Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) made it clear he still has his eye on the presidency after a failed bid in 2016.

In a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that dropped Wednesday, the third-term senator declared, “Listen, it’s no secret that I want to be president. I ran for president. I came close.”

“You gonna run again?” Patrick asked.

“Time will tell,” Cruz replied, adding: “... I will say this is a bug that history has proved is rarely ended. It is a permanent and often fatal bug.”

In 2016, Cruz collected the second-most Republican delegates behind eventual President Donald Trump.

He said earlier this week that Republicans have by no means united behind Vice President JD Vance as Trump’s potential successor in 2028.

“There’ll be time to figure that out,” Cruz told MS Now. “I’ll certainly be part of the discussion.”

As for the GOP’s future, he said, “Economically, I think we should be a conservative party, and on foreign policy, we’ve got a debate: Are we an isolationist party that withdraws from the world, or do we believe in American leadership? And I care deeply about both of those issues and who the party is.”

According to a New York Times aggregation of polls, Cruz is running a distant sixth among potential contenders behind JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

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