Cruz celebrates April Fools’ with Trump ‘rickroll’
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is no stranger to popular culture, and it looks like he’s never going to give up trolling Donald Trump.
To celebrate April Fools’ Day, Cruz “rickrolled” visitors to his campaign’s website by sharing a video that purported to show how Trump had finally accepted his challenge to a one-on-one debate — after months of dragging his feet.
The Cruz camp shared a video that shows the Texas senator speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, inviting Trump to debate him at any time. Then it shows two clips of Trump: In the first, he brags about polls showing him to have won every single debate; in the second — taken out of context — he says, “We’re gonna go on forever with these debates.”
At this point, the video cuts to the popular music video for British singer Rick Astley’s 1987 pop song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The tune was likely a bit more jarring for Cruz’s non-digital-native supporters. But others assuredly knew exactly what happened: They got rickrolled.
Ted Cruz participates at a town hall in Milwaukee on Tuesday. (Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)
Rickrolling is a popular bait-and-switch meme in which someone shares a link that ostensibly pertains to the discussion at hand, but actually redirects to Astley’s signature song.
On Friday morning, the Cruz campaign had the message “Happy to hear @realDonaldTrump accepted my challenge to debate one-on-one” pinned to the top of its Twitter feed with a link to the video.
During this election cycle, Cruz has not shied away from incorporating his love of popular culture into his campaign.
Cruz did impressions of popular characters from “The Simpsons” in June for BuzzFeed and acted out his favorite scene from the film “The Princess Bride” in November during “Candidate Cafe” for New Hampshire’s WMUR. And one of his campaign ads from February spoofed the Mike Judge comedy “Office Space” to mock Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
