Ted Cruz was recounting to an audience how he had outlasted most of his 16 rivals for the Republican presidential nomination when a plane carrying the man who had won it all, Donald Trump, flew overhead, interrupting him mid-speech. “All right, that was pretty well-orchestrated,” said Cruz, a Republican U.S. senator from Texas who waged a bitter campaign against Trump. Hours later Cruz would take his revenge, refusing to endorse Trump.

Despite the fact that the reason was pretty evident, Fox News still interviewed Cruz right after his speech, which ended in a chorus of boos and with his wife being escorted off the floor as the convention erupted in rancor, and asked him why he did not support Trump’s candidacy. “Well, first off – are you serious? Are you actually going to ask me that question after everything?” the Texas senator seemed genuinely puzzled by the inquiry, but quickly went with the flow. “Why didn’t I endorse Donald Trump? Well, for the same reason I don’t like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping – because they’re all liars and hypocrites. And that’s putting it mildly.”

Cruz also said that “politics aside, I don’t like the man, period. I think he’s the worst thing to happen to the United States since 1776, honestly. If we were back in World War II, for example, and if we had just survived Pearl Harbor, I think Donald Trump is the type of man who would bed with the Japanese after two days if that would get him a huge business deal or something. The man is all controversy and hot air, he doesn’t stand for principles at all. He doesn’t care about this country or its people, he’s all about his own pocket.”

Asked if there was ever any chance of him supporting Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate, Cruz replied with a “definite maybe.” He also added that the “maybe” depended solely on Trump and his potential apology to Cruz’s wife Heidi, whom the controversial billionaire businessman had insulted on numerous occasions during his presidential campaign. “Unless Donald Trump apologizes to Heidi and publicly admit that I am, in fact, married to a bombshell, I’m not going to even consider endorsing him,” the Texas senator revealed.

“And that’s part of the reason why I’ve always despised that opportunist,” Cruz also said, and added, “because it’s one thing to elbow your way to fortune and to not choose your words during an argument or, say, political campaign against someone. But when you cross the line and start messing with someone’s family, that’s when things get unnecessarily ugly and then the rules change. Politics has always been an ‘anything goes’ game, but even the greatest political opponents always respected each other. And that respect went down the drain when Trump started throwing away political correctness and dragging other candidates’ personal lives through the dirt.”

“So, if he’s willing to take back everything he’s said about my wife, I might consider endorsing him, but for one reason only. And that is the unity of Republicans throughout America. It’s best to lead by example and that’s why we need unity, which we couldn’t be farther away from at this point,” the former Republican presidential candidate argued. “If he admits my wife’s not ugly at all, I’ll think about it. Any other scenario – I’m emigrating back to Cuba because I couldn’t stand living in a country where Donald Trump is president.”