I learned a lot (big thank you to the invaluable Guido Seen Elsewhere section) from Leslie Loftis about why the sort of person who likes him likes Ted Cruz:

The stubbornness against Cruz is personal. We are fellow Houstonians. I know many people who have worked with him and many more who know someone who has. I’ve followed his career since late 2010 when my husband asked me to look into a lawyer named Ted Cruz, former solicitor general. Word in the Texas lawyer circles was that he wanted to challenge Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst for retiring Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s Senate seat. It was an impossible task according to the conventional wisdom. But many of the grassroots conservatives were tired of the party’s conventional wisdom.

Cruz covered every county in Texas, and he won votes with every hand he shook. People liked his ideas, and they liked him. He went from two per cent name recognition to an early call and huge victory in the Republican primary. (In Texas, that is the election.) I was there, and I liked what I saw.

But that is the people. And his staff. They are loyal. Intellectuals and party players, and the friends of those intellectuals and party players, however, sound like George W. Bush, “I just don’t like that guy.”

I’ve asked for substantive objections. They don’t come. Even the personality objections lack details. “Not nice.” Stories like mine about the kiss or videos of a dad taking a moment to airplane with his daughter, those don’t get air.

I’ve come to the same conclusion as this citizen journalist, “I believe what these elitists hate the most is that they feel that Ted Cruz looks down on them. Ted Cruz doesn’t respect them because they have money, or because they went to Harvard, or because they are men of power. Ted Cruz is motivated by principle, not class. Ted Cruz has a political agenda and a love of constitution that overrules loyalty to his Ivy League brethren.”

For the egos of his Ivy League brethren and their friends, we are jeopardising our Republic. Because they “just don’t like that guy”, we risk nominating the fickle and hardly likeable Donald Trump for president and actually electing the conniving Hillary Clinton. The American experiment is at stake, and our elites are pouting that the man rising to lead is not their kind of guy.

True, he is not. And that is why the people like him.

All of which only serves to flesh out some of things said by Tom Grey in a comment he recently attached to my earlier Cruz piece.

In my opinion, an amazing proportion of the trouble in the world is caused by men - mostly it is men - disagreeing about their relative importance in the world.  The GOP’s top dogs think they are topper dogs than young whippersnapper Cruz, but Cruz does not acknowledge this, because he’s a whippersnapper.  Which is why the voters like Ted Cruz and why the GOP elite hate Ted Cruz.

It’s now looking like Cruz may be the Sun Tzuist, rather than Trump.  And it looks as though the long-term significance of the Trump phenomenon may be that he is clearing the path for Cruz, by making a sufficient number of Republicans like Cruz, simply because he is not Trump.  More probably, there is no Sun Tzu happening here.  This is just how it happens to be turning out.

More anti-Trumpery here.  Summary: Trump won’t stand up to detailed scrutiny.  For starters, he ain’t nearly as rich as he pretends.

All of which is great for people like me and Tom Grey, who like Cruz because he is Cruz.

On the other hand … Trumpophrenia strikes again.