Brooks: Cruz Has ‘Dark and Satanic Tones’ That Rubio Is Adopting Some Of

New York Times columnist David Brooks argued that Republican presidential candidate Texas Senator Ted Cruz has “dark and satanic tones” and that fellow candidate Florida Senator Marco Rubio is starting to adopt on Friday’s “PBS NewsHour.”

Brooks said, “you begin to see little signs of liftoff. Trump’s sort of ceiling-ed out. Carson’s collapsing. And Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere. And so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio’s doing a little, by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has, and so –.”

Brooks added, “Well, if you go to a Cruz — if you watch a Cruz speech, it’s like, we’ve got this enemy, we’ve got that enemy, we’re going to stomp on this person, we’re going to crush that person, we’re going to destroy that person. It is an ugly world in Ted Cruz’s world. And it’s combative. And it’s angry, and it’s apocalyptic.”

Brooks did alter his description of Cruz from “satanic” to “Mephistophelian, maybe.” He then continued, “But it’s dark, and combative, and, frankly, harsh. It’s a harsh — he gets some jokes in the beginning, but then it’s just, we have enemies. We’re in an apocalyptic situation. We’re on the edge of the abyss. You need a tough guy to beat that back. And that’s his personality. That is not Marco Rubio’s personality. He’s a sunny — he’s been running the youthful optimism campaign, but he’s beginning, to prevent Cruz from getting liftoff, to mimic sort of that, get a piece of that. I personally think it’s a mistake, because inauthentic — inauthenticity almost never works. And so, if Cruz starts to go like — I mean, if Rubio starts to go like Cruz, he just doesn’t look like himself, and that bothers people.”

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