Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) gestures as he speaks to media representatives on the fifth day of the impeachment trial of former US President Donald Trump for instigating the deadly attack on the US Capitol in Washington, USA on February 13, 2021.
Erin Scott | Reuters
Will Senator Ted Cruz be known as “Flying Ted” now?
Early Thursday, social media broke out with multiple photos allegedly showing a masked Cruz boarding a plane in Houston and then flying to Cancun, Mexico, despite millions of its Texans froze from historically low temperatures and widespread power outages.
Hours after thousands of posts on Twitter shared these photos, other images showed someone with the Republican surname and the first initial of his legal first name – Rafael – waiting for a flight back to Houston from Cancun later Thursday morning.
NBC News has contacted Cruz’s office repeatedly about the pictures but received no response.
Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who lost a narrow Senate election to Cruz in 2018, beat him up during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Thursday.
Cruz “is on vacation in Cancun when the people of the state he was elected to represent and serve are literally freezing to death,” said Democrat O’Rourke.
On Tuesday, Cruz tweeted – in response to an article criticizing him for making fun of California’s blackouts a few weeks earlier – “I have no defense. A blizzard hits Texas and our state closes. Not good. ”
Former President Donald Trump, who ran against Cruz in the 2016 Republican nomination contests, regularly ridiculed him with the contemptuous nickname “Lying Ted”.
But Cruz later became a passionate Trump supporter, unsuccessfully last month trying to get Congress to reject certification of Joe Biden’s victories on electoral college in several states.
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