Cruz blames criticism of Cancun trip on media ‘Trump withdrawal’

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is blaming extensive media coverage of his trip to Cancun on a void he says the absence of former President Trump has created in the news cycle. 

“I will say, to venture into practicing medicine, that I actually want to diagnose the media. The media is suffering from acute Trump withdrawal, where for four years every day, they could foam at the mouth and be obsessed with Donald Trump, and now that he has receded from their day-to-day storyline, they don’t know what to do with themselves,” Cruz said during an appearance on conservative radio host Dana Loesch’s program Monday afternoon.

“Donald Trump broke the media, and so they don’t want to do that,” he added. “They just want to engage in political attacks.”

The Republican made similar comments about Trump and the media Tuesday evening while appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. 

“I think the media is suffering from Trump withdrawal, where they’ve attacked Trump every day for four years,” Cruz told Hannity. “They don’t know what to do, so they obsessed over my taking my girls to the beach.”

Cruz was widely criticized last week after he was spotted at an airport in Houston traveling to Cancun while hundreds of thousands of people went without power, water and heat as a result of an intense winter storm in the Lone Star State. 

After receiving backlash, the senator claimed he was only traveling to Mexico to drop off his daughters and was always planning on returning to Texas promptly. Text messages obtained by The New York Times showed Cruz’s wife, Heidi, messaging friends about an upcoming vacation in Cancun days before Cruz was seen at the airport. 

“It was obviously a mistake. In hindsight, I wouldn’t have done it,” Cruz said Thursday. “I was trying to be a dad. And all of us have made decisions — when you got two girls who have been cold for two days and haven’t had heat or power and they’re saying, ‘Hey look, we don’t have school, why don’t we go. Let’s get out of here.’ ” 

During two stints on the presidential campaign trail and four years in the White House, Trump routinely criticized journalists as peddlers of “fake news” and going so far as to call them “the enemy of the people.”  

Cruz, who often engages in his own attacks on the national media, Hollywood celebrities and prominent liberals, pointed to a recent scandal in New York within Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) administration regarding the alleged falsifying of coronavirus nursing home deaths data as an example of bigger scandal than his trip and not being so intensely covered. 

“The mainstream media doesn’t want to cover it at all,” Cruz told Loesch.

“You know, Chris Cuomo wants to play footsie with his brother and have a hug fest because CNN doesn’t want to cover news, and nobody else covers it,” he added, referring to the governor’s brother, a CNN host. “And it’s serious and tragic.”