Trump in Texas to support Senator Ted Cruz

Houston (USA) (AFP) - Donald Trump travels to Texas on Monday to support his former rival in the presidential election, Senator Ted Cruz, with whom he has long exchanged insults and murderous formulas but he now calls "Ted the magnificent".

During the campaign, he had decked the religious right-wing champion with the mocking nickname "Ted the liar", spread rumors about his father and made fun of his wife's physique.

But at 15 days of mid-term elections with an uncertain outcome, he will bring him, from the Toyota Center in Houston, his enthusiasm and ability to mobilize crowds: Donald Trump needs to retain the Republican majority in the Senate, Ted Cruz is aware that a presidential hand can help him in a tighter duel than expected.

"He's no longer Ted the liar," Trump said as he left the White House. "Ted and I, we get along very well, I like Ted"

If the polls put him in the lead, the re-election of the ultra-conservative senator is far from being the walk of health initially hoped for. He is facing the new rising star of the Democratic Party, Beto O? Rourke.

"Beto", as his followers call him, gives him a hard time. The style of this forty-year-old, clearly anchored on the left but who stands aside from a somewhat systematic anti-Trump rhetoric that he deems sterile, has marked the spirits, to the point that some have already made their "savior" "for the 2020 presidential election.

Accused of being a "featherweight" by the American president, the latter has decided not to give in the overbid.

"I think it just does not make sense to answer," he said on ABC. "Aggression and the exchange of insults unfortunately occupy a central place in the political debate: either you throw oil on the fire, or you remain focused on the future".

- Lee Harvey Oswald -

On stage, in front of a tide of red caps "Make America Great Again", Donald Trump should mock the young democrat and braid the Republican senator in search of a second term in the upper house of Congress.

During the campaign, however, when Ted Cruz was his last opponent in the race for the Republican nomination, the blows flew low, very low.

Donald Trump gave credit to the National Enquirer tabloid claim that Cuban-born father Rafael Cruz had been to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of firing at John F. Kennedy in 1963, and who himself was murdered two days later.

The Texas senator accused the real estate mogul of being behind an article in the same tabloid claiming he had cheated on his wife, Heidi.

At the end of the primary school, Ted Cruz, who had treated Donald Trump as a "pathological liar", did not formally join him. At the Republican convention in Cleveland in July 2016, he refused to call the rostrum to vote for him in the November election, urging Republicans to vote "according to their conscience."

As often, it is the tweets of the impetuous billionaire who summarize most directly the evolution of his positions in the long term.

"Why would the people of Texas support Ted Cruz who did absolutely nothing for them, yet another of those politicians who talk a lot but do nothing!", He wrote on February 28, 2016.

"As you know, Ted has my full support," he tweeted Aug. 31, 2018. "His opponent is a disaster for Texas."

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