Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel spin Ted Cruz's Cancun misadventure into jokes, mortification, travel ads

Half a million Texas households still had no power Thursday and "Texans have been lining up for clean water from public spigots, boiling their own, or even trying to melt snow," Trevor Noah said on Thursday's Daily Show. "But the saddest part is that these people are the lucky ones. Because it turns out one poor Texan had to travel 800 miles just to get heat, water, and electricity."

Noah's first question about Sen. Ted Cruz's ill-advised, very short vacation in Cancun is how he could be so stupid. "Look, I get that Ted Cruz is tired — the man deserves a break after trying so hard to overthrow the government — but now is not the time," he said. "What's even worse is that when he got caught, instead of owning up to it and apologizing, he acted like a total Ted Cruz," Noah added. "Seriously, Ted Cruz blaming his daughters for this is just gross. Being a good father means putting them on a bus, not throwing them under one. Although to be fair, maybe Ted Cruz just doesn't know what a good dad is — I mean, his dad killed JFK."

The Daily Show did turn Cruz's Cancun misadventure into a fun travel ad.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So did Jimmy Kimmel Live, with a "Ted Cruise" vacation package. But first, Kimmel recapped Cruz's "Flyin' Ted" scandal in all its inglorious detail. First, Cruz "loads his family onto a plane to get the hell out of town," and because he's been on TV so much, "everyone recognizes him even with his mask on, they post all these pictures of him, there's so much backlash he has no choice but to immediately book a flight home," he said. Since almost nobody bought Cruz's first excuse for his early return, "Ted decided to kinda come clean," saying he had second thoughts the moment he sat down on the plane. "Yes, yes, as soon as people started posting pictures of him on the plane, he looked up and knew he shouldn't be on the plane, Kimmel said. "How did he think he was going to get away with this? You know your judgment is terrible when this haircut is only the third-worst decision you've made this month."

Kimmel interviewed a Ted Cruz blobfish puppet, showed a fake United Airlines ad, and ended up finding a kind of silver lining: "At least his vacation was ruined." Peter Weber