Texas’s Republican senator Ted Cruz laid into Donald Trump’s war in Iran and his tariff scheme after the party received an “ass-kicking” in the midterm elections.
The Democrats took a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives this week as American voters punished both the US president and his Republican Party for the rising cost of living.
Traditonal Republicans states voted for the Democrats, including Texas, as James Talarico became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in the red state since 1988.
Cruz, a longtime ally to Trump, said the “blue tsunami” was an “ass kicking” for the Republicans, calling it a “Watergate-level repudiation”.
In a lengthy statement on X, he said: “Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter. But Texas, today at least, is blue. As we sit here today, I am the only statewide elected Republican who remains in Texas. That’s not something I ever thought I would say.”
Though he stopped short of calling out the US president by name, he claimed “too many Republican politicians seem like they didn’t understand or they didn’t care” about the rising cost of living.
Cruz continued: “Tariffs have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end, and we should never, under any circumstances, give the Ayatollah billions of dollars.”
Trump started the Iran war in February when he agreed with Israel to launch strikes at Tehran.
Iran retaliated by effectively closing the major shipping lane, the Strait of Hormuz, which usually carried a fifth of global oil and gas supplies.
That closure has pushed worldwide fuel prices up and subsequently driven up grocery prices, too.
Cruz joins vice president JD Vance who also distanced himself from the president by insisting the “reason we lost is the war” in the Middle East.
Cruz also appeared to take a pop at Elon Musk, Trump’s ally who tried and failed to buy Texas by putting hundreds of millions of dollars into the Republican candidate Ken Paxton.
He wrote: “Last year, we saw the world’s very first trillionaire [Musk], a modern-day Thomas Edison, at the very same time that millions were struggling to feed their families.
“Data centers being constructed were turning billionaires into centibillionaires, while simultaneously the average American’s electricity bill went up 30% in the last five years.”
He said over the next two years, his party needs to “fight the madness” of what he imagines Democrats’ policies will be.
“We have not suddenly become a bunch of tofu-eating, gun-banning, tutu-wearing pinko commie liberals. That ain’t us. Texas is still Texas,” he insisted, as he called on the party to “rebuild”.
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