Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) lavished praise on his one-time champion, mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, in a fawning entry in Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list.
Rebekah Mercer and her billionaire investor father Robert were the driving donors behind Cruz’s White House run until diverting their support to Donald Trump when he clinched the GOP nomination.
They’re also part owners of Breitbart News and a slew of other conservative enterprises.
“Rebekah Mercer is a warrior and a patriot,” Cruz wrote of his benefactor in a short tribute published Thursday. “She is the daughter of a brilliant mathematician and tremendously successful investor, and blessed with her own deep intelligence and intuitive insight, and it would have been simple for her to have settled into a life of comfort and ease.”
“But Bekah cares too much about freedom and our nation to do so.”
The Mercers’ investments helped “fuel a political revolution,” he continued, adding: “Bekah has helped transform the world of politics.”
Then he gets to the meat of it: “And she has helped fund upstart campaigns and underdog candidates, including my own Senate and presidential campaigns. When Donald Trump won the nomination, Bekah played a pivotal role in helping assemble the team and strategy that shocked the world in November.”
Cruz understates it somewhat: Trump’s most influential hires of the campaign, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, both reportedly came at the Mercers’ recommendation. Conway originally ran a pro-Cruz super PAC that received $11 million from the Mercers, Jane Mayer reported in a New Yorker profile of the family’s patriarch. And Steve Bannnon, per the same profile, was the family’s de-facto political adviser for years.
And when Cruz urged attendees at the Republican National Convention to “vote your conscious” on Election Day — widely seen as a rebuke of Trump — the Mercers made a rare public statement to the New York Times to scold the senator, calling the non-endorsement “both regrettable and revealing.”
“Last summer and again this year, Senator Ted Cruz pledged to support the candidacy of the nominee of the Republican Party, whomever that nominee might be,” the statement read, in part. “We are profoundly disappointed that on Wednesday night he chose to disregard this pledge.”
Cruz eventually endorsed Trump. He even called voters for him. And the Mercers praised him publicly in the Washington Post.
The senator faces a costly re-election campaign in 2018.
