Ted Cruz Accuses Cancún Vacation Critics of Spewing “Venom and Vitriol”

Approximately 48 hours ago, Texas senator Ted Cruz boarded a plane headed to Cancún while his constituents searched for potable water and froze to death. Sometime after that, photos of Cruz en route to Cancún hit the internet. Roughly 12 hours after that, he concocted an excuse for the trip—which he no doubt thought was pretty good—in which he blamed his 10- and 12-year-old daughters, claiming they’d asked to fly to Mexico on a day’s notice, a request with which he complied, “wanting to be a good dad.“ (The statement also claimed he never intended to take a beach vacation while millions of Texans went without power and that he was merely escorting his girls to Mexico and returning the next day.) Not long after that, it emerged that, in reality, the lawmaker and his wife, Heidi Cruz, had texted a bunch of friends and neighbors that they were “freezing” and that rooms at the Ritz-Carlton were $309 a night, which was a great deal, especially considering they’d be staying there through Sunday. Notably, all of this happened as Beto O’Rourke, who is a private Texas citizen, worked around the clock to do whatever he could to help Cruz’s constituents, and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised $2 million in aid for the Lone Star State.

So by the time Cruz spoke to reporters from his home on Thursday—where, incidentally, he’d also abandoned his dog, Snowflake—he knew he had to do a little bit of groveling. “I understand why people are upset,” he said. That, obviously, was where Cruz should have left things. Would it have changed people’s minds about him? No, probably not. Would they still regard him as one of the most repulsive people in the country? Yes, very likely. Still, it would’ve been uncharacteristically refreshing for him to merely acknowledge that he’d f–ked up and then gotten to work. Instead, Cruz decided to lie some more.

“I started having second thoughts almost the moment I sat down on the plane,” he claimed, which might have been true but was presumably not because he’d left Texans to die but rather because he’d noticed people were taking pictures of him that were about to make him look very bad. Continuing with the faux mea culpa, Cruz once again doubled down on the idea that the trip was for his daughters. “On the one hand,” he said “all of us who are parents have a responsibility to take care of our kids, take care of our family. That’s something Texans have been doing across the state. But I also have a responsibility that I take very seriously for the state of Texas and frankly, leaving when so many Texans were hurting didn’t feel right and so I changed my return flight and flew back on the first available flight I could take.”

Again, Cruz more than likely changed his return flight because there were pictures of him all over the internet absconding to Mexico in the middle of not just a pandemic but a catastrophic state of emergency. But Cruz wasn’t finished.

“Listen,” he went on. “We’re in a strange time where Twitter’s been going crazy and the media is going crazy and there’s a lot of venom and vitriol that I think is unfortunate frankly on both sides. I think everyone ought to treat each other with respect and decency and try to understand each other more particularly at a time of crisis.” You hear that, haters? Next time, before you fire off a snarky tweet or publish an article or run a segment on cable, ask yourself, “Have I taken the time to understand why the senator from Texas packed a bag full of Speedos for a week at the Ritz instead of doing literally anything to help the people who elected him?” Because, quite frankly, Cruz isn’t sure how you can look yourself in the mirror after the way you’ve treated him.

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