Ted Cruz expected to offer support for Donald Trump

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ted cruz

Reuters/Charles Mostoller

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Sen. Ted Cruz was expected to announce as soon as Friday that he would get behind Donald Trump, a shock political move for the Texas senator who threw subtle mud on the Republican nominee at the GOP convention and spent months on the campaign trail sharply criticizing him as unfit to serve as president.

Multiple sources close to Cruz told Politico that an expression of support was imminent, thought it was unclear if the senator merely planned to announce he would vote for Trump or offer a more full-throated endorsement.

The news was confirmed on Twitter by Rosie Gray, a politics reporter for BuzzFeed, who cited a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Conservative talk show host Steve Deace, who backed Cruz during the primaries, tweeted about Cruz's "coming endorsement" and called it the "worst political calculation I've ever witnessed."

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Neither a representative for Cruz nor the Trump campaign immediately returned a request for comment.

"If it turns out to be true, it's hard to see this as anything other than a political calculation," Ted Newton, former communications adviser to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, told Business Insider. "Nothing has changed between the convention and now to warrant a change of mind."

After refusing to attack each other for months at the outset of the GOP primary, Trump and Cruz feuded intensely on the campaign trail when the Republican field narrowed.

Trump repeatedly questioned whether Cruz's Canadian birthplace made him ineligible to be president, attacked the looks of his wife in a tweet, and fueled a conspiracy that suggested his dad was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

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When Trump later secured the nomination, Cruz declined to endorse him and delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention urging conservatives to vote their "conscience" in the November election.

Trump later said he would refuse to accept an endorsement from Cruz. 

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