Don’t Let Ted Cruz Fill the White House with Soup

My fellow Americans,

We are nine months away from the inauguration of our next President. In nine months, one of the white people whose faces currently appear all over the news will swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, a document that does not explicitly decree a separation of soup and state.

As legend has it, the day after returning from his honeymoon, Ted Cruz left his new bride, went to a store, and purchased somewhere between 100 and 250 American dollars’ worth of Campbell’s Chunky Soup.

Horrified by her spouse’s eating habits, Heidi woke early the next morning, emptied their kitchen of the cans that had rendered it incapable of storing any other food products, and returned the soup to the store.

As a person new to matrimony and as the kind of woman who would, sound of mind, willingly enter into a legally binding and life-long contract with Ted Cruz, she called her mother to confirm that her actions were ethical. Her mother denied that they were; her mother advised her to give Ted his soup back, lest, probably, he wonder why he was being persecuted and resort to eating his own solidified mucus.

Ted and Heidi Cruz were married in 2001, four years into a period in American history when Campbell’s was marketing its Chunky Soups through a series of ads that featured NFL players being fed the sodium-rich colloid by their mothers, known as the “Mama’s Boy” campaign. Although real mothers of NFL players would not appear in these ads until 2002, Cruz undoubtedly saw the correlation between these soup commercials and his own aspirations: he, too, cherishes his mother above all other humans; he, too, longs for the status that is won through hard work, determination, and not saying swear words on television.

In his memoir, Cruz recounts the moment when he decided to She’s All That himself from a pubescent nerd into the rubber Grandpa Munster mask we all know today:

Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he wrote in his book. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’*

Few are ostensibly more highly esteemed in American culture than professional athletes, and — especially in Texas — few athletes enjoy more popularity than NFL players. What better way to become popular himself (while still maintaining his significant and close relationship with his mother) than to consciously emulate the behavior of these athletes by doing what they did: eating Campbell’s Chunky Soup?

My fellow Americans, I know that Trump is a bad choice for President. Everything anyone would say about him being capricious and Tang-colored is true. I understand that he is upsetting establishment Republicans and that he encourages bigotry and violence and has the vocabulary of a 15-year-old bully on a sitcom about 6th graders. I understand that nominating “Anyone but Trump” seems like a sound idea.

I urge my brothers and sisters in the Republican party to disabuse themselves of this notion. I urge them to please, please, please not allow Ted Cruz to advance even one step closer to filling the White House with Campbell’s Chunky Soup on January 21.