MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sen. Marco Rubio was reluctant to take the bait on Wednesday when pressed to respond to rival Donald Trump’s mounting attacks on his finances.
“When Donald comes across a poll he doesn’t like he gets weird and he does these sorts of strange things, and that’s fine,” Rubio said when reporters prodded him to respond to Trump following an event at Saint Anselm College. “That’s the campaign he wants to run and he’s entitled to it.”
Earlier in the day, Trump challenged reporters to ask about Rubio’s finances.
“Marco Rubio has a disaster on his finances,” Trump said during a press conference in front of the state house in Concord earlier in the day. “He has a disaster on his credit cards. When you check his credit cards, take a look at what he’s done with the Republican Party when he had access, what he had to put back in, and whether or not something should have happened, you’ll understand it. Marco Rubio has a basic disaster on finance, so let’s see what you find, let’s see what kind of reporter you are.”
When a reporter followed up on Trump’s “financial disaster” comment to Rubio, the senator said, “The only debt I have in the world is a mortgage on my home — at a pretty good interest rate. [Trump] says a lot of things. I can’t respond to everything he says, I wouldn’t be able to run a campaign.”
Earlier, Rubio was asked a more direct question about his use of a Republican Party card for personal use in Florida, and he dismissed the issue.
“It wasn’t a credit card, it was a charge card with American Express,” he said. “And every month I would get a bill in my home and I would review it and if there was something on it that was personal, I would pay it. And if it wasn’t, the party paid it. What I said was, what I would do differently is that I just wouldn’t have done personal things on it, because I would have avoided confusion that it’s created in the minds of some, but it’s been coming up for five years. It’s not a new issue, it’s something that was used against me by Charlie Crist [in the 2010 Senate race] and it’s an attack that’s been debunked.”
Trump, who is well ahead in current polls of New Hampshire, has stepped up attacks on Rubio in the wake of the senators strong debate performance that has given his campaign a new momentum.
