These Ted Cruz Cancún Trip Memes Are Perfect for a Short Flight

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) took a short trip to Cancún, Mexico, to drop his daughters off on vacation, the Republican lawmaker confirmed in a statement after he was spotted boarding a flight. While questions remain about the exact details of Cruz’s travel itinerary, one thing is for certain: The minor scandal set off a fiesta of memes at the Texas senator’s expense.

Comedian Blaire Erskine went viral with a video in which she pretends to be Cruz’s director of communications. In the brief clip, she joked that his office’s official response to Cruz’s trip was “big whoop.”

“Senator Cruz deserves to relax, unwind, unplug, recharge — like you would a power outlet — or his power grid’s gonna go out, and we can’t be having that,” Erskine joked in the video. “Why can’t he have his Eat, Pray, Love moment like everybody else can?”

For Texas Monthly, Lauren Larson wrote “13 Curses to Mutter Against Ted Cruz While You Boil Snow to Drink,” evoking the very real challenges Texans are facing amid frigid temperatures and power outages that have affected millions. Among the curses are, “May you make direct eye contact with your neighbor during your yard pee.”

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Cruz, standing with his wheeled suitcase in hand, was edited into photos to make it look like he was present for another politician’s infamous PR nightmare, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s 2017 beach trip. Photo edits also depicted him leaving the scene of famous emergencies like Pearl Harbor or D-Day in Normandy, mocking him for leaving Texas, the state he represents in Congress.

Cruz’s trip was compared to a movie scene of U.S. climate refugees fleeing across the Mexican border and repeatedly likened to a famous scene from The Simpsons in which Springfield mayor Joe Quimby gives a press conference responding to allegations he skipped town in the midst of an epidemic.

“People of Springfield, because of the epidemic, I have cancelled my vacation to the Bahamas,” Quimby, shown from the chest up in a suit and tie, says on a television screen. The shot changes and we can see Quimby standing wearing a suit and tie on top but swimming trunks and sandals on the bottom, standing in front of a mayor’s office backdrop on a beach as he says, “I shall not leave the city —” before he’s interrupted by a steel drummer.

Even Cruz’s statement confirming his travel got backlash, as some believed he basically blamed the whole situation on his kids and threw them under the bus.

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