Ted Cruz never got over losing the 2016 nomination to Donald Trump.
He smiled for the cameras, signed on as an ally, and quietly kept his eye on the next race.
But one Fox News interview just showed exactly which voters the Texas Senator is courting for 2028.
Ted Cruz Picks a Diesel Fight With the President
President Trump signed an executive order in October 2026 that waived a slate of new sanctions and tariffs targeting Russia. Those penalties sat just two days away from kicking in.
Congress wrote them into a sweeping sanctions package that carries the name of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and Trump signed it in September. The law threatened tariffs on the five biggest buyers of Russian energy and on any country helping Moscow slip around the sanctions.
The waiver followed a separate agreement Trump struck with Vladimir Putin to push more Russian diesel onto world markets. Diesel prices have pinched farmers, truckers, and every family buying groceries that rolled in on the back of an 18-wheeler.
And the President didn’t dress it up. “We need oil for the world, and this is diesel, which is what we need, so we’re very happy to get it,” Trump told reporters when he announced the deal.
Trump also made clear he didn’t want to chase Russia away from the negotiating table while his team works to end the war in Ukraine, a war Russia launched in February 2022 and one that Joe Biden spent years bankrolling with no exit plan in sight.
But that reasoning didn’t sit well with US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Cruz sat down with Fox News host Aishah Hasnie alongside US Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK). Near the end, Hasnie reminded Cruz that he hammered Biden for waiving sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, then asked where he stood on Trump doing something similar.
“I wish the president hadn’t done it. I think it was a mistake,” Cruz said.
And he kept going. “The current path unfortunately just benefits Putin and is not a good idea,” Cruz added.
His alternative? Buy more diesel from Canada. “Canada is a friend,” Cruz said, before taking a shot at the President’s trade fight with Ottawa. “I would like to see this trade war end and end now.”
Ted Cruz Accidentally Made Trump’s Case for Him
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Cruz handed the White House a gift.
“Now it’s worth noting gasoline prices are a dollar a gallon less than they were under Joe Biden,” Cruz said.
Read that one twice. A Senator who wants voters to believe Trump botched energy policy just admitted Trump knocked a full dollar off every gallon of gas. Now the President is trying to do the same thing for diesel before the November 2026 midterms, while also trying to wind down a war that keeps Americans on the hook for somebody else’s border dispute.
And here’s where it gets a little rich. Cruz’s own big idea involves a waiver too. He wants Trump to suspend the renewable fuel standard for red dye diesel, the fuel farmers and ranchers burn in their tractors and equipment.
“With the stroke of a pen the president could take 30 cents a gallon off the cost of diesel,” Cruz said.
So a waiver that helps ethanol rules disappear counts as smart policy. A waiver that might keep Moscow talking about peace counts as a gift to Putin. Funny how that math works out.
Cruz didn’t stand alone, of course. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) posted that “Lindsey would be appalled.” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) called the move “beyond irresponsible.”
Tillis even tied it back to the Middle East. “If the president wants to actually bring down energy prices, he can do it by solving the Iran problem, not by doing a solid for Vladimir Putin,” Tillis said. Which is a curious line, since the same crowd tends to howl whenever Trump tries to solve the Iran problem at a negotiating table instead of a battlefield.
But not every Republican piled on. Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) said he was “glad” to see Trump waive the Russia provisions in what he called a “stupid law.”
The Donor-Class Audition Hiding Behind the Sanctions Fight
None of this happens in a vacuum. Cruz was Trump’s chief rival in the 2016 primary, and he famously stood on the Republican National Convention stage that summer and refused to endorse the nominee, telling delegates to “vote your conscience” instead.
He patched things up later. He played the loyal ally on cable news. And then the tapes surfaced.
In January 2026, Axios obtained nearly 10 minutes of recordings from private donor meetings in which Cruz mocked Trump’s tariff agenda and went after Vice President JD Vance. Axios described the recordings as a look at Cruz positioning himself as a traditional free-trade, pro-interventionist Republican ahead of a possible 2028 primary against Vance.
Cruz joked to donors that anyone on his team who used the phrase “Liberation Day” would get fired. “I’ve told my team if anyone uses those words, they will be terminated on the spot,” Cruz reportedly said. He also allegedly told the room, “JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same.”
His spokesman pushed back at the time, insisting Cruz remains the President’s greatest ally in the Senate.
But look at the pattern. Cruz has pushed a hard line on Russia for more than a decade, from pipeline sanctions to every escalation the foreign policy establishment dreamed up. He has backed a tough posture on Iran. He trashed tariffs in private. And now he wants the trade fight with Canada over “now,” while calling Trump’s peace-minded diesel deal a favor to the Kremlin.
Maybe Cruz just really loves Canadian diesel. Maybe. Plenty of Texans would happily fill up with it.
And yet the policy positions line up a little too neatly with what a certain kind of donor wants to hear. The checkbook crowd that misses the pre-Trump Republican Party, the one that shipped factory jobs overseas and cheered every new foreign deployment, has been shopping for a candidate. Cruz keeps auditioning for the part.
Vance sits on the other side of that divide. The Vice President has spent his time in office arguing for restraint, for ending wars instead of feeding them, and for trade policy that puts the American worker ahead of the Wall Street portfolio. That’s exactly the lane Cruz seems determined to run against.
The voters who sent Trump back to Washington, DC in 2024 asked for an end to the Ukraine war and relief at the pump. Trump is chasing both. Neoconservatives who have wanted a showdown with Russia since the Obama years keep acting like peace talks are the dangerous option, even with a nuclear-armed adversary on the other end of the line.
Expect more of this from Cruz as 2028 gets closer. If Trump lands a deal with Iran, watch for the same “mistake” language to show up again, maybe on the same network, maybe with the same polite smile.
Cruz can call it a mistake. The America First voters he’ll eventually need already know which side of this fight they’re on.
Sources: Mediaite; Newsweek; The Hill; The Spokesman-Review; Fox Business; CBS News; Axios; Houston Chronicle; The Independent
