Ted Cruz's New Trump Friendship Apparently Didn't Stop Him From Renewing DaffyDonald.us

They were once rivals, hurling insult after insult at each other during the Republican presidential primary. But now, there seems to be a nascent friendship between President Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Still, domains called SleazyDonald.us and DaffyDonald.us under Cruz's name continue to exist, according to a Huffington Post report by Ashley Feinberg on Tuesday.

Feinberg reported that both domains appeared to have been renewed in February 2018 — before the expiration date that would have presumably auto-renewed the domains.

Cruz's spokesperson, Catherine Frazier, told The Huffington Post, "Both domains were purchased during the 2016 Presidential primary, and were never used. They, as with all the domains we’ve purchased, were set to auto-renew with our account. Upon realizing we still had the domains, we removed them from our account." Bustle has reached out to Cruz's communications team for comment.

According to the information listed by the record website, Whois, DaffyDonald.us and SleazyDonald.us were registered to Cruz in March 2016, when he was running against Trump in a heated primary election. The contact listed for registering the website, which has yet to host any content, appeared to fall under Cruz's organization.

Feinberg reported that the initial expiration date for SleazyDonald.us was slated for March 2018 in January this year, but it was then updated to March 2019 in February. As for as DaffyDonald.us, the expiration date for the website was March 2018 as of November 2017. It was renewed to March 2019, like SleazyDonald.us, in February.

The report noted that it is possible that whoever registered the domains set an option for a yearly auto-renewal. But a registrar for web-hosting company GoDaddy — which hosts these domains — said that the auto-renewal option activates on the expiration date. It wouldn't need a user to put the feature into action. Per the report, the domains were renewed a month prior to their expiration.

All of this tech information comes after Trump told the media on Monday that he no longer called Cruz "Lyin' Ted" as he did in the past. Now, apparently, Cruz is "Beautiful Ted" as well as "Texas Ted."

In comments to the press, Trump said that he and Cruz were working together to help the latter gain public support as he competes with popular Democratic candidate Beto O'Rourke. "Ted Cruz and I had a very, very nasty and tough campaign It was a very tough campaign," the president said. "By the way, very late into the campaign, people were shocked. ... Ultimately what happened, we voted out. The outcome was obvious."

Seemingly gone are those days of publicly humiliating, pillorying, and ridiculing each other. But there certainly are people in the United States who haven't forgotten Trump calling Cruz dishonest, joking about his father assassinating former president John F. Kennedy, or Cruz calling Trump a "coward" and "consistently disgraceful" on Twitter along with the hashtag "#classless."

And for those people, Feinberg's report about SleazyDonald.us and DaffyDonald.us is just another and all-too-similar episode in the Trump versus Cruz debacle.