Marco Rubio says in an interview set to air Sunday that he wants to be “helpful” to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, reasoning that he wants to stop Hillary Clinton from taking the White House.
“I want to be helpful. I don’t want to be harmful, because I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Rubio tells CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Look, my policy differences with Donald Trump, I spent 11 months talking about them. I think they’re well understood. That said, I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president. If there’s something I can do to [prevent] that from happening and that’s helpful to the cause, I’d most certainly be honored to be considered for that.”
That includes speaking on Trump’s behalf at the July Republican convention, if asked, and releasing his delegates.
“I basically, technically have [released them] already, because Donald is gonna have a majority number, and at that point it’ll be irrelevant,” Rubio says. “So if we haven’t done so already, we will.”
CNN said Thursday that Trump had crossed the 1,237 delegate threshold to have a majority to lock up the party’s nomination.
One thing Rubio says he won’t help Trump with is bolstering the GOP ticket, arguing that selecting him as vice president “wouldn’t be the right choice for him.” Instead, Trump needs to pick someone who “more fully embraces some of things he stands for.”
Rubio certainly didn’t embrace them at all during the GOP primary. As the campaign progressed toward Super Tuesday in March, the Florida senator unleashed his full rhetorical arsenal on the New York businessman, saying at one point that “people in the conservative movement who are supporting Donald Trump are going to stop and say, ‘My God, what have we done?’ ”
During a February debate, Rubio went hard at Trump on health care, trapping the candidate in a repeat loop and criticizing him for having an insufficient proposal to replace Obamacare. He also ripped Trump on his previous immigration stances, business record, Trump University, and whatever else happened to be in the kitchen sink.
He parlayed that on the campaign trail into a borderline comedy routine, attacking Trump in unusually personal and harsh terms, mockingly reading his tweets.
His super PAC hit Trump for thinking voters were “fools”.
And he himself declared that “no one” would call for unity behind Trump, stating that a Trump nomination would mean “the end of the modern conservative movement and the end of the modern Republican party in a very devastating way.”
