Ted Cruz wants the 2028 nomination, and America First voters haven’t forgotten who fought Donald Trump to the bitter end in 2016.
His allies insist that old feud ended a long time ago.
And Bill Maher just watched Cruz tip his hand on live television.
Bill Maher Got the Laugh He Wanted From a Republican Senator
Bill Maher opened the last Real Time before the midterm elections by firing back at President Trump.
The President had torched the HBO host in a Truth Social post that ran more than 1,300 words, the longest of his time on the platform. Trump branded Maher a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL LOSER” and a pothead after the two shared a dinner at the White House.
Maher spent a chunk of his monologue swatting back. He mocked the length of the post, denied that he calls the President over and over, and rolled old clips to dispute Trump’s claim that he opposed efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
“Eating with Trump is a lot like dating Taylor Swift,” Maher said. “It’s a lot of fun at the time but later on, they’re tearing you a new *******.”
Then his first guest walked out.
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) came to sell his new book, Going Further: The Incomparable Clarence Thomas. Maher asked whether Trump or anybody else had leaned on him to skip the show.
“None whatsoever,” Cruz said.
And then the Texas Senator added a little garnish. “By the way, that was funny as ****,” Cruz told Maher, and the studio crowd broke into applause.
Maher claimed he had held back. “I’m trying not to fight. I am. I could’ve been meaner,” he said.
“I don’t know that that’s possible,” Cruz answered.
Mediaite’s write-up of the night says Cruz also told Maher he finds himself agreeing with him more and more. One week earlier, Maher had used his monologue to tell viewers that Trump carried the lowest approval of any President heading into a midterm and that Republicans were running away from him. Cruz showed up seven days later and laughed right along.
Better Ted Than Dead, Ten Years Later
This friendship didn’t start last week.
In January 2016, Maher told the Daily Beast that Cruz was “scarier than Donald Trump” and called him “high intelligence in the service of evil.” But by March of that year, with Cruz standing as the last real obstacle between Trump and the nomination, Maher closed a Real Time broadcast by picking Cruz over Trump. He even rolled out hats that read “Better Ted Than Dead.”
Cruz lost anyway. He had already called Trump “a pathological liar” on the trail.
And in July 2016, Cruz took the stage at the Republican convention in Cleveland, refused to endorse the nominee, and told delegates to vote their conscience while the arena booed him off.
Fast forward to November 2023. Cruz sat on Maher’s set promoting a different book, Unwoke, called the host an “old-school liberal” and “funny as ****,” and confessed he had shared Maher’s monologues “at least a dozen times.”
Same compliment. Same studio. This time the punchline was the President of his own party, days before an election that decides who controls Congress.
Ted Cruz Has Been Building a Case Against Trump One Issue at a Time
One laugh on HBO wouldn’t mean much by itself. But it lands on top of a long list.
Start with trade. President Trump built his tariffs to drag factories back from countries that spent decades gaming American trade policy. Days after the Liberation Day announcement in April 2025, Cruz told Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow, “Tariffs are a tax on consumers, and I’m not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers.” He warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in 2026.
Then came the tapes. In January 2026, Axios published recordings of Cruz talking to donors at two private meetings the year before. Cruz described pressing Trump to back off tariffs and claimed the President’s reply was, “**** you, Ted.”
On those same tapes, Cruz went after the Vice President by name. “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz said. He also accused JD Vance and Tucker Carlson of pushing out Mike Waltz because Waltz backed bombing Iran. Carlson denied any role.
Publicly, Cruz keeps those knives in the drawer. He prefers the softer version.
In May 2026, as President Trump moved toward a deal to end the conflict with Iran, Cruz posted, “I am deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran ‘deal,’ being pushed by some voices in the administration.” He named nobody. After those donor tapes, he didn’t need to.
When the White House released the agreement in June, Cruz piled on. “History demonstrates that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is an exceptionally bad idea, and I think unfortunately the president is receiving some really bad advice on this deal,” he said. That same month he praised Trump’s February decision to hit Iran as “the most consequential” of the second term. Cruz loves the war chapter. He just can’t stomach the peace chapter.
But the most revealing break came in September, after Trump promised a $5,000 dividend to every adult citizen if Republicans hold Congress. “I don’t think we should be paying people that are not working,” Cruz told Fox News, insisting it be “structured as a tax refund.” Weeks later he told Will Cain that “the way to be a populist is not get in the Bernie Sanders game of giving away free stuff,” and he lumped the populist push into what he called right-wing socialism.
He even tossed in a line about diesel: “$6 diesel is a bigger issue in Iowa than $5,000.” Iowa. The state Cruz won in the 2016 caucuses, and the first stop on any 2028 calendar. Maybe that’s a coincidence. Maybe Iowa farmers just came to mind first. It’s a funny place for a Texas Senator’s mind to wander, though.
Asked that same month how much a Trump endorsement would count in 2028, Cruz shrugged it off. “It carries weight, but I think the voters are going to make their own determination,” he said.
And in October he went on Fox to knock Trump’s Russia diesel deal, a move aimed at lower prices and an end to the Ukraine war. “I wish the president hadn’t done it. I think it was a mistake,” Cruz said.
The Donor Class Just Got Its Audition Tape
Line those breaks up and a pattern jumps off the page.
Free trade over tariffs. War with Iran over a negotiated peace. Confrontation with Russia over a deal. No direct relief for working families. Every single position matches the wish list of the donor crowd that ran the Republican Party before Trump took the escalator ride in 2015. That’s the neoconservative lane, and Cruz has parked himself right in the middle of it.
Maher’s audience fits the same picture. HBO subscribers in Los Angeles and Manhattan don’t decide Republican primaries. But the checkbooks in those zip codes sure help fund them. And on Iran, Maher and Cruz share the same hawkish instincts, which is exactly why Trump’s post singled out Maher’s Iran record in the first place.
Fair enough, a guest who trashes the host’s monologue doesn’t sell many books. Politeness explains “None whatsoever.” It doesn’t explain volunteering that the jokes were funny, or adding that Maher couldn’t possibly have been meaner to Trump. Nobody required that second line.
The book itself makes the whole scene stranger. Justice Clarence Thomas, regarded by many conservatives as the finest justice of his era and an American hero, survived the 1991 smear campaign he called “a high-tech lynching” and spent the next three decades refusing to court the approval of liberal elites. Cruz carried a book about that man onto a liberal comedian’s stage and fished for that same crowd’s applause.
Thomas never needed Hollywood to like him. Cruz apparently does.
Somewhere in the rebroadcast schedule, CNN will run the clip again for its weekend viewers. The neoconservatives and Never Trumpers who want their old party back will catch it there too. They’ll recognize the pitch.
The fight over the post-Trump Republican Party already has its sides. Vice President JD Vance stands as the America First heir apparent, the man Cruz privately calls Tucker’s creation. Cruz is auditioning for the other team, the one that wants the tariffs gone, the Iran war back on, and the populist checks shredded. Voters will sort out 2028 on their own. They just got a clear look at which crowd Cruz is playing to.
In March 2016, Bill Maher told his HBO audience he’d take Ted Cruz over Donald Trump. Ten years later, Cruz sat on that same stage, days before a midterm election, and told Maher his jokes about Trump were funny as ****.
Sources: Mediaite; Raw Story; Newser; USA Today; The Hollywood Reporter; The Daily Beast; Deadline; Axios; Fox Business; Newsweek; HuffPost; ABC News; CBS News; The Hill; Breitbart; Time