Late night hosts mock Ted Cruz's lame post-Mexico photo ops, cheer Trump's tax returns defeat

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) finally found a place colder than last week's Texas freeze — and the reception he got from Texans after returning from his truncated Mexican vacation, The Late Show imagined Monday night.

"Following the backlash over his trip to Cancun, Sen. Ted Cruz spent the weekend trying his best to help the people of Texas," Jimmy Fallon said at The Tonight Show. But his "photo op didn't work out too well. Most people just drove away when he tried showing them his vacation photos." But "Cruz tried to be helpful in other ways," he said. "Later he showed Texans how to make frozen margs with the snow in their living rooms."

"Sorry, Cruz," but "doing the literal bare minimum for the sake of the cameras" at this point "is the politician version of coming home with flowers the day after Valentine's Day," Trevor Noah said at The Daily Show. "It's not nothing, but your a-- is still sleeping on the couch."

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"Every detail that comes out of this story is more Ted Cruzier than the last one," like that he invited his college roommate on the family vacation he blamed on his daughters, Stephen Colbert said at The Late Show. And "it gets worse, because after Cruz returned we found out he left his dog behind."

Also, former President Donald Trump finally lost his tax return battle, and "given the potential charges, the former president could be sent to jail if convicted," Colbert said. "I can't wait to see it all play out in the new Netflix series Orange Is the New Orange."

Once New York prosecutors get Trump's tax returns, "we'll finally have the evidence we need to lock Hillary up — or something like that," Jimmy Kimmel joked at Kimmel Live. "Life is funny, isn't it? One day you're building walls, the next they're closing in on you." And the Ted Cruz story "is only getting funnier," he said. "Only Ted Cruz would think he can repair his image by touching a maskless constituent two days after getting off an international flight."

"United Airlines announced over the weekend that they launched an investigation into who leaked data about Sen. Ted Cruz's travel itinerary amid media coverage of his trip to Cancun, Seth Meyers said at Late Night. "They're trying to figure out who would have a motive, and they narrowed it down to everybody." Peter Weber