Presidential hopeful Ted Cruz spoke to a crowd at Republican headquarters in Little Rock this morning, one of three appearances he’s making in the state today (later this evening, he’ll be in Van Buren at a dinner event that includes the presentation of an award to state Rep. Justin Harris).

A few notes from watching the live stream:

Cruz is a formidable orator. He hit all of the most important Tea Party hot buttons, firing up the crowd with his patented mix of disenfranchised conservative fury and buttoned-down, Federalist Society starchiness. (One of my favorite quotes from Jeffrey Toobin’s 2014 profile of Cruz in the New Yorker: “He dresses like an I.B.M. salesman circa 1975, in boxy blue suits, white shirts, and red ties.”)

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Watching Cruz today, the question foremost in my mind was this: What exactly is his strategy for dealing with the rise of Donald Trump, who’s polling at the top of the pack in the overcrowded GOP primary?

In the context of Trump, part of Cruz’s message today had to be read as: Hey guys, remember, I say crazy, destructive things too! He bragged about declaring that the U.S. would become “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism” under President Obama’s multilateral nuclear deal with Iran. Cruz said that statement earned him blowback from fellow Republicans, specifically Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. They chastised him for using over-the-top rhetoric on the issue, he said.

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“Let me give y’all a real simple principle,” Cruz told the crowd today. “Truth is not rhetoric.”

Since Cruz’s Tea Party base holds establishment Republican leaders like Romney and Bush in great contempt, their disapproval counts as points in his favor. But I don’t know — that seems pretty tepid compared to Donald Trump’s proud declaration on stage at the Republican debate that he wouldn’t rule out a third party bid if he doesn’t win the party’s nomination. While Cruz’s actual politics are far more conservative than Trump in most regards, the Texas senator just doesn’t have the same raw, lunatic bombast (this is sometimes called “authenticity”) that a not-insignificant portion of the Republican base craves … and that Trump feeds like no one else.

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What else to say about Cruz’s address? About what you’d expect. He told the crowd today that he’ll start his presidency by rescinding every “illegal action” taken by President Obama, investigating Planned Parenthood and ending the “persecution of religious liberty” — the go-to rhetoric for opponents of LGBTQ rights now that it’s becoming less and less kosher to explicitly advocate treating gay and trans people as second-class citizens (unless perhaps you’re Mike Huckabee).

He’d then undo the nuclear agreement with the Iranians and move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, “the once and eternal capitol of Israel.”

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He’d repeal every word of Obamacare. Presumably that includes the words about requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions. The Affordable Care Act as a topic of Republican angst has grown a little less pronounced as of late — the tone on health care was strikingly muted during the first GOP debate — but among Cruz’s wing of the party, Obamacare is still the deadliest of poisons.

Cruz would “instruct the federal Department of Education — which should be abolished — that Common Core ends today.” That line got a loud and sustained cheer. Has anyone told the folks in the crowd that Gov. Asa Hutchinson has decided to continue Common Core in Arkansas for the foreseeable future?

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Cruz will abolish the IRS and “padlock the building.” He gets in a hokey laugh line about how he’d “take all 90,000 [IRS employees] and put ’em down on our Southern border,” since that might scare potential immigrants away. 

After expressing outrage over our unsecured borders, he tells the story of how his father, a Cuban immigrant, sought refuge from Castro’s regime in the U.S. “When I was a kid, my father told me all the time that we had a place to flee to,” Cruz said.

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He commends Arkansas for moving up its primary date to create a bloc of Southern states; the “SEC primary” can be reasonably predicted to help hard-right conservatives such as himself. Cruz said Arkansas “will play a critical role” in the 2016 Republican nomination. Objectively untrue.

Cruz is a smart guy and a gifted politician. He’s also an unbending radical, in some ways the most alarming of the candidates in the Republican field. Behind everything he says, there lurks the apocalyptic implication that America is being overwhelmed by dark forces, and only Ronald Reagan reborn — i.e., Ted Cruz — can turn them back. “We will not give up on our children and grandchildren,” he declared at the end of his speech today. “We will defend liberty, we will defend the Constitution, and we will restore the United States of America.”

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