Megadonors and elections. So you see, it’s all real Profiles in Courage stuff. As my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty noted, there are even a lot of people who agree with Cruz who still loathe him. Like them, my problem with Cruz is not his politics, but his character.

My skepticism came to a head with a particularly symbolic moment, which definitely ranked as the most cynical political stunt of the year. Cruz was invited to a nonpartisan, ecumenical gathering in support of Middle East Christians, who were and are the victims of genocide in Iraq and Syria. But there was a problem. A blogger discovered that one of the groups in attendance had said some not-nice things about Israel. And it’s true that many groups of Middle East Christians view Israel unfavorably — just as many others view it favorably. And it’s also true that Israel had nothing to do with the point of the gathering, which was to bring together Christians regardless of their differences. But Cruz, who was already running for president, and whose entire strategy was on being the blameless right-winger, could already see the headline: “Cruz supports adversaries of Israel.” So what did he do? He took the stage, launched into an irrelevant and patronizing rah-rah Israel speech. When people groaned, he called them — literally among the most powerless people in the world, people being slaughtered by jihadists — anti-Semites and left. That moment, the chutzpah, the cynicism, the gall of it, seemed to boil down Cruz’s character to its essence.