Sen. Ted Cruz in an apparent attempt at humor posted a photo alluding to his 2021 trip to Cancun while many in his state were without power during a historic series of storms, and it didn’t land well.
The Republican senator from Texas tweeted a photo of himself standing in front of the Cancun Bar and Grill in Midland.
“I’m in Midland, TX today, and guess what I found!” Cruz wrote.
The tweet had already drawn more than 3.2 million views as of Friday along with a flood of comments, many of which didn’t find humor in it.
Hundreds of Texans died in the state’s February 2021 power crisis amid a series of powerful winter storms in which more than 4.5 million homes and businesses were without power.
“Yea, it's so funny that in the middle of a terrible storm in your state, when people died and others left without heat and electricity, you thought it was the right time to go for a family vacation on the beach in Cancun. Hilarious,” Twitter user Republicans against Trump tweeted.
The New Republic’s Prem Thakker writes of Cruz’s Cancun trip: “It’s a legacy that will stay with Cruz, but amid the escalating viciousness of his party, he has been able to shed the association ever so slightly. However, on Friday, he gave us a reminder of how cartoonishly callous he most certainly is.”
“It’s all a joke. The pain, the suffering, the heightened contradictions his departure from his constituents revealed—it’s all just funny to him.”
At least 246 people died in what’s considered one of the worst natural disasters in state history.
“And still. To Ted Cruz,” Thakker writes, “the human suffering, the real-world implications of an energy policy so reliant on fossil fuels, of a government system that can leave so many to die such cold, lonely deaths—it’s all a little punch line.”
