Commentary: Ted Cruz is never going to be president now

CLEVELAND -- Here's a prediction for you: Ted Cruz will not be the GOP nominee in 2020, and his speech to the Republican convention on Wednesday will be remembered as the big reason why.

There's always something appealing about a politician standing on principle, even when it's a principle you disagree with, especially when it damages his career. Cruz stood on principle Wednesday, and in doing so enriched his reputation among #NeverTrump conservatives.

But Republicans who have reconciled themselves to Donald Trump, i.e. the vast majority of the party's electorate, will not see Cruz's performance in such valiant terms. Instead, they'll see a politician who knifed their nominee in a fit of pique, and will be unlikely to ever forgive him even if Trump does get wiped out in November.

Cleveland this week has no shortage of Cruz fans. Plenty of the people I've talked to here, including the ones decked out in Trump gear, say Cruz was their first pick. Many of them will be disappointed in what he did here on Wednesday, and conclude that he's not a team player, that he doesn't really care about beating Hillary, that he's in it only for himself.

To them, Cruz will have given that speech because he couldn't just suck it up. He's a sore loser. A whiner who wouldn't put America First. You get beat, and you're supposed to do it gracefully. Instead, Cruz sabotaged their nominee. He's a traitor to them.

It's often said American voters have short memories. That's true in some ways, but the Republican voters who have fallen in behind Trump, the ones who will knock on doors and try to sell him to anyone who will listen regardless of who they voted for in the primaries -- they'll remember this. Betrayal sticks in the mind.

Because if there's one thing keeping the GOP together at this point, it's hatred for Hillary. There are rational and irrational dimensions to this, but Republican voters at a basic level believe that Clinton winning in November might very well be fatal to their party, and by extension the country.

To them, a Clinton win means more unaffordable government programs that foster dependency, more immigrants who will of course vote Democratic, the continued transformation of America into something they don't recognize. It means a liberal Supreme Court for 40 years legislating from the bench. It means more gun laws and more terror attacks.

The only thing between them and that future is Donald Trump, flawed as many acknowledge he is. Will he disappoint them? Sure, probably, and they'll tell you as much: GOP voters, as a matter of course, tend to not be all that big on optimism. His big redeeming virtues, though, are that he's not her, and that he's radical enough to actually change some stuff in Washington.

Ted Cruz was never going to get up there and endorse Trump. After all, Cruz is the model of an inflexible ideologue. He would despise Trump even if the guy had never insinuated his wife was ugly and that his dad helped kill JFK. Trump, to him, is everything that's wrong about America, a big government liberal who lies and cheats and buys politicians in order to screw the forgotten man. He's basically an Ayn Rand villain come to life, and now he's somehow the nominee.

But Cruz is also a self-interested politician. There's a reason he's the most unpopular man in Congress, and it's not just because he's some inflexible right-winger. It's because the knock on Cruz is that he really is only in for Cruz, that he's willing to undercut anyone and everyone the second he sees it can benefit his career.

Cruz did quite well in the primary by convincing Republican voters that he was a conservative first and foremost, someone who was willing to take huge professionals risks for the good of the cause. After Wednesday's speech, however, I doubt many of those voters will continue to see him so charitably.

To them, all he really did was appease his own ego, helping Hillary and hurting America in the process.

In:
• Hillary Clinton
• Ted Cruz
• Republican National Convention
• Donald Trump