Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blasted President Joe Biden, the Afghanistan withdrawal, and the proposed spending bill in a wide-ranging interview with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday.
Cruz asserted that Chinese President Xi Jinping saw the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as a weakness, arguing that the odds of China attacking Taiwan “have increased 10-fold in the last month, because as Xi has looked at Biden, I fear that Xi has made the determination that Biden is too weak and too unable to do anything.”
Later in the interview, Cruz returned to the topic of Afghanistan by claiming Biden’s mask mandate policies amid the Covid-19 pandemic is a ruse to distract from how he handled the withdrawal.
“But you put your finger on what the White House is trying to do,” he said. “They want to change the topic from Afghanistan. It’s why Biden issued this completely illegal and unconstitutional vaccine mandate, because he wanted to change the topic from the disaster in Afghanistan.”
“The vaccine mandate is going to be struck down in court. They know that,” Cruz claimed. “But the president is defying the law because he wanted the press to start defending him and stop talking about the disasters in Afghanistan, and he’s counting on a bunch of big businesses in particular forcing their employees to comply before the matter is ever adjudicated and before the order is struck down.
During the interview, Bartiromo also brought up Democrats’ “$5.5 trillion spending package.” Democrats have presented a $3.5 trillion spending bill, but the actual costs have been estimated to be over $5 trillion, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Several Democrats have also said the bill will probably have to be scaled back.
Cruz called the proposal “disastrous,” and said that “this is the Bernie Sanders budget.”
He then went on to praise Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) — two moderate Democrats who have blocked certain initiatives from Democratic leadership, such as abolishing the filibuster — for opposing the bill as it currently stands.
Sinema has said she will not support the bill, as has Manchin — writing in an op-ed that it “will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans.”
“Whether it passes or not will depend on 50 Democrats in the Senate, do they get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to go along?” Cruz said. “I can tell you [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer is putting a world of hurt and pressure on the two of them. I hope they stand their ground. They have demonstrated some real courage so far, standing up to the crazies in their party.”
Watch above, via Fox News.