His friend Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told Cruz he believed that “Jew hatred and Israel bashing” were on the rise on the right — and that something had to be done about it.
By Liz Goodwin and Emily Davies
(December 22, 2025 / The Washington Post) Sen. Ted Cruz sat down with a longtime ally in November at an office near D.C.’s Union Station to discuss the future of the Republican Party. Before long, the discussion touched on his own future.
His friend Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told Cruz he believed that “Jew hatred and Israel bashing” were on the rise on the right — and that something had to be done about it. Cruz, who had begun a series of speeches decrying antisemitism in the GOP, told Klein he had been fielding requests from people urging him to run for president in 2028.
Cruz came across as someone “seriously” considering such a run, Klein recalled.
With the future of the party up for grabs in a Donald Trump-less 2028 primary race, Cruz has in recent months positioned himself as a loud voice for a more traditional, hawkish Republican foreign policy. He’s also urging the GOP to rid itself of popular MAGA pundit Tucker Carlson, who he argues is injecting the “poison” of antisemitism into the movement with his broadsides against Israel. Carlson has rejected that characterization.
As he feuds with Carlson, Cruz is weighing a second presidential bid, according to a person close to the senator and another briefed on his thinking, who spoke like others on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal conversations. A White House run would be politically risky for Cruz, 55, putting him on course to collide with Vice President JD Vance, whom many Republicans expect to enter the 2028 race.
Friction is already evident behind the scenes: Cruz has criticized Vance, a close ally of Carlson, to Republican donors, according to two people familiar with the comments. The senator has warned that Vance’s foreign policy views are dangerously isolationist, the people said. (Vance has been one of the GOP’s most prominent skeptics of U.S. intervention abroad.)
The emerging rivalry shows how much the party has changed under Trump’s leadership since Cruz arrived in the Senate in 2013. After rising to prominence as a rebel against the establishment, Cruz is now a vocal champion of some longtime orthodox GOP positions, as a new generation of conservatives is ascending with a different vision.
Some political observers are skeptical that another Cruz run would gain much traction. He can no longer run as an outsider, and he alienated some conservatives with his fight against Trump in the 2016 campaign. Still, Cruz has built name recognition and relationships with plenty of activists and donors across the country in recent years, and it’s far from clear what will animate the base in the next GOP primary contest.
“Can Ted help craft or meld together the traditional Republican approach with the new reality of what the Republican Party is now?” asked Daron Shaw, a political science professor at the University of Texas who overlapped with Cruz as a staffer on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. “It’s a heavy lift.”
A couple of weeks before his chat with Klein, Cruz called Carlson “a coward” during a speech in Las Vegas before a group supporting Jewish conservatives, again denouncing the “poisonous lies” of antisemitism. He said they were “blessed” to have Trump, who “loves the Jewish people,” in the White House.
“When Trump is not in the White House, what then?” he asked in his booming voice.
“Ted Cruz!” an audience member shouted.
The senator just smiled, then continued his speech.
‘All of us hate Ted Cruz’
Anyone considering a run for the GOP nomination in 2028 faces a big obstacle: Vance.
The 41-year-old vice president leads early polls and is seen as a loyal lieutenant to Trump, who maintains high support from the party base even as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted.
But Trump has been noncommittal about endorsing his running mate as heir to his Make America Great Again movement, leaving an opening for an ambitious conservative with a different vision for the party.
“The Republicans will be fighting for their identity,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said of the 2028 primary race. Greene, a close ally of Carlson who represents the populist and isolationist wing of the party, added: “There’ll be Ted Cruz, I’m sure, running against JD Vance. All of us hate Ted Cruz.”
Cruz has adapted to changes in his party over several decades in politics. Following a stretch in the establishment during Bush’s 2000 campaign, he became solicitor general of Texas in 2003 and launched a Senate campaign in 2011 as a tea-party-infused change agent, defeating the lieutenant governor in the GOP primary.
“The best thing to happen to the Republican Party was to get its teeth kicked in in 2008,” Cruz said during a 2012 campaign event with the libertarian Ron Paul.
When he arrived in Washington, Cruz picked fights over spending and President Barack Obama’s health care law, sparking a government shutdown in 2013. Not everyone in his party liked his style. “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody could convict you,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) joked at a 2016 press dinner.
Cruz brought his insurgent pitch into the 2016 presidential race, but Trump caught fire with an antiestablishment campaign that dramatically eclipsed the senator’s. After bowing out of the GOP primaries as the last major Trump opponent standing, Cruz told delegates at the Republican National Convention that year to “vote your conscience,” instead of throwing his support behind Trump, who had branded him as “Lyin’ Ted.” He returned to the Senate, where he is now chair of the Commerce Committee and has refashioned himself into a bipartisan dealmaker on aviation safety and other issues.
The Texas senator, who has called himself a “noninterventionist hawk” and has long been a vocal ally of Israel, argues that an anti-Israel foreign policy could embolden terrorists. And he is a defender of the benefits of traditional capitalism at a time when some in the “New Right” are calling for a more populist turn.
“Those who are anti-Israel quickly become anti-capitalist and anti-American,” Cruz said in a brief interview about his decision to speak out against Carlson. “Tucker’s obsession is unhealthy and dangerous.”
By targeting Carlson and growing anti-Israel sentiment within the party, Cruz has hit upon a division within the GOP base that some believe could animate the 2028 primaries. Carlson is closely allied with Vance, a onetime Trump critic who is now an “America First” populist, embracing skepticism of some big-business interests and rejecting the U.S. foreign policy status quo.
This article was originally published in The Washington Post and can be viewed here.