In the case of Ted Cruz v. Humanity, the verdict has long been unanimous. Five years ago, Lindsey Graham quipped that “if you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” And the other day, former Republican pollster Matthew Dowd shared this joke: “Why do people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? Because it saves time.”

So even though the right-wing buffoon winged his way to warm Cancun while the little people of Texas froze in their homes, it wasn’t a big surprise. Quite the contrary, it was precisely the kind of behavior one would expect from Cruz, for one big reason:

At heart he’s not really a U.S. senator, at least not the type of senator who rolls up his sleeves and does the hard work of constituent service. He has no interest in actually governing – much less trying to help govern in an emergency when it’s most needed. That’s simply not his brand. At heart he’s just a performance artist, a spewer of agitprop whose metier is (in the words of former aide Amanda Carpenter) “shitposting on Twitter.”

There have long been two kinds of senators: work horses and show horses. Cruz comes from a long line of show horses, but he’s a mutation of the old tradition – thanks, alas, to the ubiquity of social media and the toxic polarization that marks our era, shrinks the center, and prioritizes combat over compromise. Cruz has no interest in doing deals and moving legislation. His mandate, from the Texans who’ve twice elected him, is basically to agitate, to blame the “libs” for whatever, to try to tear stuff down (including, most recently, the free presidential election) instead of building anything up.

Lest we forget, he’s been this way since he first surfaced in the Senate eight years ago. One month into his gig, while he was trying to smear Obama’s incoming Defense secretary as a communist, I warned in a column that Cruz “is a man who bears watching, and I don’t intend that as a compliment.” Later that year, in autumn ’13, he launched a far bigger Cruz missile, forcing a long government shutdown in the hopes of killing Obamacare. In his words, “Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” At one point, he attacked the health reform law for 21 straight hours, sustaining his energy by reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham.

I bet you don’t remember that stunt.

So of course it would’ve never occurred to Cruz that flying off to Cancun in the midst of a life-and-death crisis was, at the very least, bad optics. That’s the majority view, anyway. What’s hilarious is that some right-winger commentators think that what he did was just fine. Erick Erickson tweeted that if Cruz had stayed home to help constituents, it would’ve been “performative drama.” Another pro-Cruz polemicist, ex-felon Dinesh D’Souza (pardoned by Trump in 2018), mused the other day: “What could Ted Cruz do if he were in Texas? I’m hard pressed to say.”

Actually, we don’t need to press very hard. The first instinct of a real senator would be to stay home, work the phones, fire off texts and emails to federal, state, and local officials, to help make sure that the maximum coordinated help was reaching the maximum number of people. In other words, to govern.

But Cruz doesn’t do governing. His abiding instinct – his whole job, as a tumor on the body politic – is basically to tweet crap (“Can we build the Keystone Pipeline if we add Hunter Biden to the board?”) and provide infauxtainment on Fox News (returning from Cancun, he fled to Sean Hannity). Let somebody else do the hard relief work – even if it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raising $2 million in two days for people 1800 miles from her House district. That is just too delicious.

One saving grace. We know about the Cancun trip because other travelers aimed their cell cameras at Cruz and busted him in real time. There we have it, folks: Live by social media, die by social media. Put your hands together for rough justice, which I’m sure will chasten Cruz and turn him into a real senator.

Not.