Ted Cruz Made Some Absurd 2016 Predictions Tonight

On Fox News’ New Year program — predictably called the All-American New Year — Fox hosts Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric Bolling were joined by several Republican contenders for the presidency. One of them made some truly absurd comments about what the new year would bring — and waddya know, it was Ted Cruz, not Donald Trump. In a videotaped segment, Cruz said that the IRS would be abolished by the end of 2016. That’s a spectacularly confident prediction, to put it mildly. As a campaign promise, it’s flatly absurd.

But Cruz didn’t stop there. He also predicted that 2016 would be the last year before Hillary Clinton “retires permanently in Chappaquiddick,” the last year until “we utterly destroy ISIS and defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” and of course, “the last year that we have Obamacare.”

So, let’s recap. The junior senator from Texas is predicting the repeal of a law that’s already withstood five years of assault from the GOP, the defeat of a global terrorist group that’s withstood a year of hatred from just about every country planet, and the abolishment an entire government agency — all in one year. Easy peasy!

No, in actuality, these are some alarmingly bold predictions. While they weren’t campaign promises in the most narrow technical sense — Cruz never said, “I will do these things” — they basically are campaign promises, because Cruz is running for president and he has endorsed all of these positions before. If Cruz becomes president, you can bet his supporters will remember that he promised to do these things, and you can bet they’ll be angry with him if he fails to eliminate the IRS, Obamacare, and ISIS during his first year in office.

Maybe Cruz doesn’t actually think he’ll become president. If that’s the case, this sort of talk is cheap and inconsequential. But in the event that he does become president, he will be under constant pressure to accomplish all of these things within his first year, which is more or less impossible. Does Cruz not understand this? Or does he just not care? In any event, he’s set the bar pretty high for himself, and he hasn’t even won the primary yet.