Mike Lee wasn’t going to let Ted Cruz down. The Utah senator was the first of Cruz’s 53 Republican colleagues to endorse him. In June, at the end of a book tour waylaid by questions about Donald Trump, Lee spoke with unusual passion about why he had not endorsed the Republican nominee once Cruz quit the race.

“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK,” Lee told Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg. “We can go through the fact that he has made some statements that some have identified correctly as religious intolerance. … I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the U.S. Constitution, that he is not going to be an autocrat.”

Three months later, Cruz endorsed Trump for president — and did not give Lee a head’s up. “This Cruz news is all a surprise to us and the senator,” his spokesman Conn Carroll said.

It was not the first time that Lee’s “best friend” had flummoxed him. Lee had appeared blindsided when Cruz, a fellow member of the Judiciary Committee, used a 2015 hearing on criminal justice reform to announce that the threat of “violent criminals” had moved him against a reform bill. “It is simply incorrect to say that this suddenly releases a bunch of violent criminals,” said Lee, watching the bipartisan reform effort begin its long, election-year slide into oblivion.