If you put Marco Rubio’s many opinions of Donald Trump and Election Day the last several months into a paragraph, there’s a cohesive, though not entirely coherent progression in there:
I stand by everything I said in the campaign. Donald Trump is a con artist, and we should not hand the nuclear codes to an erratic individual. But Hillary Clinton has a 30-year record of scandal and outrage, and I don’t trust her on foreign policy, which could lead to a conflict anywhere in the world that this nation cannot afford and should not be involved in. This election is a disturbing choice between someone who I disagree with on many things and someone who I disagree with on virtually everything. I don’t trust either one of them.
If a thousand words are worth a picture, these are Edvard Munch’s “The Scream“. Rubio has remained loyal to both the GOP nominee for president and his past assessment of him, a knotty position that must create noticeable angst. But holding it has allowed him to focus his criticism on Clinton and describe how he’d stand up to her in Congress—now one of his core justifications for reelection, with Trump lagging considerably in the polls. At the outset of a debate Monday night with his challenger, Democratic representative Patrick Murphy, Rubio reproached Clinton’s record at multiple turns and only admitted, meekly, his continued discomfort with his own party’s White House hopeful.
But as the evening and now the week advanced, he separated from Trump on two of the Republican nominee’s lushest troves of attacks. Toward the conclusion of the debate, Rubio flatly rejected any concern that the election would be “rigged”, a claim Trump has trumpeted at a fortissimo level the last several days:
Other Republicans have dismissed Trump over this matter. Rubio rebuked him.
He did the same on the issue of WikiLeaks, the contents of which the Trump campaign has used to attack Clinton. An increasing number of Republicans—individual members and the party apparatus alike—have grown comfortable using the illegal work of hackers as political ammo. Not Rubio. From ABC News Wednesday:
Rubio called for the resignation of State Department undersecretary Patrick Kennedy this week for his alleged role in a “quid pro quo” scheme to protect Hillary Clinton from her email controversy—but that information was revealed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD via U.S. intelligence and congressional officials, not WikiLeaks.
Trump has not responded to Rubio for either set of remarks and has only issued a blanket charge of naivety against GOP members who deny mass election fraud. Yet he has chastised other prominent Republicans, like House speaker Paul Ryan, for saying less.
Just give Trump some time. A little Marco could go a long way.
