Trump once impliedly mocked Ted Cruz’s wife’s mental illness

Just another one of the awful things Trump did we have memory holed.

I firmly believe that Donald J. Trump did more awful stuff, more frequently, and with more nefarious intent than we will ever be able to fully comprehend. Trump was consistently shitty and awful, but the media and the electorate have consistently chosen to overlook this, or at least, treat each new awful thing as something novel, instead of part of a consistent pattern and practice. Over the years, Republicans offered many, many bad faith defenses of his awful behavior. The polite center and the mainstream media happily slurped up each one of these defenses in service to some sort of fake Trump redemption arc narrative (“NEW TONE!!”).

But, like all the diseases trying to get into Mr. Burns body at the same time, the thing that keeps us from properly conceptualizing how shitty Trump is that there’s just too much! Before we could fully absorb and comprehend each new awful thing, he did five more awful things. This was just life from anyone who chose to pay attention to politics from like 2015 onward.

To that end, I wanted to bring up a truly awful thing Trump did that we have largely forgotten. Like so much of the shit involving Trump, this one started with a few dumb tweets. From Politico:

Donald Trump tweeted and then deleted a message Tuesday evening that threatened to "spill the beans" about Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi. Then he tweeted again.

"Wow @SenTedCruz, that is some low level ad you did using a picture of Melania in a G.Q. shoot.Be careful or I will spill the beans on your wife," Trump tweeted, before deleting the message seconds later.

Now what did Trump mean by “spill the beans”? Well, he meant he wanted attack Ted Cruz by pushing the (already publicly known) story of Heidi Cruz’s stress episode:

About a decade ago, when Mrs. Cruz returned from D.C. to Texas and faced a significant professional transition, she experienced a brief bout of depression.
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 Heidi Cruz took an upaid absence as an managing director with Goldman Sachs last year after her husband began his presidential campaign.

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BuzzFeed News reported last March on a heavily redacted 2005 police report where Heidi Cruz was spotted sitting on the ground near a Texas highway outside of Austin. According to the report itself, Heidi Cruz displayed no "signs of intoxication."

Mental illness effects millions of people. I’m not fan of Ted Cruz, but this was a tragic event for the Cruz family that they thankfully appear to have recovered from. Trump is a monster for using it, even if just impliedly, to attack Heidi Cruz.

It’s worth pointing out that this was all BEFORE Trump became President. I could say that the media utterly failed to make this a narrative point. Trump never had to deny he was attacking Heidi Cruz over mental illness because the media apparently never thought it was worth asking him. But, do you honestly think it would have changed a single Trump voters vote in 2016? I think Trump would have just said he meant something else and the media is smearing him. And conservatives would have bought it, just like they bought a lot of his bullshit. Still, it’s worth wondering what would have happened if the media had done its job properly in 2016, rather than try to play a both sides game with Hillary Clinton’s poor email practices.