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Senator Ted Cruz isn’t mincing words about President Trump’s military campaign against Iran, calling it “the most consequential decision” of his presidency and declaring that America is “unquestionably winning the war,” according to his exclusive interview with Fox News Digital. The Texas conservative’s assessment comes as the conflict approaches its one-month mark, with over 9,000 U.S. military strikes decimating Iran’s military capabilities and eliminating the country’s top leadership, as Cruz described in that same interview. In the interview, Cruz laid out the scale of American military success with precision that suggests he’s been getting detailed briefings straight from the source: “We’ve taken out virtually the entirety of their air defenses. We have taken out their short range and medium range ballistic missile launchers, their missiles, and their missile manufacturing capacity. Have taken out their drone launchers, their drones and their drone manufacturing capacity.”
The numbers are staggering: 140 Iranian ships sunk, representing the largest naval destruction since World War II, plus the elimination of the Ayatollah and virtually the entire top tier of Iranian military leadership, all as outlined by Cruz in the Fox News Digital interview. Cruz’s confidence isn’t just informed by public information; he revealed he spent the entire day with Trump on Air Force One and in the presidential limousine on February 27th, according to the interview. “We spent most of the day talking about, should he launch this military action, or should he negotiate further,” Cruz recalled in the interview. His advice to the president was direct: “I don’t think there’s anything to negotiate. The Ayatollah is negotiating in bad faith and the regime was weaker than it ever has been.”
That assessment has proven prescient, Cruz argued in the interview, where critics predicted quagmire and American casualties, but the reality has been a methodical dismantling of Iranian military infrastructure with minimal U.S. losses. Cruz’s reasoning for supporting the strikes echoes Trump’s own justification: “The Ayatollah and the mullahs in Iran have been waging war against the United States for 47 years. Iran has been the number one state funder of terrorism in the world,” as he stated in the Fox News Digital discussion. The senator’s argument is essentially conservative realist: after decades of proxy wars, embassy attacks, and threats, America finally dealt with the source.
But not everyone in Trump’s coalition is convinced, with polls showing a significant gap between MAGA-aligned Republicans, who support the strikes at 90%, and non-MAGA Republicans, where support drops to 54%, as Cruz referenced in his interview. Some of the president’s most vocal supporters from 2016 and 2020 have expressed concern that this isn’t the “America First” foreign policy they voted for, and Cruz directly addressed these concerns in the interview, framing the strikes not as nation-building or democracy promotion, but as necessary self-defense. “The president decimating this regime has made America substantially safer, and that is his responsibility as commander in chief,” Cruz said in the Fox News Digital interview. Whether that argument wins over the skeptics remains to be seen, but what’s clear is that Cruz has positioned himself as Trump’s most effective surrogate on Iran policy, armed with insider knowledge and willing to make the case that this military action represents exactly the kind of decisive leadership that separates Trump from the weak or stupid or low-IQ people, as the president himself might put it. For Cruz, this is vindication of a worldview he’s been advocating for years: peace through strength, delivered with overwhelming force against enemies who only understand strength.
Providence watches over the bold.
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