Ted Cruz Desperately Dodges Major Abortion Question in Allred Debate

After spending weeks trying to run away from his anti-abortion stance on the campaign trail, Senator Ted Cruz was held accountable by his opponent and the moderators of Tuesday night’s Texas Senate debate.

During the debate against Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred, Cruz tried to dodge a question on whether he supported the right to an abortion in cases of rape and incest.

In Texas, abortion care is not permitted, except to save the mother’s life. When initially asked if he supported exceptions to the state’s draconian abortion law, Cruz gave a nonanswer, simply saying that states should determine their own laws.

“Well, listen, abortion is an issue that many Texans, many Americans, care deeply about, and it’s an issue that people of good faith can disagree,” Cruz said.

“You did not directly answer the question,” said debate moderator Gromer Jeffers, who again tried to push Cruz to respond to the question. “Why is this an issue you won’t address, about saying whether you support or oppose exceptions for rape and incest?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?” asked an exasperated Cruz.

Cruz is clearly avoiding the question because he knows that abortion bans that don’t permit exceptions for rape and incest aren’t popular with voters, even in the state of Texas and even among Republicans.

He quickly tried to change the subject and accused Allred of allowing minors to get abortions without their parents’ permission. “He has voted in favor of striking down Texas law that gives parents the right to be notified and consent,” said Cruz. “He’s voted in favor of striking down Texas’ law and legalizing abortion up to and including the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy.”

“Senator Cruz just called himself pro-life. You’re not,” responded Allred. “It’s not pro-life to deny women care so long that they can’t have children anymore. It’s not pro-life to force a victim of rape to carry a their rapist baby. It’s not pro-life that our maternal mortality has skyrocketed up by 56 percent.

“When Ted Cruz says he’s pro-life, he doesn’t mean yours.”

Donald Trump babbled incoherently at a rally in Atlanta, Tuesday night, the latest in a series of untethered performances from the former president where his apparent cognitive decline showed on full display. 

“‘Thirty-two days, Mr. Congressman. Thirty-two,’ she goes. And the election will be in thirty-twoooooo daaaaaays. Thirty-two days,” Trump said to the audience, slurring his words. 

The former president was attempting to mock Kamala Harris for repeatedly announcing that she had only 32 days until the election during a rally speech. Trump claimed that she froze when the “teleprompter crashed.” 

And with that, Trump’s so-called “weave” carried him away.

“Ohhh, I would’ve loved to—you know, it kicked back in, it’s called a kickback. Like, some people know a lot about a kickback. It’s called a kickback. They know in this administration. But no, it’s a kickback, it kicks back in,” Trump garbled.  

Trump picking up on the minute details of Harris’s public speaking performances is particularly ironic considering the gibberish he was in the midst of delivering during his sleepy Tuesday night speech.

At one point, Trump complained about the “woke military,” playing an explicitly homophobic video that included clips from the antiwar film Full Metal Jacket (1987), and expressed his apparent love for world wars, a third of which he is constantly promising Americans is on the horizon. 

“So, we won two, BEAUTIFUL, biiiiiiiiiig, horrible—in many ways—we won two world wars with that attitude,” Trump said. 

This is only the latest scattered, strange performance that Trump has given this week, as his blitz of events seems to be catching up with him. 

Trump struggled to provide coherent answers to policy questions during an interview with the Economic Club of Chicago earlier Tuesday, and lashed out when faced with multiple fact-checks. 

During a town hall in Pennsylvania on Monday night, the Republican presidential nominee abruptly stopped taking questions, and instead had his team play music for 40 minutes while he silently swayed back and forth onstage. Occasionally, he even pretended to conduct.

Donald Trump is going to work at McDonald’s.

CNN reported Tuesday that the former president will visit one of the fast food restaurants in Pennsylvania on Sunday and “work the fry cooker,” a bizarre stunt after his repeated claims that Kamala Harris never worked at a McDonald’s.

Trump has always been a big fan of the fast food chain, even catering a White House event during a government shutdown in 2019 with some of McDonald’s offerings. The news that he would work there for a short time drew laughter on social media.

Harris has often spoken of her time working at McDonald’s while she was a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., even telling the story in a campaign ad. Her running mate, Tim Walz, mocked Trump at a campaign event in August, questioning whether he’d be able to work there.

“Can you simply picture Donald Trump working at a McDonald’s, trying to make a McFlurry or something?” Walz said. “He couldn’t run that damn McFlurry machine if it cost him anything.”

On Sunday, Trump, a child of nepotism who has never worked a job outside of the Trump Organization, will presumably have his time cooking french fries. It remains to be seen how hands-on his role at the golden arches will be, or if the stunt will help his campaign at all, with recent polls showing him narrowly behind Harris in Pennsylvania.

A Georgia judge has ruled to block some of the recent changes to the state’s election regulations, deciding that a new rule by the Trumpian board—and its suspicious timing ahead of the November election—would only amount to bedlam for the swing state.

In his Tuesday night decision, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote that the initiative, driven by local MAGA politicos (whom Trump referred to as “pit bulls fighting for victory” before their August vote) was “too much, too late.”

The regulation would have mandated poll workers to hand-count ballots after they were electronically filed—an arduous order that local officials warned last week was making it that much harder to find people willing to do the job.

In his ruling, McBurney noted that although the strenuous regulation appeared, on its face, to be consistent with the intent and purpose of the State Election Board, the timing of the rule’s passage and its expedited implementation would only further destabilize the election and seed chaos.

“A rule that introduces a new and substantive role on the eve of election for more than 7,500 poll workers who will not have received any formal, cohesive, or consistent training and that allows for our paper ballots—the only tangible proof of who voted for whom—to be handled multiple times by multiple people following an exhausting Election Day all before they are securely transported to the official tabulation center does not contribute to lessening the tension or boosting the confidence of the public for this election,” McBurney emphasized.

“This election season is fraught; memories of January 6 have not faded away, regardless of one’s view of that date’s fame or infamy,” McBurney wrote. “Anything that adds uncertainty and disorder to the electoral process disserves the public.”

It’s the second consecutive blow to the MAGA movement’s supposed success in the Peach State. On Monday, McBurney torched another component of the far-right overhaul, deciding that local election officials could not stand in the way of voting results and cannot refuse to certify election results. Instead, officials have a duty to certify the results by 5 p.m. on the Monday following Election Day, according to the judge.

“No election superintendent (or member of a board of elections and registration) may refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance,” he ruled.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s massive grift was embarrassingly revealed during his debate against Representative Colin Allred Tuesday night.

Cruz has been seriously struggling in his Senate race against Allred, and on Tuesday, it seemed that Allred dealt several critical blows to the Texas Republican.

In his closing remarks, Allred didn’t hold back.

“We’re all Americans, and we’re all Texans. We need a leader who will bring us together around our shared values. That’s what I’m trying to do during my six years in Congress. That’s the exact opposite of what Senator Cruz has done,” Allred said.

“Whatever he says tonight, you’ve seen it for 12 years. He’s been one of the most divisive senators in the entire country. If you don’t like how things are going in Washington right now, well, you know what, he is singularly responsible for it.

“He has introduced this new kind of ‘angertaiment’ where you just get people upset and then you podcast about it, and you write a book about it, and you make some money on it, but you’re not actually there when people need you. Like when the lights went out, when 30 million Texans were relying on a senator to spring into action, he went to Cancun. That’s who he is,” Allred said.

Throughout the debate, Cruz appeared incapable of countering any of his opponent’s blows. As Allred launched attack after brutal attack, Cruz just awkwardly laughed.

Cruz has innovated a new way to scam podcast money back into his now flailing campaign. The Republican senator has been funneling the payout from his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz, straight into a pro-Cruz super-PAC called “Truth and Courage.” According to iHeartMedia and Cruz, the senator is simply “volunteering” his time, and the massive payouts are just “digital revenue.”

Cruz faces a tough election against Allred, especially considering that nearly 2.6 million people have registered to vote in the state since the midterm elections—the bulk of whom are from some of Texas’s most liberal territories, including the areas surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin.