Ted Cruz's "Fav" Porn Company Made T-Shirts & They're Oh-So Hilarious

The world received a truly wonderful gift this week, and it just keeps on giving. The Twitter account of former Republican presidential candidate and current Texas senator Ted Cruz accidentally liked porn on Monday night and, of course, it launched an unrelenting stream of mockery online. Now you can immortalize the scandal with a t-shirt straight from the Twitter account at the center of the whole thing, so get your Ted Cruz porn shirt before it's too late.

The t-shirts are available for $22 from TeeSpring.com in four different designs with a few different combinations of shirt style and color. Each one makes a different reference to the incident, and some are definitely more safe for work than others. If you want to keep it as tame as possible, the Ted Cruz 2020 shirt featuring the Twitter bird is your best bet (though it may inadvertently make people think you're an actual Cruz supporter). If you want something a little more subtle, there's also a MasturbaTED coffee mug available.

The scandal broke when a Twitter user happened to notice that the top tweet on Cruz's Likes page on his profile featured a hard-core porn video posted by the account Sexuall Posts, which now runs the t-shirt sales. Cruz's team quickly removed the tweet from his profile and released a statement blaming staffing issues, but it was way too late for that. The screenshot receipts spread far and wide, and by Tuesday morning it was making national headlines.

To his credit, Cruz sought to downplay the issue altogether, rather than appeal to his typical sexually-restrictive rhetoric. He actually made a joke about it during an interview with Capitol Hill reporters this week, apparently never having realized that porn tends to catch people's attention.

Cruz told the press on Monday:

This was not how I envisioned waking up this morning. If I had known that this would trend so quickly, then perhaps we should have posted something like this during the Indiana primary.

There was some critique of the general response to Cruz's scandal, including that no one should be shamed for watching porn. However, the rhetoric primarily focused on the extreme irony of this particular politician succumbing to this particular scandal. Cruz has been a fierce advocate against marriage equality — the Sexuall Posts video features two women engaging in sexual activity. He also fought to defend a Texas law against the sale of sex toys, arguing that people's sex lives should be confined the privacy of their own homes. Politically attuned Americans also noticed how the whole thing was made better because of Cruz's conservative political persona.

The scandal also throws a new wrench in Cruz's 2018 Senate reelection campaign. Cruz was already facing open defiance from within his own party, as well as a tough challenge from a charismatic Democratic congressman. The scandal may blow over and people may truly believe that a staffer accidentally liked the tweet, but Cruz already has dismal favorability ratings among his constituents, so voters may not be inclined to trust what he has to say. Unfortunately, it will take a whole other year to see how this blunder affects Cruz at the ballot box.

If you really want one of these t-shirts because they make you happy, then by all means go ahead and purchase one. But also remember that there are a lot of humanitarian causes that need your support right now, such as Hurricane Irma relief efforts, so make sure to really consider the value of $25.