A Video Of 18-Year-Old Ted Cruz Has Surfaced

Somebody has unearthed a video of 18-year-old Ted Cruz talking about his hopes and dreams, and not surprisingly, it’s detestable. In a brief interview, 18-year-old Cruz says that his goals are to "take over the world” and “rule everything,” and that he wants to be “rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.” In other words, all the things you’d want in a future president! Young Ted Cruz was just as smarmy as middle-aged Ted Cruz, and while Politico claims he made the remarks “sarcastically,” I’m not totally convinced.

“Aspirations. Is that like sweat on my butt?” a lanky Cruz quips in the video, presumably after someone else asked him what his aspirations were. (This must be what Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler refers to as the senator’s “great sense of humor.”) After realizing that he’s being asked what he wants to do with his life, Cruz says he’d like to “be in a teen tit film.” Then, shifting gears, he says he wants to “take over the world, world domination, you know, rule everything. Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.” What comforting words from a potential commander-in-chief.

The video was uploaded to YouTube by the user “Young Ted Cruz,” but its original source is unknown.

Cruz’s imperious demeanor shouldn't come as much of a surprise, though. The New York Times' Jason Horowitz reported in 2015 that during college debates, Cruz's "raw ambition sometimes soured the student judges." Indeed, a lot of people who knew the future senator in his youth have attested to what he was like as a young'un, and the verdict is almost unanimous: Cruz was an arrogant, unpleasant jerk.

Take Craig Mazin, who was roommates with Cruz for a year at Princeton. He’s been unrelenting in his criticism of Cruz, and had the following to say in a 2013 interview:

And, you know, I want to be clear, because Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics, but truthfully his personality is so awful that 99 percent of why I hate him is just his personality. If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only one percent less.

Mazin frequently harps on Cruz over Twitter.

But it's not just him. We also have Cruz’s old classmate from Butler College, Erik Leitch, who gave the following testimonial to The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy:

It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else ... the only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views.

Murphy interviewed more of Cruz’s former classmates, who used descriptors like "abrasive" and "arrogant" to describe him. Murphy says that four people who attended college with Cruz “independently offered the word ‘creepy’” to describe him, and that a few accused him of “donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived.”

Cruz may not be lurking around the women's dorm in a bathrobe anymore, but the haughtiness on display in that video doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. According to Slate's John Dickerson, many Republicans in the Senate think Cruz has an inflated ego, while GQ reports that he actually has a portrait of himself hanging in his office. If anything can be said for Cruz, it's that fame and power didn't fundamentally transform his personality. He was always like this.