Revolutions tend to devour their own, and so Ted Cruz finally became the main course in Indiana on Tuesday. The Senator’s ruin-to-rule campaign strategy was years in the making but didn’t anticipate Donald Trump, who turned out to be the greater revolutionary.  After Mr. Cruz’s Wisconsin victory a month ago, the GOP’s not-Trump wing seemed strong enough to deny the businessman the nomination. Their alternative was Mr. Cruz, who arranged the one-on-one contest in Indiana he said he could win.  But in seven straight contests after Wisconsin the GOP electorate peered at the Texan and the New Yorker, compared their merits, and decided they preferred Mr. Trump. Mr. Cruz’s ratings among Republicans tanked over the last two weeks, according to Gallup, with 39% favorable and 45% unfavorable views. In January his net approval was 54 points higher.  The reasons for this crash go back to Mr. Cruz’s strategy to run for President that began from his earliest days in the Senate in 2013. He calculated he couldn’t stand out in the presidential pack if he merely attacked President Obama and Hillary Clinton. So he and his allies at the Heritage Foundation and the Mark Levin talk-radio right put together a strategy to inflame populist resentment against the GOP Congress and catapult Mr. Cruz to the White House.  In the narrative they contrived, true conservatives are forever betrayed by the corrupt leaders of what Mr. Cruz called “the Washington cartel.” Thus they set up impossible feats of strength like the ObamaCare government shutdown, or phony tests of political purity on drones and gun control. Mr. Cruz also saw immigration as a wedge for the base and made it his signature.  The strategy raised Mr. Cruz’s profile among conservatives, but one price was to stigmatize all other GOP candidates as “establishment,” even conservative Governors. Another was to set the stage for Mr. Trump, who co-opted the rebellion.  The billionaire became the more effective and polarizing outsider. He called for mass deportation and making Mexico pay for the wall. He doubled down on protectionism. Mr. Cruz tried to move further to the right on nativism and trade, including the spectacle of renouncing his endorsement of trade promotion authority the day before the vote, but he could never outflank Mr. Trump.  Far from challenging the New Yorker, Mr. Cruz helped to normalize Mr. Trump’s message. In July 2015, Mr. Cruz told Sean Hannity that “Donald” is “a friend of mine. . . . He’s bold and brash and he’s willing to speak the truth.” In another interview that month, he added that “the Washington cartel supports amnesty and I think amnesty is wrong and I salute Donald Trump for focusing on it.”  As late as December he tweeted that Mr. Trump is “terrific,” declining the “cage match” with Mr. Trump that Mr. Cruz claimed the establishment wanted. The Trump love-in caucus, with Mr. Cruz and conservative media celebrities as members, enhanced the New Yorker’s credibility. Mr. Cruz’s praise also undermined the moral case against Mr. Trump’s politics.  All of this worked for a while—until Mr. Trump turned on Mr. Cruz. The Texan’s late attacks on the businessman lacked credibility because Mr. Cruz had said the opposite only weeks earlier. By the end in Indiana he tried to link Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. Trump’s image was already firmly set among primary voters.  On Tuesday Mr. Cruz left the race, but not before saying, “I’m going to do something I haven’t done for the entire campaign. I’m going to tell you what I really think of Donald Trump.” He then called him “the biggest narcissist” and a “pathological liar,” confirming in the process that Mr. Cruz had been the one lying all along.  Mr. Cruz’s pandering to the right also sent a signal to moderate and somewhat conservative Republicans that he didn’t need their support. Mr. Trump split the “very conservative” vote with Mr. Cruz but crushed the Senator among more moderate voters. That doomed Mr. Cruz in the East in particular, but also in Indiana.  The Texan’s lost opportunity was to expand his appeal beyond his most conservative base of support and coalesce mainstream Republicans. He never tried to break out of his factional ghetto, as if excoriating the establishment and transgender bathroom laws could motivate a majority to defeat Mr. Trump’s plurality.  The conservatives aghast at Mr. Trump should appreciate the irony that even as Mr. Cruz hoped to produce a new conservative era, he helped wreck the best chance for conservative reform in years.
How Ted Cruz made Donald Trump possible and sunk his own candidacy, the Wall Street Journal writes in an editorial.