Trump travels to Texas to support a unique rival, Ted Cruz

It's a complicated relationship that Mr. Trump summed up in three words during the senator's presentation at the National Rifle Association meeting last year: "Like. Do not like. As."

"It's water under the bridge," said a relative of Mr. Cruz about their rivalry. "Trump has been gracious and constantly asks," How can I be useful? "He's a charmer."

In an unusual move, Trump cracks for a candidate whose polls show a comfortable lead about two weeks before the election. Mr. Cruz faces Democratic Representative Beto O'Rourke. Two polls published in mid-October indicated that Mr Cruz was ahead of Mr O'Rourke by 9 percentage points.

No Democrat has won a race in Texas since 1994. The Democratic Party has been looking forward to Texas for years, hoping that it could take advantage of the demographic changes in the big cities, while Republicans see it as a solid block in the south-west.

Mr. O'Rourke has already made a remarkable impression on voters across the state. His campaign said this month that he had collected $ 38.1 million during the reporting period of the Federal Election Commission of three months that ended September 30, the highest big quarterly campaign never recorded for a candidate in the Senate.

On Friday, Trump called O'Rourke "total weight compared to Ted Cruz".

"There is nowhere to represent the values ​​and desires of the people of the great state of Texas," Trump wrote.

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"He will never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela!"

A spokesman for Mr. O'Rourke declined to comment on the president's tweet.

Some observers have said that Trump's visit was as much about participating in his unruly rallies as getting support for Mr. Cruz.

"Texas is a bastion of restrictive attitudes to immigration and is generally very sensitive to the limits that can be imposed on the government," said Joshua Blank, head of polling and research at Texas Politics. Project, a non-partisan research and survey program at the University of Texas at Austin. "So, Trump is still very popular here."

After the president had offered to assemble for the senator, some of the assistants of Mr. Cruz had initially hoped that Mr. Trump would go to the west of Texas, more friend of the Republicans, considering that it would energize the party's base without raising opposition.

But his campaign has instead chosen to make it go to Houston where he could gather a large crowd, said relatives. In the end, Mr Cruz's campaign has no problem appearing with Mr Trump, who won the state by 9 percentage points in 2016.

Even during the presidential campaign, Cruz's campaign at least felt that both men had the opportunity to work together.

Members of Mr. Cruz's campaign suggested joining Mr. Trump's 2015 campaign to travel to the US-Mexico border to discuss immigration. "They said, 'We will do it,'" recalls a former Cruz campaign manager. "But it did not work and then they went to the border without us."

At the start of the 2016 primary, Mr. Cruz "considered Trump as the weakest possible opponent," said a former Trump campaigner.

Mr. Cruz's campaign only woke up too late and became aware of the celebrity factor and populist messages that reinforced Mr. Trump's support. Mr. Cruz began to criticize the main applicant and it was at that moment that the situation deteriorated.

Mr. Trump dubbed his fellow Republican "Lyin 'Ted", insulting the physical appearance of his wife and hinting that his father was complicit in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Cruz called Mr. Trump a "pathological liar", "weeping coward" and "utterly amoral".

Several months after the Congress, Mr. Cruz was slow to acknowledge publicly that Mr. Trump was the candidate of his party. In September 2016, two months before the general election, he made the decision to re-establish the link by writing

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post that after months of prayer and search of his own conscience he would vote for Mr. Trump. He encouraged other Republicans to do the same.

He praised Trump's victory over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and pledged to work with the president to appoint conservative judges to the courts, enforce immigration laws, abolish Obamacare, rebuild the army and prevent "radical Islamist terrorists" from attacking the country.

Since the day of the inauguration, Mr. Cruz has been a strong advocate for the two choices of Trump's Supreme Court. He pleaded for a fiscal overhaul and, while lobbying for a complete repeal of President Barack Obama's signature health care plan, he pushed back Republican efforts to do so last year.

Mr. Cruz also defended Mr. Trump's efforts to build a wall on the Mexican border, but he did not tolerate the separation of the family, calling the images of terrified children "heartbreaking." He added, however, that "Illegal immigration produces human tragedies. "

Mr. Trump had been in office for less than seven weeks when Mr. Cruz had chosen to break bread with his former political opponent.

At the White House, the president and the first lady invited Mr. Cruz, his wife Heidi and their two young daughters to dinner. Mr. and Mrs. Cruz also had dinner with Mr. Trump's best advisors, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Messrs. Trump and Cruz never discussed Mr. Trump's derogatory remarks about Mr. Cruz's wife and father, and no excuses were made, according to one informed of the discussions.

Mr. Cruz told his associates that the two men needed each other and said he would seek to work with Mr. Trump to get Texas voters first.

In the end, he tells people, it's not personal. It's politics.