Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told The Daily Caller News Foundation Thursday at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, that Sen. Ted Cruz “made a bad calculation” when choosing not to endorse Donald Trump in his speech Wednesday night.
Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said Cruz’s speech Wednesday was “a political calculation based on his own ambition for [running for President in] 2020.” The former Republican National Committee chairman went on to note, “Trump didn’t care, it wasn’t a big deal for him.”
On the other hand, Barbour said that when the Texas senator was booed off the stage for not getting behind Trump, “it was a big deal to Cruz.” Barbour made the devastating point that, “it kind of reminds you of why only one of his 54 colleagues in the Senate endorsed him.”
The former political director of the Reagan White House did admit that, “Cruz, message-wise, in terms of policy, talked about a lot of things that Republicans support, feel strongly about: limited government, lower taxes, less spending, rational regulation, constitutional government, the president not trying to go around Congress all the time.” Barbour told TheDCNF that, “it was the politics of it, that gave him trouble and apparently a lot of people suspected that’s what he was going to do.”
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