An 18-year-old Ted Cruz answers questions about his aspirations in a video posted to YouTube. | Screenshot Teen Ted Cruz joked of goals: ‘World domination, you know, rule everything’ 
 
 A new video of a teenaged Ted Cruz, posted Saturday on YouTube, shows a lankier and younger version of the future Republican presidential candidate sarcastically talking about his life’s goals —and they’re far more ambitious than the mere presidency. "Take over the world, world domination, you know, rule everything. Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff,” Cruz says 
 
 The new clip was posted on YouTube under the name “Young Ted Cruz.” The operator of the account told POLITICO the video had been provided by a high school classmate of Cruz’s who wished to remain anonymous. The video comes less than 10 days before the Iowa caucuses, where polls show Cruz at or near the lead. 
 
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 Off camera, the teenager identified as an 18-year old Cruz is asked about his life’s aspirations. 
 
 “Aspirations? Is that like sweat on my butt?” a sardonic Cruz says at the start of the 30-second clip, wearing jeans and a tucked in shirt. "No no, oh I see, what you want me to do, what I want to do in life." 
 
 Cruz squints his eyes tilts his head to the sky. "Well my aspiration is to, uh, oh I don’t know, be in a teen tit film like that guy who played Horatio. You know he was in Malibu Bikini Beach Shop,” he says. The reference appears to be to a 1986 movie, The Malibu Bikini Shop, which came out two years before the video was filmed. 
 
 "Well, other than that,” Cruz continued, "take over the world, world domination, you know, rule everything. Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.” 
 
 Asked about the new video, Cruz campaign spokesman Rick Tyler replied, "Good to see he’s always had a great sense of humor." ||||| Looking for news you can trust? 
 
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 With the bromance between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump over, the mogul turned GOP front-runner has begun trash talking the senator from Texas. “He’s a nasty guy,” Trump recently huffed. “Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him.” For members of the politerati, this was no revelation. As Cruz has quickly climbed the political ladder, he has left a long line of associates who complain, without much prompting, that he is an insufferable schmuck. 
 
 A prominent aide to George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign could barely contain himself when we asked him to discuss Cruz, who worked in the campaign’s policy shop. This person described Cruz as hyper-arrogant and widely despised, and he emphasized—over and over—that the pervasive dislike of Cruz within the Bush ranks had nothing to do with ideology. (Cruz, he noted, never objected to Bush’s call for compassionate conservatism, immigration reform, and national education standards, and no one on the campaign regarded him as an ideologue.) The problem was simple: his personality. 
 
 “That’s exactly what he was: a big asshole,” says a campaign veteran who worked with Cruz. 
 
 “Ted thought he was an expert on everything,” says this campaign veteran, who asked not to be named. “He was a smart and talented guy, but completely taken with himself and his own ideas. He would offer up opinions on everything, even matters outside his portfolio. He was a policy guy, but he would push his ideas on campaign strategy. He would send memos on everything to everyone. He would come to meetings where he wasn’t invited—and wasn’t wanted.” In fact, this Bush alum recalls, “the quickest way for a meeting to end would be for Ted to come in. People would want out of that meeting. People wouldn’t go to a meeting if they knew he would be there. It was his inability to be part of the team. That’s exactly what he was: a big asshole.” 
 
 The Bush vet goes on: “I don’t know anyone who had a decent relationship with Cruz.” And when Bush became president, his top campaign aides agreed Cruz should not be offered a job in the White House. “No one wanted to work with him,” this source remembers. “George W. Bush couldn’t stand the guy.” This person adds, “It’s a real quandary for Bush campaign people: Trump versus Cruz, who to vote for? And it would be a big quandary even if it’s Cruz versus Hillary Clinton. That’s how much they cannot stand him.” 
 
 It may be easy for someone to lob anonymous shots at Cruz. But there are plenty of others, including prominent Republicans, who have not been shy about sharing their feelings about Cruz on the record. Here is a quick guide to Cruz’s loudest detractors: 
 
 Bob Dole 
 
 Fighting words: The 1996 Republican presidential nominee and former senator from Kansas told the New York Times last week that Cruz would be an ineffective president because “nobody likes him.” He explained: “He doesn’t have any friends in Congress. He called the leader of the Republicans [Mitch McConnell] a liar on the Senate floor. If you want to call somebody a liar in the Senate, you go to their office—you don’t go on the Senate floor and make it public.” 
 
 The beef: Last fall, Cruz mocked the failed candidacies of Dole, Mitt Romney, and John McCain, citing their efforts as evidence of the electoral impotence of mainline Republicans. But the feud with Dole began in 2014, when Cruz led a last-minute push to defeat the UN Treaty on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities. He claimed the accord threatened American sovereignty. Dole, who suffered a disabling injury while serving in World War II, had come to the Senate floor in his wheelchair to lobby for passage of the treaty. 
 
 Bob Dole likes every GOP candidate in the field—except for the one he whispers at the end of this video: https://t.co/i7XGzyWdJW — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) November 12, 2015 
 
 Sen. John McCain 
 
 Fighting words: McCain called Cruz, Sen. Rand Paul, and Rep. Justin Amash “wacko birds” in 2013. Last spring, McCain derided Cruz after Cruz boasted he had been leaning on McCain to loosen restrictions regarding guns on military bases. “It came as a complete surprise to me that he had been pressing me; maybe it was some medium that I’m not familiar with,” McCain told Politico. “Maybe it was through, you know, hand telegraph; maybe sign language. Ask him how he communicated with me because I’d be very interested.” In January, McCain suggested that Cruz might not be eligible for the presidency because he was born in Canada. “He fucking hates Cruz,” a McCain adviser told GQ. “He’s just offended by his style.” 
 
 The beef: McCain considered Cruz’s treatment of Dole unforgivable. “It was the most embarrassing day in my time in the Senate, to force Bob Dole to watch that,” he told the New Yorker. And he certainly holds no warm feelings for Cruz, who once said he was “embarrassed” to have supported McCain in 2008. But McCain’s hatred of Cruz is not just personal. It has a policy component: The two have clashed on drones, NSA data collection, and the nomination of McCain’s friend Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense. 
 
 George W. Bush 
 
 Fighting words: “I just don’t like the guy,” the former president said in October. 
 
 The beef: Cruz worked as a policy adviser for Bush’s 2000 campaign. But while most of Cruz’s colleagues on the campaign got White House jobs, Cruz ended up at the Federal Trade Commission—an indication he had alienated his campaign comrades. Explaining W’s dislike of Cruz, a Jeb Bush donor told Politico that “he sort of looks at this like Cruz is doing it all for his own personal gain, and that’s juxtaposed against a family that’s been all about public service and doing it for the right reasons. He’s frustrated to have watched Cruz basically hijack the Republican Party of Texas and the Republican Party in Washington.” Bush consigliere Karl Rove told Fox News that Dubya was particularly upset that Cruz had questioned Bush’s nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts—whom Cruz himself had once praised. 
 
 John Boehner 
 
 Fighting words: The former speaker of House has called Cruz “that jackass” and a “false prophet.” 
 
 The beef: Where to start? Cruz has served as a cheerleader for the House Freedom Caucus, the band of arch-conservatives who made Boehner’s job all but impossible. He trod so heavily on Boehner’s turf that he earned the nickname “Speaker Cruz.” Cruz pushed for a government shutdown over defunding Planned Parenthood, and then he accused Boehner of selling out conservatives to cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi. When Boehner resigned, Cruz took a victory lap. 
 
 Rep. Peter King 
 
 Fighting words: When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked the Long Island Republican if he would support Cruz as the nominee, King replied, “I hope that day never comes; I will jump off that bridge when we come to it.” He has called Cruz a “carnival barker,” a “counterfeit” with “no qualifications” who appeals “to the lowest common denominator,” and “just a guy with a big mouth and no results.” 
 
 The beef: King was one of the House Republicans most upset with Cruz’s push for a government shutdown in 2013, which he considered disastrous for the party. “If you come up with a strategy that’s going to shutdown the government of the United States, and you have no way of winning, you’re either a fraud or you’re totally incompetent,” King told CNN. 
 
 Sen. Lindsey Graham 
 
 Fighting words: “He is an opportunist, he’s a libertarian when it is hot,” the senator from South Carolina told RealClearPolitics, adding that Cruz “has done more to allow ISIL to gain a foothold in Syria than any senator other than Rand Paul.” Last week, Graham said picking between Trump and Cruz was like having to choose “death by being shot or poisoning,” and he said the party would be better off if it picked “somebody out of the phone book.” 
 
 The beef: Graham thinks Cruz has blocked national security measures for personal gain, and he rebuked the Texan for suggesting Hagel had received money from the North Korean government. 
 
 Everyone on the 2000 campaign 
 
 Fighting words: (See above.) 
 
 The beef: Per GQ: 
 
 He was infamous for firing off mundane work e-mails in the middle of the night—it happened so often that some in the Bush campaign suspected him of writing them ahead of time and programming his computer to send while he was asleep. He was also known for dispatching regular updates on his accomplishments that one recipient likened to “the cards people send about their families at Christmas, except Ted’s were only about him and were more frequent.” 
 
 Supreme Court clerks 
 
 Fighting words: Former clerks who had worked at the Supreme Court when Cruz was clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist dissed his “dime store novel” write-ups of death penalty cases. 
 
 The beef: The New York Times reported that Cruz’s fellow clerks believed he was “obsessed” with capital punishment and noted that clerks took offense at the airy tone with which he discussed executions when the court received last-minute appeals for a stay. 
 
 Harvard Law School classmates 
 
 Fighting words: “A pompous asshole.” 
 
 The beef: GQ reported that Cruz started a study group during his first year in Cambridge, but he announced that “he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.” In an interview with the Boston Globe, another student recalled what happened when she agreed to carpool with Cruz: “We hadn’t left Manhattan before he asked my IQ.” 
 
 His Princeton roommate 
 
 Fighting words: “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States,” screenwriter Craig Mazin told the Daily Beast in 2013. “Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.” On Twitter, Mazin—who has called Cruz “a nightmare of a human being”—recalled that when he was a freshman sharing a dorm room with Cruz, he would get invited to parties hosted by seniors because the upperclassmen pitied him. Cruz, he notes, “was that widely loathed. It’s his superpower.” 
 
 Getting emails blaming me for not smothering Ted Cruz in his sleep in 1988. What kind of monster do you think I am? A really prescient one? — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) January 15, 2016 
 
 When I met Ted in 1988, I had no word to describe him, but only because I didn’t speak German. Thank you, Germans, for “Backpfeifengesicht.” — Craig Mazin (@clmazin) January 20, 2016 
 
 (Backpfeifengesicht, by the way, translates to “face that should be slapped.”) 
 
 The beef: It’s personal. “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,” he said on the Scriptnotes podcast. According to Mazin, Cruz would hit snooze on his alarm clock over and over again, and he refused to stop doing this when Mazin asked. Also, Mazin says, Cruz was just weird. “I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist?,” Mazin told the Daily Beast. “And I thought, who is this person?” 
 
 Everyone else at Princeton 
 
 Fighting words: Per the Daily Beast, “Several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like ‘abrasive,’ ‘intense,’ ‘strident,’ ‘crank,’ and ‘arrogant.’ Four independently offered the word ‘creepy.'” 
 
 People might think Craig is exaggerating. He’s not. I met Ted freshman week and loathed him within the hour. https://t.co/2ZrbTdjHJh — Geoff (@gacohen) January 20, 2016 
 
 The beef: It’s tough to pinpoint any one cause, but Cruz made female students uncomfortable by frequently walking to their end of the floor in his freshman dorm, wearing only a paisley bathrobe. When he announced his bid for president of the school’s debate society, the other members had a secret meeting to pick an anyone-but-Cruz candidate. The eventual winner later acknowledged that “my one qualification for the office was that I was not Ted Cruz.” 
 
 Ted Cruz 
 
 Fighting words: “If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy,” Cruz said at a Republican debate in October. 
 
 The beef: Being well liked is not everything. At least that seemed to be the point Cruz was making about himself. He added, “But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done and I will get you home.” ||||| The Most Hated Man in the Senate 
 
 In the first few months of his first term in the United States Senate, Ted Cruz has been, for all practical purposes, the human equivalent of one of those flower-squirters that clowns wear on their lapels. His initiatives can often seem like non-sequiturs — he has proposed defunding the United Nations over forced abortions in China. And his statements can seem almost self defeating, such as when he described decorated war veterans Chuck Hagel and John Kerry as “less than ardent fans of the U.S. military.” 
 
 Not surprisingly, the freshman from Texas has irritated Democrats. Sen. Dianne Feinstein described him as “arrogant” and “patronizing” after the new arrival offered the 20-year Senate veteran a lesson on the constitution during a debate over assault weapons. He’s also been a headache for GOP leaders, expressing reluctance to back fellow Texas Republican John Cornyn for minority whip on the grounds that he had to make sure the candidate he supported would “stand and fight for conservative principles.” (National Journal ranked Cornyn as the second-most conservative member in the pre-Cruz Senate last year.) 
 
 Cruz’s ecumenical approach to criticism has, however, contributed to some confusion about what he actually believes. The question of whether Cruz is an isolationist or an interventionist, for example, has elicited some debate among conservatives; he’s pro-Israel, hawkish on Iran, yet apparently skeptical of interventionism and nation-building. He wants more border security, and less illegal immigration — but he has also asserted that the United States is and should remain a country that “celebrates” legal immigrants. Also, he keeps talking about the great twentieth-century political philosopher John Rawls, who has more often been associated with the left than the right — to the great frustration of Democrats, who feel like Cruz is, disingenuously co-opting their concerns. 
 
 Cruz is often lumped in with fellow GOP rising stars like Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, but of all of them, he is perhaps the toughest to pin down ideologically. So what exactly does Cruz believe? 
 
 First, it’s important to understand that foreign policy isn’t his primary focus: He’s economically liberal, in the classical sense, and economic issues make up the bulk of his political message. His stump speech, the one that references Rawls, is a call for the GOP to recast its small-government stance to emphasize what he’s calling “opportunity conservatism” — the belief that conservatives “should conceptualize and should articulate every domestic policy with a laser focus on easing the means of ascent,” as he put it in a January speech in Austin. 
 
 Beyond economics, his approach is a bit more idiosyncratic. He’s ideological, even compulsive, with regard to the Constitution. This is a longstanding preoccupation — as an undergraduate at Princeton, he wrote his thesis on the 9th and 10th amendments — and apparently a sincere one. It helps explain why he gave his colleague Rand Paul a much-needed break during his March 6 anti-drone filibuster. He’s firmly against gun control, but that stance is rooted in his reading of the Constitution rather than any affinity for gun culture. (Cruz, more nerd than sportsman, would look no more plausible skeet shooting than Barack Obama.) 
 
 It also helps explain Cruz’s stance on immigration. Many observers were surprised when Cruz conspicuously declined to make common cause earlier this year with Sen. Marco Rubio on immigration reform. Cruz, like Rubio, is the son of an immigrant from Cuba, and Texas Republicans have, as a group, been more moderate on the issue than the national GOP. But unauthorized immigration is, of course, both an economic issue and a legal one. Someone like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who signed Texas’s 2001 law that made certain undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities, is looking at it through the former lens. Cruz sees it as a rule-of-law issue, arguing that establishing a path to citizenship would be “profoundly unfair” to legal immigrants. 
 
 Cruz’s preoccupation with principles began early. He was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban immigrant father, who had met in Texas and would soon return there; Cruz often tells crowds about how his father had only a few dollars to his name when he came to the United States and worked his way through college, at the University of Texas, by washing dishes. 
 
 By high school, the young Ted Cruz had become a competitive debater, and memorized stretches of the Constitution; he kept up both pursuits at Princeton, where he won several national debate awards. By the time he went on to Harvard Law School, a political career must have seemed likely, although he logged a few years on Wall Street before moving into the public sector. 
 
 But the defining moment of Cruz’s time as Texas’s solicitor general may be the best indicator of how he views America’s place in the world: the case of Medellín v. Texas. 
 
 In 1993, José Medellín was one of several men who, as part of a gang initiation in Houston, raped and murdered two teenage girls. In 1997, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 2003, the appeals began. Although Medellín’s guilt was clear enough — he had signed a confession a few days after the murder — he was technically a Mexican national, having moved to the United States as a toddler, and Texas authorities hadn’t notified him of his right, under the Vienna Convention, to contact the consulate. 
 
 Medellin’s case got a boost in 2005, when President George W. Bush wrote a memo confirming that state courts should, in view of the country’s international commitments, review Medellin’s case and a number of others. The memo seemed like an olive branch on Bush’s part — the issue had become a point of tension between the Mexico and the United States. 
 
 The reaction in Texas among those following the case was not particularly sympathetic to the president’s diplomatic outreach. And Medellin v Texas wasn’t the kind of case that would help an isolationist warm to the cause. The plaintiff was effectively arguing that despite being a confessed and convicted rapist and murderer, he should be protected by two sets o 
 
 f loopholes — regardless of what you think of Texas, or the death penalty, it was pretty audacious. When the case made it to the Supreme Court, Texas won on a 6-3 vote, and a couple of years later, when Perry wrote about the saga in his campaign book, he was clearly incredulous that three Supreme Court justices hadn’t agreed. 
 
 Cruz took that view of it too. “Were Medellín’s view correct, the implications would be staggering,” he wrote in an article adapted from a speech he gave at Yale Law School in 2010 “The President could overturn any law at any time in the name of enforcing any vague, aspirational, international agreement the United States might have ratified.” The court’s ruling was cause for celebration, he said, because the values at stake — American sovereignty and the separation of powers — had both been upheld. On the other hand, Cruz continued, “the case invites great trepidation, because it represents an assault on those principles that will continue unabated for many years to come.” 
 
 Those principles, Cruz implied, were important enough that he was willing to put aside his personal feelings in the situation. In fact, “on a personal level,” he found it noteworthy that he had, “ironically enough” ended up arguing with Bush and taking up arguments that had previously been made by the Clinton administration. As that aside suggests, Cruz has, never been particularly concerned with ingratiating himself. Perhaps the best example of that, beyond the recent scuffles in Washington, is the fact that he is in the capital in the first place after a meteoric rise through Texas politics. One thing to know about the Lone Star State’s government is that there’s a traffic jam at the top: Perry is the longest-serving governor in state history, having got the job in 2000 after Bush stepped down to prepare for his presidential inauguration. Most of the state’s top politicians have been in statewide politics, if not the same exact role, for more than a decade. 
 
 Cruz, by contrast, had never even run for office before 2012. On the face of it, he was an unlikely candidate. He was well known in political circles from having served as solicitor general, but was still largely unknown among the general public. His years in the attorney general’s office were his only public-sector experience in Texas, although he had worked in Washington, at the Federal Trade Commission, during Bush’s first term. 
 
 In other words, when Cruz took on Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican Senate primary last year, he was jumping the line by about 50 spots. Even political scion George P. Bush is running for land commissioner in 2014, although he could surely raise enough money to take a swing at the governor’s office, and apparently considered it. That Cruz would blithely run for the Senate seat — let alone win it — surely irks Texan politicians of both parties. 
 
 That’s not Cruz’s problem, though — and as he climbs the political ladder, he seems destined to annoy some more people along the way. He might even take a shot at the presidency some day. If he does, he might come across as too wonkish and too aggressive to connect with voters. “Belligerent egghead” has rarely been a winning brand in presidential politics. (Just ask Newt Gingrich.) In terms of foreign policy, though, polling shows that Republicans around the country share some of Cruz’s concerns; they are, for example, somewhat skeptical of international cooperation. And to date, at least, it doesn’t seem that Cruz’s controversies have caused him any personal trouble; in January, Public Policy Polling found that he had a higher net approval rating than either Perry or Cornyn. If he wants to have a greater role in national politics, which seems likely, there’s clearly an audience. 
 
 Photo credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images
– Ever wondered what a young Ted Cruz looked and sounded like (and no worries, no Princess Bride impersonations)? A circulating YouTube video, which Politico says was apparently provided by a high school classmate, purports to show the 18-year-old GOP candidate mulling his future. "Aspirations? Is that like sweat on my butt?" Cruz ponders in the video—which Raw Story says was shot for his Baptist high school in Houston in 1988—before offering up his first goal to "be in a teen tit film." Upon further reflection, however, Cruz realizes he should set the bar higher. "Well, other than that, uh, take over the world, world domination, you know, rule everything," he notes. "Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff." Although some reviews of the video aren't terribly flattering—Raw Story labels young Ted Cruz "irritating and horrible," while Gawker calls his less-mature self an "insufferable twerp"—Cruz's campaign spokesman tells Politico: "Good to see he's always had a great sense of humor." (Mother Jones documents Cruz's various beefs with people to see if he's really an "awful, terrible jerk.")