daughters for the trip. Cruz's 2024 reelection was one of the most expensive Senate races ever at $95 million. Every major energy vote in his career aligns with his oil donor interests — Keystone XL, EPA rollbacks, methane regulation opposition, and carbon tax resistance. He sits on the Commerce Committee where he shapes energy regulation. The donor-to-vote pipeline is seamless.