The View’s Meghan McCain on Thursday blasted Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for taking a family trip to Cancun while his home state’s residents literally freeze to death, calling the senator’s trip a “very Marie Antoinette” moment and “one of the worst optics” in recent political memory.
After speculation exploded overnight on social media that the Texas lawmaker had snuck away for a tropical getaway while the Lone Star State is gripped in a full-blown crisis, Fox News confirmed on Thursday that Cruz and his family had indeed made the trip. Cruz’s office, meanwhile, remained mum throughout the morning, though it does appear the conservative senator is already hustling back home to stem the PR nightmare.
With millions of Texans still without power or running water amid a devastating winter storm, The View’s panel initially took aim at the complete failure exhibited by the state’s Republican officials, who have ludicrously attempted to blame Texas’ power outages on the Green New Deal.
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“The truth is that a privatized, deregulated energy system is at fault, and they knew they had problems to fix, and they’ve known this since 2011, but they didn’t do it,” host Whoopi Goldberg noted.
McCain, the show’s resident conservative host, immediately decried the entire situation as “awful,” insisting that there’s a “lot of heads to roll and a lot of people to blame” over the debilitating loss of power and utilities during the storm.
From there, McCain focused her attention on Cruz—who has criticized other politicians in the past for traveling in the wake of local or regional crises.
“What’s not helping right now is the fact that Senator Ted Cruz is seen on a flight with his family to Cancun right now,” she declared. “I was looking at Twitter in the commercial break. He’s apparently on a flight back home to Texas right at this very moment.”
“I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of media waiting, asking questions, but to, like, literally flee your home state while people are freezing to death, to go to Cancun is a very Marie Antoinette,” McCain added. “One of the worst optics I could come up with in an era where there’s been a lot of bad political optics.”
Later in the segment, meanwhile, fellow View host Sunny Hostin also tore into the right-wing senator, invoking his role in objecting to Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s election.
“He was never held accountable for any of that, challenging the Electoral College again and again and again,” she exclaimed. “That’s why he went to Cancun, allegedly, to escort his family, because no one is held accountable for any of this behavior. That is—that is really in my view, what the problem is.”
