Ted Cruz ‘Jokes’ About Cancun Trip He Tried To Make During Storm That Killed At Least 151 Texans

Senator Ted Cruz on a plane to Cancun and satellite imagery of the February 2021 ice storm

Photo via @davidstoreytv/Twitter, NOAA/Wikimedia Commons

May 19, 2021, 2:03 pm

Senator Ted Cruz made a little joke on Monday, or we think it was supposed to be a joke, referencing the time he flew off to Cancún during the historic snow and ice storm that left millions stranded without power, heat, or running water in his state of Texas before blaming it all on his kids. He quote tweeted a local news station talking about an airline that promised cheap flights from Houston to “sunny Cancún” with a simple statement: “Awesome!”

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This is not the first time Cruz has made a joke out of leaving his constituents literally in the cold because his wife’s money allows him to fly wherever he wants, pandemic or no pandemic, and it’s far from the first time he’s been painfully unfunny.

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What makes this attempt at a joke particularly unfunny is that over 150 people died in the state of Texas as a direct result of not only the unprecedented storms but due to the state’s lack of weathering on its natural gas pipelines, causing them to freeze, in spite of multiple past warnings that just such a situation could occur. This left millions without power in below-freezing temperatures, resulting in hypothermia deaths as well as fatalities from people using their stoves and cars in a desperate attempt to heat their homes.

Cruz has been a U.S. senator for Texas since 2013, and in spite of increasingly intense weather events that the vast majority of climate scientists attribute to climate change, he failed to prepare his state for the storms, and people died while he was vacationing in Cancún. He did quickly return to Texas, but only after he was spotted on the flight to Mexico and widely called out for abandoning his constituents, where he was able to get his photo taken holding a case of bottled water in what appeared to be an empty parking lot or something.

Not a week later, he was joking about the whole fiasco (which again, included over 150 dead people) at CPAC.

“God bless CPAC,” he said on the main stage. “I gotta say, Orlando is awesome. It’s not as nice as Cancún, but it’s nice.”

As it turns out, people are still mad about the whole thing, possibly because their loved ones are still dead, and it’s still too soon for him to be making jokes.