Sen. Ted Cruz "should have stayed home" rather than attend the Republican National Convention and pointedly not endorse Donald Trump — a move that both made the GOP nominee a "sympathetic figure" and "hurt" Cruz, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Thursday.
The "Morning Joe" moderator and former GOP Florida lawmaker called the Cruz speech —
loudly booed by convention delegates Wednesday night — an
"embarrassing moment" for the conservative senator.
"Ted Cruz said that people shouldn't stay home in November," Scarborough said. "Ted Cruz should have stayed home. If his intent was to hurt Donald Trump, it didn't work."
Instead, Scarborough argued, the speech made Trump "look like a sympathetic figure, not easy to do."
"It was an embarrassing moment for him," Scarborough said. "He hurt himself. I think most everybody in the hall thought that he hurt his political prospects for the future."
Scarborough made the same point in the moments following the controversial Trump speech as well.
Scarborough wondered hypothetically if "Trump knew all along what he was going to do, and decided, 'Let him hang himself.'"
"He comes down, and he's just sitting there, watching his son," Scarborough noted of Trump's entrance to the convention hall during Cruz's speech. "He's smiling. He doesn't attack Cruz. You know, maybe it's a conspiracy theory."
"He's just smiling while the whole place is going crazy."
"I talked to people in the Trump Organization last night after this happened — no anger," Scarborough said. "Nobody was venting . . . I talked to Donald a couple days ago. In the middle of the Melania dust-up [over her speech plagiarism] and he said, 'Listen, a mistake was made. We're going to clean it up, but right now, we're getting so much publicity about the speech, and everybody is saying so many nice things about Melania, I'm going to let it play out.'
"Donald Trump comes from the [public relations] school [that] any publicity is good publicity," Scarborough added. "Everybody's talking about this 'train wreck' of a convention every day, just like they talked about the 'train wreck' of his campaign every day, for nine months, and it works."
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