Ted Cruz is so tone-deaf, one wonders if the gravitational shift of millions of eyes rolling at once feeds his life force. The never-funny senator was at it again this week at CPAC, attempting to poke fun at himself for literally leaving his constituents out in the cold only a week ago. “I gotta say, Orlando is awesome!” Cruz said. “It's not as nice as Cancun, but it's nice.”
Does he think that helped? Does he think at all?
Last weekend, I spent too much time wondering what “Cancun Ted” Cruz was thinking—or not thinking. Something about the image of him lumbering with an overstuffed suitcase through the airport, his Texas-themed face mask concealing what I could only imagine was a shit-eating grin, was a demonstration of Olympian shamelessness. The nerve!
His lack of contrition was chilling. Cruz should have been chastened after he skipped off to a luxury hotel in the Yucatan while regular Texans froze and went without showers for days. He should have been embarrassed that, once he got caught, he issued a series of easily disprovable lies about what he was doing every step of the way. He seemed more upset that one of his wife’s friends leaked text messages that prove the trip was planned as a way for him and his family to flee the crisis than he was by the crisis’ existence in the first place.
The fact that Cruz felt the need to lie about where he was going, how long he planned to be there, who planned the trip, and when he had planned on returning showed that Cruz is capable of understanding that some things ought to be shameful; the fact that he hasn’t resigned over any of the more awful things he’s done as a public figure show that he’s not capable of actually feeling the shame. It’s the ability to demand an emotional reaction from others, but an inability to or refusal to experience one himself.
An inability to feel shame is Ted Cruz’s greatest strength as a politician. It’s a superpower. It is what enables famous sexual abuse-ignorer Jim Jordan to whine about “cancel culture” to Fox News’ audience of millions. It is what allows a person to shoplift from a Walgreens in the background of a local news report about how much shoplifting is going on at that particular Walgreens. It enables a famous man to sleep with an adult film star while his wife is postpartum. And it’s impossible to look away from, like the streaker in the middle of the Super Bowl. Can you name the last play that happened before a 31-year-old man in a bright pink leotard streaked across the football field with about 5:00 left to go in Super Bowl LV? Do you even remember anything else that happened in the game?
If I were Texas Governor Greg Abbott, I’d have my secretary send Cruz a basket of fancy hams and cheeses as a thank-you gift for serving as a human shield. Abbott, who has spent the last couple of weeks pretending that he’s going to get to the bottom of the mystery of who caused Texas’ catastrophic infrastructure failure, has blamed wind power and ERCOT, two entities whose guilt wouldn’t undermine his core belief that deregulation is good for everybody.
In fact, Texas’ failure is a first grade textbook-level example of why deregulation can lead to disaster for regular people, and spare all who profit from it of any consequences, until the whole thing comes crashing down, leaving the regular folks to root around for scraps in the rubble as the profiteers use their resources to relocate to another place they can drain of blood. That’s how late-stage capitalism works! But as that immutable fact was about to be the headline in the story of what happened in Texas, along comes Ted Cruz and his police escort and his silly wife’s silly group text and his lonely housebound poodle named Snowflake, upstaging the story that should have been Abbott’s political undoing. I can’t believe I’m about to brush up against defending Cruz, but he did not deserve to dominate that news cycle. Abbott (and his greasy Lieutenant Governor Ken Paxton) should have. Senator John Cornyn, who just this week announced plans to gimme gimme the federal government for a bailout to weatherize the electric grid with one hand after years of flipping the bird to the Green New Deal with the other, should have.
Shameless nitwits like Cruz are dangerous not only because it’s bad in general for elected leaders to care that little about what people think of them, but also because their shamelessness is exhausting. An exhausted public is less likely to hold other politicians to account who are screwing more people more directly than Cruz could ever hope to. In a world of loud attention-seekers, the quiet ones are more dangerous.
Loudly tacky always drowns out quietly evil. While Kayleigh McEnany was yelling sassy bumper sticker slogans at the press, Steve Mnuchin was building a business relationship with mega-wealthy murderer Mohammed bin Salman on the taxpayers’ dime, and will likely suffer no consequences as a result. The attention-seeking but ultimately meaningless theatrics of the unwell congresswomen from Georgia and Colorado steal oxygen from alarming efforts by Republicans to entrench minority rule by making sure fewer people vote. Donald Trump spent months delivering circus-like press conferences and firing off deranged tweets about bleach curing COVID while nobody understood that his administration had literally no plan to actually distribute the vaccine they were making a huge deal about developing. (Trump, the exception, is both loudly tacky and quietly evil.)
Democrats and even some Republicans have called for Cruz to resign over the vexingly clueless vacation. But he won’t resign. He didn’t resign after he helped incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that led to five deaths and two subsequent suicides. Why would Ted Cruz resign over flying to Mexico, realizing that people were mad, and then pivoting right out of there à la Grandpa Simpson at La Maison Derrière? Why would anything happen to Cruz at all beyond the public agreeing that Ted Cruz is insufferable? With that and a dollar, I could buy a can of Sprite!
Of course, it’s possible to think about more than one bad political behavior at once, and dunking on Ted Cruz is fun, up to the point that dunking is all that’s going on. It would be best for America if shame experienced a renaissance, if all its Ted Cruzes woke up one morning after being visited by the Shame Fairy, suddenly horrified by the way they have conducted themselves. But until then, beware the canny and the boring.
