Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., made the case for backing Donald Trump in a presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton, despite his previously-expressed contempt for the presumptive GOP nominee.
“Despite all my differences with Donald Trump, I have a better chance to get a conservative-nominated Supreme Court with him than I ever will with Hillary Clinton,” Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday.
“If we pass — the Senate and the Congress passes a law to repeal Obamacare, Donald Trump will sign it. Hillary Clinton will veto it. If you talk about rolling back some of these damaging regulations to our economy, Donald Trump will support that. Hillary Clinton will oppose it. Those things matter. These are important issues.”
Rubio’s statement that he would be willing to speak at the GOP convention in July shocked supporters who viewed him as a principled enemy of the reality TV star, given his harsh criticism of Trump during the primary contest. It caused some observers to wonder Rubio, who declined to run for reelection in order to focus on his bid for the White House, was flip-flopping on Trump in advance of a campaign to keep his job.
But Rubio stuck by his criticism of the real estate mogul and said he wouldn’t be Trump’s running mate this fall.
“Everything I said during the campaign, I meant,” he told Tapper. “He deserves to have a running mate that more fully embraces some of the things he stands for… And I think he just — he would be better served by having someone more aligned with him on some of these things or someone who didn’t run against him and had some of the interaction that we had. You know, if I were his running mate, you could see the ads now, where they’d be playing back my words and saying, you said this about him then but now you’re saying something different.”
Rubio also said that the presence of his “real good friend,” Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera, in the Florida Senate GOP primary will keep him on the sidelines this summer. And it might be awhile before he’s back in public office.
“I don’t know where I’m going to be in two years,” he said. “If there’s an opportunity to serve again in a way that I feel passionate about I’ll most certainly think I’d explore it. But I don’t know where I’m going to be in two years, I don’t know what my life will look like then.”
