Donald Trump Jr. jumped to the defense of Sen. Ted Cruz over the Texas Republican’s controversial Cancun trip.
Cruz faced mounting backlash Thursday after it emerged he’d flown to Mexico with his family as his home state suffered sweeping power outages caused by winter storms.
On Twitter, former President Donald Trump’s eldest son slammed “the hypocrisy of those trying to cancel Ted Cruz,” saying their silence “on their Democrat Governor’s incompetence is telling.”
In a video posted to Rumble, Trump Jr. admitted the optics of Cruz’s trip were not ideal but added, “In the grand scheme of things, he’s a senator. He doesn’t manage crisis in states. That’s a governor’s job.”
“Give me a break that they’re spending more time focusing on this, than they are, you know, governors just flagrantly disregarding their executive orders shutting down states, etc. ... shows you how ridiculous things are,” he continued.
“Now, if I were a Trump, which I am, you know, I’d come up with a nickname for something like this, like maybe, I don’t know, ‘Cancun Cruz,’” Trump Jr. said. “It’s funny, OK. But like honestly I can’t get on this bandwagon trying to cancel the guy.”
Twitter users took the wording of Trump Jr.’s tweet to mean he didn’t know the party affiliation of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has faced criticism for his handling of the power outages that swept across his state during this week’s deadly cold snap.
But in a video shared to Rumble on Friday, Trump Jr. insisted he knew Abbott was a Republican and said he’d instead been railing against Democratic governors accused of incompetence and of breaking rules amid the COVID-19 pandemic.