For a guy looking to sell a book to a right-wing audience, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) couldn’t have landed a much better spot than his interview with Fox News’s Mark Levin on Sunday. Levin, less an interviewer than town crier, gave Cruz plenty of time to explain what his new book, “Justice Corrupted,” would offer readers.
“This book is the first inside account of what happened on Jan. 6,” Cruz said in his practiced manner. “And so I take the reader through the events of the 2020 election leading up to Jan. 6. I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist.”
The book was released Tuesday. This particular “corporate media” outlet can now report that, in fact, rampant fraud continues not to exist — as demonstrated, here at least, by Cruz’s failure to present any of his promised evidence of election or voter fraud.
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The thrust of Cruz’s book echoes the one released by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earlier this year: Had but the authors been in charge, none of this would have happened. If only everyone in November 2020 had the benefit of their hindsight, a hindsight that is near-perfect!
In Conway’s case, that sentiment was focused on the 2020 election. Her assertion that Trump lost made headlines as a break from his repeated claims, but it was offered mostly as a pretext for her to claim that she could have gotten him across the finish line. In Cruz’s case, the failure that could have been avoided was the flurry of post-election lawsuits aimed at proving illegalities.
“I called President Trump, and told him that he needed to assemble a far better legal team, and he needed to do so immediately,” Cruz writes at one point, with the tone of a guy trying to impress his friends. But, sadly, no lawyers would take Trump’s case — a failure Cruz chalks up, no doubt accurately, to Trump’s reputation. When Trump asked if he, Ted Cruz, would argue Texas’s last-ditch lawsuit should it get to the Supreme Court, Cruz readily agreed. Unfortunately for Trump (Cruz would have us think), Cruz never got the chance. The suit, a pastiche of nonsense, was quickly turned away.
Then there was Cruz’s effort to leverage Trump’s claims of fraud to his own benefit. Beaten to the punch by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in early 2021, Cruz invented a way to object to the results of the election while maintaining plausible deniability that he was doing so. What if they simply held off on certifying electors until fraud claims had been adjudicated? Never mind that they had been, of course; this was a way for him to wink at Trump’s base while still nodding soberly at his colleagues. And when this course of action wasn’t adopted, it opened the door for him, writing a book months later, to suggest that if only it had been, everything would have turned out fine.
When Cruz does talk about fraud in the book, he does so in an amusingly lawyerly way. He’s more than willing to warm over a wide array of right-wing boogeymen from the days of yore — both ACORN and the New Black Panther Party make appearances — but he generally constrains his claims about fraud in ways that leave him an escape hatch back to reality.
For example, he quotes from the speech he gave shortly before the Capitol riot:
All of his assertions about fraud are similarly nebulous in a very politician-y way. He says enough so that people who track this stuff closely know what he’s talking about, but not enough to be able to be pinned down as being dishonest. It’s always 2020 “might have been the most fraud-ridden election in the history of the United States” this and “no one would ever find out whether there had been serious fraud that tipped the election in one direction or the other” that. Scratching an itch by brushing a feather against it.
“This book is the first inside account of what happened on Jan. 6,” Cruz said in his practiced manner. “And so I take the reader through the events of the 2020 election leading up to Jan. 6. I take them through the evidence of election fraud and voter fraud in November 2020, which the Democrats and the corporate media insists doesn’t exist.”
The book was released Tuesday. This particular “corporate media” outlet can now report that, in fact, rampant fraud continues not to exist — as demonstrated, here at least, by Cruz’s failure to present any of his promised evidence of election or voter fraud.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
The thrust of Cruz’s book echoes the one released by former Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earlier this year: Had but the authors been in charge, none of this would have happened. If only everyone in November 2020 had the benefit of their hindsight, a hindsight that is near-perfect!
In Conway’s case, that sentiment was focused on the 2020 election. Her assertion that Trump lost made headlines as a break from his repeated claims, but it was offered mostly as a pretext for her to claim that she could have gotten him across the finish line. In Cruz’s case, the failure that could have been avoided was the flurry of post-election lawsuits aimed at proving illegalities.
“I called President Trump, and told him that he needed to assemble a far better legal team, and he needed to do so immediately,” Cruz writes at one point, with the tone of a guy trying to impress his friends. But, sadly, no lawyers would take Trump’s case — a failure Cruz chalks up, no doubt accurately, to Trump’s reputation. When Trump asked if he, Ted Cruz, would argue Texas’s last-ditch lawsuit should it get to the Supreme Court, Cruz readily agreed. Unfortunately for Trump (Cruz would have us think), Cruz never got the chance. The suit, a pastiche of nonsense, was quickly turned away.
Then there was Cruz’s effort to leverage Trump’s claims of fraud to his own benefit. Beaten to the punch by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in early 2021, Cruz invented a way to object to the results of the election while maintaining plausible deniability that he was doing so. What if they simply held off on certifying electors until fraud claims had been adjudicated? Never mind that they had been, of course; this was a way for him to wink at Trump’s base while still nodding soberly at his colleagues. And when this course of action wasn’t adopted, it opened the door for him, writing a book months later, to suggest that if only it had been, everything would have turned out fine.
When Cruz does talk about fraud in the book, he does so in an amusingly lawyerly way. He’s more than willing to warm over a wide array of right-wing boogeymen from the days of yore — both ACORN and the New Black Panther Party make appearances — but he generally constrains his claims about fraud in ways that leave him an escape hatch back to reality.
For example, he quotes from the speech he gave shortly before the Capitol riot:
Let’s shift the focus to make the gambit here clear: “UFOs remain a threat to our nation’s cows. By any measure, the claims of people seeing UFOS exceed any in our lifetimes.” See how that works?“Voter fraud has posed a persistent challenge in our elections, although its breadth and scope are disputed. By any measure, the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes.”
All of his assertions about fraud are similarly nebulous in a very politician-y way. He says enough so that people who track this stuff closely know what he’s talking about, but not enough to be able to be pinned down as being dishonest. It’s always 2020 “might have been the most fraud-ridden election in the history of the United States” this and “no one would ever find out whether there had been serious fraud that tipped the election in one direction or the other” that. Scratching an itch by brushing a feather against it.