Hours after getting booed for not endorsing Donald Trump in his primetime speech at the Republican National Convention, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he wasn’t going to be a “servile puppy dog” to the party’s nominee given Trump’s personal attacks against him during the primary season.
“I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” Cruz told his state’s GOP delegation at a breakfast in Cleveland Thursday morning.
Trump’s former GOP rival, who like the rest of the field signed a pledge during the primaries to support the party’s nominee, said that agreement was “abdicated” when the brash real estate mogul mocked his wife, Heidi, and suggested that his father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“That pledge was not a blanket commitment that if you go and slander and attack Heidi that I’m going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father,‘” Cruz said.
During the late stages of the bitter GOP primary race, Trump threatened to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife after an anti-Trump super-PAC ran ads featuring a racy photo of Melania Trump. Donald Trump then shared a photo on Twitter featuring an unflattering photo of Cruz’s wife next to a flattering photo of his own. Trump also at one point gave credence to a sketchy National Enquirer report that linked the elder Cruz to Kennedy’s assassin.
Fielding questions from the Texas delegation, Cruz assured them he would not be voting for Hillary Clinton, but would not commit to voting for the Republican nominee.
At one point, Geraldine Sam, a Texas GOP delegate and former La Marque mayor, stood up and yelled, “This is not about you. This is not about your wife … your word is your bond.”
“Let me be very clear: This is not a social club,” he said. “We either stand for shared principles, or we’re not worth anything.”
During his primetime address Wednesday, Cruz urged the crowd inside Quicken Loans Arena to vote for someone who embodies the “principles that our party believes in.”