After getting caught jetting off to Mexico while his constituents in Texas were literally dying, Ted Cruz decided to try and save face by...oh god, staging a photo opp that violates CDC guidelines regarding international travel and preventing coronavirus transmission.
The Texas senator—who initially lied about trying to go on a “hastily planned” Cancún Ritz-Carlton getaway on Wednesday, per The New York Times, before finally coming clean about his cowardly would-be escape plan on Thursday—tweeted some photos of himself on Saturday that show him handing out water bottles to beleaguered Texans, TMZ reports.
But as Business Insider notes, Cruz’s clear attempt at reputational damage control after abandoning millions of people suffering from freezing weather, water shortages, power outages, and more has backfired in more ways than one. Not only are a lot of people reportedly not buying Cruz’s super performative charity posturing—I mean, look at the material—but the dude actually put every person in those photos at increased risk of covid transmission just by taking them!
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advise travelers returning to the United States from Mexico to self-quarantine for a week and get tested for covid-19 before resuming normal activities, scientist Peter Gleick tells BI. Being a psycho politician who stages photo opps to make yourself look good isn’t a “normal” activity by any stretch of the imagination, but you know what I mean. Probably not something he should’ve been doing mere days after traveling internationally during a global pandemic.
Anyway, speaking of Texas, about 165,000 people in the state were without electricity on Friday night, the Times reports, and millions of Texans either still don’t have running water or have been notified to boil their tap water. (As the Associated Press explains, low water pressure has made it unsafe to drink in some places.) At least 58 people have died as a result of this week’s extreme weather, with causes of death ranging from carbon monoxide poisoning and car accidents to drowning and hypothermia.