Ted Cruz, the Empty Evangelical
A characteristically Midwestern problem presented itself in Iowa last week, as the Republican caucuses drew near: How to deal with vulgarity, in the person of Donald Trump? Trump—an embodiment of secular excess, a gleeful assemblage of the major moral vices—might be expected to struggle in Iowa, where the Republican electorate is so stringently evangelical that, in 2008, they went for Rick Santorum and, in 2012, for Mike Huckabee. But one great accident of 2016 is that the banner of the moral majority has been held not by Santorum or by Huckabee but by the brilliant, despised, opportunistic candidate who at the moment seems like Trump’s main challenger: Ted Cruz.