Marco Rubio said his presidential aspirations would be over if his campaign manager manhandled a reporter, as Donald Trump’s has been accused of doing.
The Florida senator told radio host Mike Gallagher Monday that accusations of Corey Lewandowski grabbing Michelle Fields, the Breitbart reporter who resigned late Sunday, is “one more example of what’s happening here at these events.”
“If my campaign manager had done that, my campaign would be over. He would have had to resign, and my campaign may be over. I would have had to quit that very day,” Rubio said.
The Lewandowski-Fields accusations are just the latest ones involving physical altercations in the Trump campaign. The increasing violence at Trump events, for which he has denied responsibility, has seemingly not hurt Trump’s campaign, as he still leads Rubio in polls leading up to the Sunshine State’s winner-take-all primary Tuesday.
“You don’t have a right to disrupt an event because you don’t like the person speaking, and I’ve been very clear about that,” Rubio told Gallagher.
“But the reaction should not be, ‘So let’s punch them in the face.’ … When you’re in a position of influence or leadership, when you have the megaphone of a major presidential candidate, you cannot go around saying whatever the hell you want, because there are people out there that are unstable and you don’t know how they’re going to react to that stimulus,” Rubio concluded.
