Ted Cruz Promises ‘Different’ Trump This Time Around
Senator Ted Cruz has made a bold declaration ahead of a historic Inauguration Day on Monday: “This is a different Donald Trump being sworn in than in 2017.”
Speaking on NewsNation’s The Hill Sunday, Cruz said Trump had made better picks and gained more experience to bring his varied plans to fruition.
“I think he has the wind at his back,” he said.” There’s a whole lot of experience that has come.”
Perhaps in an homage to his time hosting The Apprentice, Trump fired several of officials who served under him during his first term.
His first administration had much higher turnover for senior staff, compared to the four presidents before him, according to the Brookings Institution think tank.
Several other disputes also developed with those closest to him, such as his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who turned on the president-elect and testified in his criminal hush-money trial last year.
“If you look at the Cabinet nominees this time around, I think the first term, there were some mistakes in Cabinet nominees, and some nominees that he came to regret, because there were people that were not fighting with him to accomplish his agenda,” Cruz said.
The Texas firebrand also said the most common attribute among nominees was “change”—but he did not to elaborate on what “change” the nominees would bring.
“I think this, the current team of nominees, I think is really strong, and it’s striking the most consistent characteristic in the people who Donald Trump has nominated is being a change agent going in to change the culture of an institution.”
Cruz also predicted that his Inauguration speech will show a “bold vision.”
“This election was a powerful mandate. I mean, it was really an overwhelming mandate. You look at in November, Donald Trump won the popular vote of the seven battleground states.”
“I think we also have a very clear mandate to unleash American energy and to use that to drive down prices, drive down cost at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and the bills that are working, working families are paying all across this country. I think we have a mandate to bring back economic growth and jobs, to extend the tax cuts and and also to stand with our friends and stand up to our enemies,” he continued.
Cruz could just as well have been reading off a script written by Trump himself, repeating many of the GOP lines that became a core feature of Trump’s divisive electoral campaign.
“The Trump team today is coming in with a much greater awareness of the challenges of the deep state, the challenges of of embedded bureaucracies that that in the first term really resisted a lot of what he wanted to do, and I think they’re much more effectively going to be able to turn the battleship in a direction that I think the American people expect.”