After attempting to do significant public relations damage control over his jaunt to Mexico while Texas was in a deep crisis caused by Winter Storm Uri, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is now trying to suggest he’s being victimized by the media.
Speaking during an appearance on conservative radio host Dana Loesch’s program Monday, Cruz, who had left the state with his family to travel to Cancún, Mexico, as millions of residents suffered extreme temperatures without heat, electricity and running water in the wake of a brutal winter storm, said that the media’s coverage of his travels were unfair. He also said he believed the media was looking for a new Republican politician to belittle.
“The media is suffering from acute Trump withdrawal, where for four years every day, they could foam at the mouth and be obsessed with [former President] Donald Trump,” Cruz said on the program, “and now that he has receded from their day-to-day storyline, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”
The Texas senator made similar complaints on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program later that evening.
“The media is suffering from Trump withdrawal, where they’ve attacked Trump every day for four years, they don’t know what to do. So they obsess over my taking my girls to the beach,” Cruz said on Monday night.
Cruz’s exploits were indeed widely covered in the media, but it’s questionable whether that was a result of the media not having a subject like Trump to cover, as he has suggested. Rather, articles detailing Cruz’s travels last week focused on his departure from a state that saw millions without power after an unusual winter storm system caused damage to Texas’s electrical grid, which was not equipped to handle severe cold weather events the same way the other two federally regulated grids in the U.S. are.
Several officials in Texas have wrongly blamed renewable energy sources for playing a role in the state’s power woes. However, several fact-checking organizations have shown that those types of energy sources weren’t to blame for what happened, and that they work well in other, typically colder environments.
Many news organizations also noted the inherent hypocrisy in Cruz’s flight to Cancún, as Cruz himself has criticized other politicians on multiple occasions in the past for traveling when a crisis was underway.
As Cruz was going back-and-forth between Texas and Cancún, at least 7 million residents of his state were under boil-water advisories. Food shortages were also prevalent throughout several areas, and at least 32 Texans have died as a result of the crisis overall.
Although Cruz had intended to stay in Cancún with his family through Saturday, after initial backlash over his holiday on social media, he booked a flight back to the U.S. immediately after landing. In a statement he released justifying why he felt it was appropriate to leave while millions of his constituents were suffering without power, water and food, Cruz blamed his daughters.
“With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends,” Cruz said in a statement last week.
