Texas senator Ted Cruz, whose superpower is always doing the wrong thing, appears to have gone sightseeing in Athens the day after a devastating natural disaster hit his home state, killing more than 100 people, including more than two dozen girls and staff members from a summer camp. In addition to being in deeply poor taste, the revelation suggests that the lawmaker did not actually attempt to get back to Texas “as fast as humanly possible,” as his office claimed.
On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Cruz was spotted at the Parthenon on Saturday, July 5, at approximately 6 p.m. local time, “more than 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks” and “a day after Camp Mystic announced that more than 20 girls had gone missing in the floodwaters.” Michael Rocchio, whose photo of Cruz at the Greek temple was posted on Bluesky, told the Houston Chronicle, “I get it, he’s on vacation. But after what happened, vacation or not, you should have been back on a plane on his way back to Texas to deal with everything that was going on with those poor kids in the floodplain.” Cruz left Greece on Sunday morning, arriving in Texas that evening.
After The Daily Beast published its story, a spokesperson for Cruz wrote on X: “A bullshit piece published by a bullshit rag outlet with no credibility, and with no regard for the tragedy in Texas. The Senator is on the ground in Texas and arrived as fast as humanly possible. I explained all of this to their two-faced reporter.” (Cruz’s office separately told various news outlets that “the senator was already in the middle of preplanned family vacation travel overseas when the flooding occurred,” adding: “Within hours, he spoke by phone with Governor [Greg] Abbott, Lt. Governor [Dan] Patrick, Texas Emergency Management director Nim Kidd, and President Trump, working to ensure that the maximum federal assets were available for search and rescue. He and his team worked closely with local officials and with families of missing girls throughout that time.”)
Later, The Daily Beast reported that “flight data shows multiple flights from Athens to San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, July 4 and Saturday, July 5, after the floods hit. While it is not known how many seats were available on each flight, possible options included flights leaving Athens on Saturday morning and landing in San Antonio that evening via Chicago, Atlanta, or Washington, DC.”
This is not the first time that Cruz has been out of the country amidst a natural disaster. In 2021, Cruz jetted off to Cancún as a winter storm left millions of Texans without heat, power, and water. More than 200 people ultimately died, and Cruz blamed the trip on his daughters, saying, in part: “With school canceled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon.”
During negotiations over the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—the Republican spending bill signed by Trump last week—Cruz, according to The Guardian, “inserted language” that “eliminates a $150m fund to ‘accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public’ around weather forecasting.”
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