U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was mentioned in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in Manhattan, where the presumptive GOP nominee faces 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business documents to cover up payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Daniels testified this week that she had a sexual encounter with Trump prior to the 2016 election (Trump has denied the claim), and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified earlier that he practiced ‘catch and kill’ tactics — buying stories including Daniels’s only to squash them — in order to protect Trump and his image prior to the election.
Pecker also testified that the tabloid published a made-up, negative story about Cruz’s father and JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald while Trump and Cruz were running against each other for the 2016 GOP nomination.
Eight years ago, while campaigning in South Carolina, Donald Trump “mocked Cruz for infusing his Christian faith into his campaign in an effort to win over evangelical voters,” as the The Columbus Dispatch described it.
Trump said of Cruz: “The worst is holding up a Bible all the time. You’re willing to lie about anything, but then you’re holding up a Bible? To me, it’s no good.”
[Above: Pres. Trump visits St. John’s Episcopal Church, June 2020, photo: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]
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During Trump’s last year in office, amid the June 2020 George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C., law enforcement officers used tear-gas “to forcefully clear peaceful protesters” from Lafayette Square, and created a path for Trump to walk from the White House to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump held up a Bible and posed for a photo op in front the church’s parish house, which had been damaged by a fire set during protests the night before.
The bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, Rev. Mariann Budde, whose diocese St. John’s belongs to, said in a statement that she was “outraged” by Trump’s visit and noted that he didn’t pray while stopping by the church.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, also issued a statement saying Trump had “used a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.”
This year Trump “held up” several copies of the ‘God Bless USA’ bibles which he “endorsed” and sold for $59.99, and Cruz continues to endorse and defend Trump as he runs for another term.