I Still Can’t Believe These Moments from the 2016 Republican Primary Really Happened

There is perhaps no better encapsulation of Charles Dickens’ immortal words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” than the 2016 Republican presidential primary. It was, generally speaking, the absolute fucking worst—but in its own warped ways, and in terms of watching grown men humiliate themselves on a national stage, it was also sometimes the best, you know what I mean?

As we embark once again on what’s already shaping up to be a nasty and comically uncivil Republican presidential primary for 2024, I find that there are a handful of moments from the 2016 primary that I’m still earnestly trying to process. Yes, we’ve already seen former President Donald Trump call Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) “Tiny D,” “Meatball Ron,” and “Rob”; we’ve seen Trump share an AI-generated Twitter Space of DeSantis announcing his presidential bid alongside gay Satan and Adolf Hitler. We’ve seen Trump’s eldest boy share an edited The Office clip showing DeSantis getting mocked for cross-dressing. We’ve seen Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), for whatever reason, share that he didn’t lose his virginity until he was 46. And, mind you, the first Republican presidential debate isn’t even until Aug. 23.

But I still have to believe this is all just the tip of the iceberg for the 2024 cycle, considering what we saw last time a Republican presidential field was this expansive. I have fond memories of former presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Ben Carson working out their differences in a supply closet, Trump instigating a very literal dick-measuring contest, and watching Cruz inadvertently elbow his wife in the face at a rally announcing the end of his campaign.

Yep, those were the days. Now, join me in a nasty little trip down memory lane...

Oh, Jeb (the artist formerly known as Jeb!). Shakespeare couldn’t have conceived of a more tragic story of fruitless ambition and male impotence than that of the listless, milquetoast former Florida governor. He entered the race a frontrunner, only to have his spirit crushed by one Trumpian taunt after another. And it all culminated in this, the centerpiece of his epic failure: him quite literally begging a visibly disinterested audience to “please clap” at the end of his flaccid remarks in February 2016.

If I were a better person I might almost feel sorry for the anti-abortion, right-wing nepo baby. But alas, I’m not.

The opening two minutes of this Republican presidential debate from February 2016 still haunt my dreams. Starting with Ben Carson, it seems no one could hear their names being called onto the debate stage, causing the candidates to crowd into the hallway off the stage and create an awkward human traffic jam of sorts. Name after name was called. They lingered awkwardly. Words can’t really do justice to the weirdness that ensued. Just watch it, please.

Speaking of moments you just have to see to believe (which is pretty much the entirety of this slideshow), I give you Donald Trump laughing along and agreeing with a woman in the audience at his rally who calls Ted Cruz a pussy. Yeah, I’ll say it: 2016 had its moments! It was the first time I ever saw the word “pussy” on The Hill.

Here’s the exact line of dialogue: “She just said a terrible thing,” Trump said, laughing, as he pointed to the audience member who made the comment about Cruz. “You know what she said? Shout it out, ’cause I don’t want to... OK, you’re not allowed to say—and I never expect to hear that from you again—she said, ‘He’s a pussy.’”

By March 2016, things were getting particularly nasty between Trump and Cruz. After a super PAC shared an ad making insinuations about Melania Trump’s past revealing photoshoots, Trump threatened to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife Heidi—only to then retweet a supporter’s tweet featuring side-by-side photos of Heidi and Melania with the caption, “No need to ‘spill the beans,’ the images are worth a thousand words.”

Trump’s crusade on Cruz only got darker when the businessman out of thin air procured the conspiracy theory that Cruz’s father aided the assassin who killed the late John F. Kennedy. Here are Trump’s exact words in an interview with Fox News at the time:

His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. ... I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.

Who else remembers where they were sitting when they saw the headline: Has Jeb Bush Worn the Same Sweater Four Days in a Row? Thanks to the meticulous sleuthing of journalist Ashley Feinberg, Gawker procured airtight evidence via campaign photos and social media depicting the former Florida governor appearing to wear the same sweater for four consecutive days in December 2015.

“Maybe Jeb just planned poorly for the weather, and only brought one sweater to New Hampshire,” Feinberg wrote at the time. “That raises a more alarming question: Will Jeb Bush be a poor (weather) planner as president? Or perhaps he has a closet filled with 50 different copies of the exact same sweater?”

Bush eventually commented on sweater-gate, boldly claiming to own not one but four sweaters, before observing that “Isis has not been defeated yet” in an emailed statement to Gawker. Deflection much?

Not long after Bush tweeted a cryptic photo of a gun with his name on it in February 2016, Twitter was overrun with both jokes and concerned posts wondering if the candidate was contemplating suicide. The concern-trolling wound up having some real-life implications. A CBS journalist read one such tweet aloud: “‘Your campaign is dying. Please, Governor Bush, don’t take your own life.’ Only in jest, but it shows you how painful things have become for Bush in South Carolina,” CBS’ Major Garrett said. The segment and reference to this particular tweet prompted the Bush campaign to demand an apology from the network.

Republicans—or at least Ted Cruz—are known to do some insane shit on 9/11, but it was still odd timing for former Texas Gov. Rick Perry to pull the plug on his campaign that day in 2015. Nevertheless, Perry—who in 2012 couldn’t even name the Department of Energy—ultimately had a bright future ahead of him as the future President Trump’s Secretary of Energy, though he couldn’t even remember the name of that department.

Yeah, even for a guy who likes porn tweets on 9/11 and a man obsessed with Egyptian pyramid conspiracy theories, this shit was weird. In February 2016, shortly after the Iowa caucus, Carson claimed that Cruz had lied to his supporters that Carson dropped out during the caucus in order to peel off Carson’s supporters for himself. At the height of their beef, the two ultimately decided to settle things like gentlemen: by finding the nearest supply closet, locking themselves inside it, and fighting it out until they resolved things, the Daily Beast reported at the time.

The once-respected neurosurgeon said a lot of things on the campaign trail and during his tenure in the Trump administration, musing about the origins of the Egyptian pyramids and referring to enslaved people as willing immigrants. But what’s stayed with me through the years is Carson’s insistence in 2015 that during his self-described troubled youth, he once tried to attack his mother with a hammer—a story his own mother denies and that fact-checking from journalists has poked holes in.

It was certainly a puzzling lie or half-truth to tell, but the Washington Post’s Janell Ross offered some important considerations at the time as to how Carson’s fibbing was a play to appeal to white voters: “Carson and his team have to protect and vigorously defend the once-violent-and-poor, now-delivered-and-rich story — hard,” she wrote. “They have to because the details and the transformation are a central part of what makes some people hold him in high esteem.”

Yeah, remember that last slide about Carson stretching the truth about his “violent” past on the campaign trail? Well, some had more mature takes on this than others. In November 2015, Trump compared Carson’s self-described “pathological temper” to that of “a child molester.” He told CNN’s Erin Burnett at the time:

It’s in the book [Carson’s autobiography] that he’s got a pathological temper. That’s a big problem because you don’t cure that … as an example: child molesting. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.

Just one year later, Trump would select Carson to be his Housing and Urban Development secretary.

In the Florida senator’s defense, it was a frozen Twix bar. But the story still did little to silence then-candidate Trump’s frequent jokes about Rubio’s manhood, including imitations of Rubio struggling to neatly drink from a water bottle.

I have to believe this report from February 2016 that Rubio cracked a molar on the aforementioned Twix is what sunk his campaign. The news broke shortly after he placed fifth in New Hampshire and inevitably cast doubt on how a man with such weak molars could possibly be strong enough to defeat ISIS.

There’s a reason Trump’s “Tiny D” barb at DeSantis feels so familiar: The former president has actually been obsessed with the dick sizes of Florida Republicans for a while now. In the wake of Rubio’s comically childish insult that Trump has small hands in February 2016, Trump hit back. “He referred to my hands—‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee,” he said at a debate later. Alongside his frequent bashing of Rubio as “Little Marco,” it’s hard not to perceive all of this as the world’s grossest dick-measuring contest.

Forget the head of lettuce that outlived Liz Truss’ tenure as UK Prime Minister. In 2016, former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina was Ted Cruz’s running mate for all of six days. In a last ditch effort to gain momentum against Trump, Cruz—who hadn’t won the nomination and wasn’t even close to doing so—randomly named Fiorina as his veep pick in one of the most delusional plays in modern American politics. Less than a week later, after a miserable showing in Indiana, the nightmare team called it quits.

Yeah, I’m not one for the supernatural, but there aren’t any other explanations for the events depicted above during a campaign rally with Fiorina’s then-running mate, Cruz. The worm hole appears to swallow Fiorina at about 0:12 in the video. Note that Heidi looks appropriately concerned.

Well, there you have it: the awkwardest, most violent group hug in human history. Cruz closed out his presidential campaign in May 2016 with a sad little rally, and then closed out said rally by embracing members of his campaign team—in the process, throwing a sharp elbow at wife Heidi Cruz’s face. Between catching insane strays in Cruz’s campaign trail feud with Trump and ultimately watching her husband bend the knee to a man who called her ugly, Heidi truly went through hell—all for her husband’s short-lived vanity project.

By June 2016, I was fairly certain I’d seen it all. Then, this headline: Chris Christie’s Job Involves Picking Up Donald Trump’s McDonald’s Orders. The story was picked up from a few spare lines in a New Yorker feature on the Trump campaign, which states:

Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.)

A full year later, additional reporting cast doubt on the veracity of this story portraying Christie, the once proud bull, as the Trump campaign’s little whipping boy. Apparently, it was a made-up, planted story by a particularly mischievous Trump adviser—that, in itself, is somehow even funnier than the original story.

Nonetheless, I have to say, if I had to live through a full year of the nation thinking I, the former governor of New Jersey, had the inglorious task of picking up my former nemesis’ fast food order, I might end it all.

Who among us has not had this happen to us?

Frankly, I can think of no more suitable conclusion to the primary than this: Cruz bending the knee to Trump in the most pitiful way possible by phone banking for the Republican nominee in something akin to a hostage video. Mind you, this came even after Trump insulted Cruz’s wife’s appearance, claimed Cruz’s dad helped assassinate JFK, and called Cruz a pussy before an uproarious crowd.

There were some real heartbreakers to come, like the viscerally, soul-crushingly disgusting audio of Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy and, of course, the events of election night itself. But on that day in October 2016, watching Cruz debase himself and betray all of his values on the world stage, however briefly, life was good.