'F**k you, Ted': Sen. Cruz caught on secret recordings attacking Vance, complaining about Trump, report says

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Calgary-born Republican widely expected to make another bid for the White House in 2028, was reportedly caught on tape tarring Vice President JD Vance with the same brush he uses on Tucker Carlson and criticizing President Donald Trump's tariff policies.

Unlike politicos keen to fault Vance for his enduring friendship with Carlson, Cruz has avoided publicly broadening his critique of the podcaster to the vice president. Behind closed doors, however, Cruz has apparently exercised no such restraint.

'JD is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same.'

In secret recordings provided to Axios by an unnamed Republican source, which were apparently taken during a pair of private meetings with donors last year, Cruz allegedly characterized the vice president as a non-interventionist puppet of Carlson.

"Tucker created JD," Cruz reportedly says in the recordings. "JD is Tucker's protégé, and they are one and the same."

Cruz and Carlson have long appeared at odds on matters both foreign and domestic. Carlson, for instance, castigated the senator in 2022 for calling the Jan. 6, 2021, melee a "violent terrorist attack."

The enmity between them reached an apparent high, however, in June, when the two clashed on Carlson's show over whether the U.S. should militarily back Israeli actions against Iran.

In the immediate wake of the combative interview, Cruz accused the host of engaging in "gotcha" journalism, attacking Trump, defending terrorists, demonizing Israel, and "running interference" for the Iranian regime.

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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

While both men have traded barbs in the months since, Cruz appears increasingly fixated on Carlson, accusing him of being anti-Semitic, an Islamist, and — in response to Carlson's criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — "#AmericaLast."

In the recordings, Cruz also allegedly accused Vance of working with Carlson to oust former national security adviser Mike Waltz over his support for U.S. strikes on Iran.

Waltz "supported being vigorous against Iran and bombing Iran — and Tucker and JD took Mike out," Cruz allegedly told donors.

While Waltz's hawkish stance on Iran and alleged behind-the-scenes coordination with Netanyahu reportedly angered Trump, the straw that broke the camel's back may have been Waltz's accidental invitation of an anti-Trump polemicist to a private high-level group chat on Signal where senior administration officials were discussing sensitive military plans.

On the recordings, Cruz allegedly also claimed that Vance worked in concert with Carlson to help Daniel Davis, an Army veteran critical of Israel's actions in Gaza, secure a senior national intelligence position — a post that Davis was ultimately denied.

Carlson told Axios that he "didn't have anything to do" with the ousting of Waltz or attempted onboarding of Davis.

The Texas senator appears in recent months to have been laying the groundwork for a 2028 bid in which he would run as the kind of Republican Trump crushed in the 2016 and 2024 Republican primaries. According to Axios, this has involved courting powerful pro-Israel donors and "positioning himself as a traditional free-trade, pro-interventionist Republican."

Whereas early pulling suggests that Vance is poised to sweep the GOP 2028 primary, Cruz presently has a 2% chance of becoming the 2028 GOP nominee, according to Polymarket, and proved unable to capture 1% in an October poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire.

Blaze News has reached out for comment to the offices of Vance and Cruz.

A spokesperson for Cruz told Axios that the senator is "the president's greatest ally in the Senate and battles every day in the trenches to advance his agenda" and that "those battles include fights over staffers who try to enter the administration despite disagreeing with the president and seeking to undermine his foreign policy."

The spokesperson added, "Sen. Cruz is proud of those fights, his accomplishments, and his close relationship with the president. These attempts at sowing division are pathetic and getting boring."

'They will be terminated on the spot.'

The Texas senator allegedly also attacked Trump's tariff policy on the recordings from his private meetings with donors.

Cruz allegedly regaled donors with the tale of a call that he and other senators made to Trump that "did not go well" after the president introduced his Liberation Day tariffs.

"Trump was in a bad mood," Cruz allegedly told the donors. "I've been in conversations where he was very happy. This was not one of them."

"Mr. President, if we get to November of [2026] and people's 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10%-20% at the supermarket, we're going to go into Election Day, face a bloodbath," Cruz allegedly recalled telling Trump. "You're going to lose the House, you're going to lose the Senate, you're going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week."

Cruz allegedly told donors that Trump's response was, "F**k you, Ted."

At the mention of "Liberation Day" in reference to the tariffs, Cruz allegedly joked with donors in the meeting, "I've told my team if anyone uses those words, they will be terminated on the spot. That is not language we use."

Blaze News has reached out to the White House for comment.

According to the Texas Politics Project, Cruz's job approval rating is presently 35% overall and 69% among Republicans.

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