The GOP's Ghastly Parlor Game: Cruz or Trump?

But he revealed his true character even earlier in his Senate tenure when he went after former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for defense secretary. In a manner that evoked the worst of Joseph McCarthy, Cruz smeared Hagel with unsupported insinuations that the nominee received money from foreign governments or extremist groups. There seems to be no argument too low for him to make -- for example, his recent, four-Pinocchio claim that "the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats."

Second, while Trump's efforts are in the service of self-promotion, Cruz's are all that plus the implementation of an extreme right ideology. The fact that senators of both parties despise him has tended to obscure the substantive threat he poses to the country.

At the same time, Trump's ascendancy, and the outrageousness of his pronouncements, has made Cruz appear like the more reasonable alternative. As Nevada Republican Sen. Dean Heller told me in an interview for "Washington Post Live," "I don't think six months ago anybody would have thought that Ted Cruz was mainstream. ... Trump has made Cruz mainstream."

In fact, Cruz is by far the more doctrinaire and ideologically extreme. You can see Trump making a deal -- on taxes, on funding Planned Parenthood, on implementing Obamacare, you name it. Cruz, not so much. Jeffrey Toobin's 2014 New Yorker profile of Cruz was fittingly titled "The Absolutist."

He is so incensed by the "judicial tyranny" of Supreme Court rulings on Obamacare and same-sex marriage that he wants a constitutional amendment to subject Supreme Court justices to retention elections, a plan contrary to the framers' vision of judicial independence. "Today is some of the darkest 24 hours in our nation's history," Cruz told Sean Hannity after the court's rulings last summer. Really? Pearl Harbor? 9/11? Dred Scott?

I can't believe I'm saying this. But I might prefer President Trump.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.