The White House Believes Ted Cruz Is Working to Undermine Trump Due to His 2028 Ambitions

The White House and its allies believe Sen. Ted Cruz is taking positions antithetical to President Donald Trump from his perch as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee as a way to position himself against Vice President JD Vance ahead of 2028.

And they’re not happy about it.

Cruz has been making life difficult for the White House behind the scenes. He’s gone to battle over nominations, called a hearing for and been vocally critical of a top Trump appointee and unsuccessfully sought universal subpoena power, which would have given him the ability to call in anybody from the Trump administration and its close allies in the tech world.

More recently, Cruz has thrown himself into the fight over who will run NASA. Sources told NOTUS that Cruz was gunning for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who was previously the interim NASA administrator, to permanently head up the agency. Vance and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, were pushing for Jared Isaacman — whom Trump originally nominated before withdrawing amid a feud with Elon Musk — making the NASA administrator fight a proxy battle between the two 2028 hopefuls.

Vance and Wiles ultimately prevailed, and Isaacman was reappointed to the position. But Trumpworld believes Cruz is still creating roadblocks for Isaacman’s nomination. When the Senate returned after a record-long government shutdown, Republicans were surprised to see that Isaacman wasn’t listed on the markup schedule, despite having already undergone a confirmation hearing in April, three sources familiar with the matter told NOTUS.

Instead, Cruz scheduled a hearing for Isaacman in early December.

“The roadblocks that Ted is putting up in front of the president’s nominee for NASA administrator — someone who’s gone through the hearing and is qualified — only serve as a desperate attempt to relaunch a political career as a protest candidate,” a source close to Trump told NOTUS. “Ted has been terribly unserious as of late.”

One senior Trump administration official told NOTUS that Cruz’s actions to advance his own agenda are “not opaque, it’s been pretty transparent, and it’s a frustration” that many in Trump’s orbit have.

A source close to Isaacman’s confirmation process blamed the delay on the unique situation of being nominated, having that nomination pulled and then getting nominated again, causing the process to reset.

The White House, the vice president’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Cruz’s office declined to comment.

The administration and its allies believe Cruz has been posturing ahead of 2028 for months. Cruz was publicly critical of Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, following his threat to revoke ABC’s broadcast license.

Cruz said Carr’s comments — made as the network suspended Jimmy Kimmel for remarks he made about Charlie Kirk’s assassination — were “dangerous as hell” and compared Carr to a Mafia boss.

“And I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas,’” Cruz said on his podcast, referring to the mob film. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar, going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”

In light of the criticism, Cruz is having Carr testify before the Commerce Committee on Dec. 17.

“He won’t collaborate or support any of the agenda Trump ran on,” the source close to Trump said. “Instead, he’s used his role to stifle Trump’s priorities. Ted is quickly going the way of MTG, and I can only imagine what fresh nickname Trump comes up with now to end Ted’s career for the second time.”

One senior GOP aide said Cruz has put some members in a tough spot to even attend some hearings because “it’s a win for Cruz and a win for nobody else.”

To be sure, Cruz has made government overreach on free speech a top issue for years and has a long history of defending free speech, even writing his dissertation on the topic back in 1992.

“Our First Amendment right to freedom of speech is under attack, as radicals on the left try to silence anyone who disagrees with them,” Cruz said in 2024. “The path forward requires us to stand firm against those who seek to suppress free speech. I remain committed to fighting our ‘first freedoms.’”

Cruz and Trump have a long and complicated history. The Texas Senator ran against Trump in the 2016 primary and refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention that year, telling attendees to “vote their conscience.” Cruz, though, like most Republican lawmakers, has come around to be broadly supportive of Trump.

On Tuesday, in response to a report that Cruz was laying the groundwork for a 2028 bid, Trump said the senator was “a very good guy, he is a very good friend of mine” — and added that he was “not that surprised” to hear he’s considering running in 2028.

But Cruz’s recent efforts to stand up to the White House have been ramping up and are becoming increasingly notable and more public. He’s one of the biggest Republican critics of Tucker Carlson, calling him a “coward” and “complicit in evil” because he interviewed white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Cruz’s criticism of Carlson has been viewed by many Republicans as an explicit attempt to create distance between himself and Vance, who is a close ally of Carlson.

Cruz and the White House also butted heads at the beginning of this Congress when Cruz sought unilateral subpoena authority for his committee. This would have allowed him to subpoena anybody without the agreement of the ranking Democrat on the panel or a full vote by the committee.

Two sources with knowledge of the matter said that while Cruz was working to include the power in the rules package, the White House, through its legislative affairs team, worked overtime to kill it.

Cruz has had a long record of criticizing Big Tech, dating back to late 2010’s. He has routinely pledged to investigate the tech industry, saying last year that “Big Tech poses the single-greatest threat to free speech and to democracy.”

“Being the chair of the Commerce Committee is incredibly good for jobs in Texas, but the Commerce Committee has direct jurisdiction over Big Tech,” Cruz said last year. “I’ve introduced multiple pieces of legislation, and I will work hand in hand with the Trump administration to fight to defend our free speech rights online, and to use every legal tool we have to protect your right to speak and to speak freely without Big Tech censoring and silencing you.”

Though the White House was successful in fending off Cruz’s attempts to exercise subpoena power, it kicked off even more bad blood between the two sides and foreshadowed what was to come for the remainder of the year.