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He keeps talking-about how she “raised Joey as a single mom,” how she “had problems with the law,” how she “fell in with some pretty unsavory characters,” how he and his father once went to Philadelphia, where she was living, “in what was basically a crack house,” leaving behind their “rings and watches and wallets,” to try to “help her get back on her feet.”Īll of this unspools, uncomfortably, as Maykopet sits listening to Cruz’s version of his sad, challenging upbringing with his late mother, at the end of which, finally, Cruz gets to what appears to be the takeaway. Um, she took a lot of pain meds, she took a lot of-she made a lot of bad choices.” Miriam had a lot of problems with alcohol abuse and substance abuse pretty much her entire adult life. “Um, when Miriam got older, um, she struggled,” he says. Here’s One That Could Have Snagged His Grandfather. Donald Trump Wants an Immigrant Witch Hunt. It remains unclear at this point in the footage how this information might find its way into a political ad. “And Miriam passed away a few years ago.”Ĭruz doesn’t say how-but she died, in 2011, in Pennsylvania, of an accidental drug overdose. She, like a lot of kids unfortunately do, think she blamed herself as a little girl for her parents not staying together. They react differently to their parents splitting apart. “And, you know, kids react differently to divorce. “And when both of them were little girls, our father and their mom divorced,” Cruz continues. They’re sisters from my father’s first marriage. I have two older sisters, Miriam and Roxana, who are a year apart in age. I remember holding Joey when he was a newborn baby-I was 15 when he was born. “You know, my nephew Joey,” Cruz says, reaching over and placing his hand on Maykopet’s back, “is someone who I’ve known his entire life.
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It’s unclear what purpose he’s supposed to serve in this context. “My name is Joe Maykopet,” he says, to the camera and everybody else, “I’m 29 years old, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is my uncle, Ted Cruz.” senator and presidential candidate to whom he’s related. Does one of them say menace? On a matching chair to his left: the Princeton-educated, Harvard-educated former Supreme Court clerk and current U.S. Here, seated on an overstuffed chair, is a person you’re not expecting: a heavyset, blue-eyed young man wearing a buzz cut, a red and white shirt with horizontal stripes and a smattering of tattoos on his arms. It’s an unexpected window into the orbit of a candidate who is otherwise disciplined and relentlessly on-message. The staged hugs, the awkward outtakes, the never-to-be-prime-time scenes, the unrehearsed, off-script interactions-these are the moments that feel the most revealing, the most captivating, the most authentic. What’s great about this footage is the camera keeps rolling, people keep talking, and Cruz keeps rubbing, and rubbing, and rubbing, his family members’ shoulders and backs. Why is this available, all of it, to anyone? Evidently, shooting video like this and posting it in a public space lets campaigns and their supportive PACs share the content without technically communicating, which would be against the rules. It also becomes clear that the death of Cruz’s half sister-and what he then did for her son-is a story he thinks reflects well enough on him that he wants to tell it in all its wince-inducing detail.Ĭruz’s mother is the least willing participant here-the most interesting, too, in part because she is at times so obviously reluctant to play along. The footage offers an intriguing familial mishmash of single mothers, half-siblings and stepparents, bearing burdens of modern America-depression, drinking, drugs.Ĭruz’s wife, an executive for Goldman Sachs currently on a leave of absence because of the campaign, describes herself as “a traditional mom,” albeit one who cops to not cooking, and likens her handling of multimillion-dollar investment portfolios to her family’s missionary work in Africa.Ĭruz’s daughters adore him, you’re told, and yet you learn that they sometimes consider him “a guest” in their Houston home. Despite the stagecraft, you encounter a family that’s messier than the one you’ll almost certainly see portrayed as the Cruz campaign enters the thick of the primaries. What they say on camera is rehearsed and familiar, as in nearly verbatim, to anybody who has seen their stump speeches.īut watch all of it, and you learn some things about Ted Cruz that are hard to imagine ever showing up in a campaign ad. Some of the things in the clips we already know: Cruz and his father, for instance, are gifted talkers.
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Clips have been surfacing on TV and the Internet, showing odd glimpses of the life of a highly scripted candidate.
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