Anyone who’s gone off to college has a story about the roommate from Hell. After the terrible year is over, it becomes just a funny story to tell your friends or children, when they start college. But imagine if that horrific roommate becomes first a nationally known U.S. Senator and then a viable candidate for President of the United States.
For Los Angeles-based screenwriter Craig Mazin, the roommate he can never forget was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, with whom he shared a dorm during freshman year at Princeton University. Rather than just telling his family and friends about Cruz, however, Mazin has taken to Twitter to make sure the world knows what kind of person the Republican candidate is.
Mazin began tweeting during the end of Cruz’s first campaign for the Senate seat from Texas. “My freshman year college roommate Ted Cruz is going to be elected Senator. In case I hadn’t made it clear, he’s also a huge asshole.”
Some of the tweets detail the kind of struggles that are familiar to everyone’s freshman year struggles to adapt to living with a stranger, but they still give an insight into Cruz’s character as well as what kind of Commander in Chief he could turn out to be. “When Ted Cruz was my roommate, he’d endlessly hit the snooze button. I asked him to stop He wouldn’t. So I Krazy-glued it. #learnfromthis”
Though Mazin spent his whole first year at Princeton with Cruz, it wasn’t due to lack of trying. A tweet from October of 2013 details his struggle with the university housing authority: “I begged them for a different roommate. Begged. They didn’t understand then. They do now.”
In an article in The Daily Beast where a number of former classmates of Crux recounted their memories of the future Senator, Mazin detailed a particularly creepy memory of the teenaged Cruz. According to Mazin, Cruz would walk through the hallway to the girl’s end of the dormitory, wearing only a flimsy robe, leaving his unwilling roommate to deal with requests from the female students that he keep out of their hallway.
In addition to complaining about Cruz’s body odor issues, Mazin was also struck by his roommate’s political extremism, unusual for someone so young and at a relatively liberal institution. Seeing him with a book titled “Was Karl Marx a Satanist?” Mazin told The Daily Beast that he thought, “Who is this person?”
To the argument that a person’s personality as they start college doesn’t hold any bearing to who they would later become, Mazin offered this tweet: “What you see before you now is EXACTLY who he was back then. He does not change. The way zombies and mold don’t change.”
Most recently, Mazin tweeted that while he can’t promise a regular stream of memories of his time with Cruz, “They will appear when you least expect them… when you need them the most…”
Most damning, he offered up the following assessment of his former roommate’s fitness to hold our nation’s highest office: “I would rather have anybody else be the President of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”