Texas Senator Ted Cruz under pressure to explain apparent Cancun trip as state reels from storm damage

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Richard Luscombe
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Ted Cruz is the state's Senator  - Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg
Ted Cruz is the state's Senator - Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg

The Texas senator Ted Cruz was under increasing pressure on Thursday to explain why he apparently flew to Cancun, Mexico, abandoning millions in his home state who are freezing in a devastating winter storm that left millions without power or water and claimed dozens of lives.

The firebrand Republican travelled to the Yucatan holiday resort on Wednesday with his family, according to Fox News, which said it confirmed the trip with a party source after images of Cruz in an airport departure lounge and on board an aircraft bound for Mexico circulated on social media.

“The photos speak for themselves,” Fox quoted the source as saying. Other media outlets including Axios and CNN said on Thursday they also confirmed Mr Cruz’s mystery trip.

It came as the state's woes deepened, with major new winter storm forecast to sweep across Texas Thursday.

Officials warned Texans not to expect respite from sub-zero temperatures until at least Saturday, with the National Weather Service predicting tornadoes, bitter cold and more heavy snow from the fresh storm.

Residents who have been without water, power or heat for days faced further delays to the restoration of their supplies, and the coronavirus vaccination programme was largely put on hold.

There was no response to inquiries by the Daily Telegraph to Mr Cruz’s Senate office in Washington DC.

But by Thursday afternoon, Mr Cruz was reported to already be on his way back to Texas, an image on Twitter purporting to be the upgrade list from a United Airlines flight from Cancun to Houston, showing somebody identified as “CRU, R” on standby for a business class seat. Mr Cruz’s given first name is Rafael.

The developments came as Mr Cruz faced a barrage of criticism and allegations of hypocrisy from political opponents, and as mocking hashtags began to trend on Twitter.

They included #CancunCruz and #FlyinTed, in recognition of Donald Trump’s famous "Lyin’ Ted" nickname for the senator during their acrimonious campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

“He is vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he was elected to represent and serve,” Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat who lost narrowly to Cruz in the 2018 US Senate election in Texas, said Thursday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Gene Wu, a Democratic state representative for Houston, also slammed Mr Cruz on Twitter. “Guess which US Senator from Texas flew to Cancun while the state was freezing to death and having to boil water?” he wrote.

“Flying and coach [and] waiting to be upgraded for the optics?” he said in a follow-up post. “But flying out during a state-wide disaster is fine for PR?”

Meanwhile, the Lincoln Project, a group of dissident Republicans behind a powerful social media campaign that helped oust Trump from office last year, was equally scathing.

“When the going gets tough… head to Cancun baby!” the group said in a tweet accompanied by a photograph of a row of beach hotels in the resort bathed in bright sunshine and adjacent to turquoise blue ocean.

The photographs of Mr Cruz, 50, at an airport and on the flight showed him in the company of a girl believed to be one of his two daughters, who posed with Trump at the White House in 2017. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, was also said to be on the flight.

Mr Cruz’s Twitter account remained silent on Thursday morning. His most recent post was a retweet of Texas governor Greg Abbott’s message about power restoration to 1.6 million Texans, which either he or his staff posted shortly after the flight from Houston landed in Cancun on Wednesday afternoon.

In December 2020, Mr Cruz used the platform to assail the Austin mayor, Steve Adler, for hypocrisy after the Democrat and several others took a trip to another Mexican resort town, Cabo, while urging citizens to stay home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Not all the reaction to Mr Cruz’s unexplained trip was negative, however. The conservative radio host Erick Erickson defended the senator and pivoted it into an attack on his opponents.

“The fact that people think Ted Cruz, a United States Senator, can do anything about a state power grid, even his own, is rather demonstrative of the ignorance of so many people who cover politics. They’d rather performative drama than substance,” he said in a tweet.

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