Rubio Should Be On Trumps VP List
There are signs that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who was one of Republican nominee’s Donald Trump’s most bitter rivals could be in line to become his running mate. Just Sunday he told CNN host Jake Tapper that he now supports presumptive GOP nominee. Rubio said that he will be going to the GOP convention in Cleveland, and that he would be “honored” to speak there on Trump’s behalf. “I want to be helpful. I don’t want to be harmful, because I don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Rubio said.
Rubio told Tapper, on Sunday in an extensive interview with CNN’s “State of the Union” program, that he ruled out becoming Trump’s vice presidential running mate, but said he’d be “honored” to play some kind of a role in helping him win the White House.
“I wouldn’t be the right choice for him,” Rubio said. “Donald deserves to have a vice president – he’s earned the nomination – and he deserves to have a running mate that more fully embraces some of the things he stands for.”
Rubio said Sunday he offered a private mea culpa to Trump for mocking his “small hands.”
“I apologized to him for that,” Rubio told “State of the Union.” “I said: ‘You know, I’m sorry that I said that. It’s not who I am and I shouldn’t have done it. I didn’t say it in front of the cameras, I didn’t want any political benefit.”
In one of the low moments of the GOP presidential fight, Rubio told a rally in Virginia Feb. 28 that The Donald can’t be trusted because he’s got “small hands.”
There is a bit of irony here because Rubio was one of the biggest Trump bashers of any of the 16 GOP candidates who Trump beat. During the primaries, Rubio called Trump a “con artist” and a “lunatic” who was “wholly unprepared to be president.” Rubio said Trump should not be trusted with our nuclear codes. Rubio warned of the “chaos” that would result from a Trump presidency.
But that was then and this is now and a Trump-Rubio ticket would be very interesting to say the least and it’s not like two rivals from the same party would end up running together. George H. Bush and Ronald Reagan were far from friends but after a bitter campaign in 1980 they ended up a winning ticket not once but twice.
For Rubio, once dubbed “The Republican Savior” on the cover of TIME magazine, being second in command to Trump could suddenly seem appealing. For Trump adding Rubio with his foreign policy knowledge and his standing in the Hispanic community would check a great many boxes off what he needs in a running mate.
Trump needs either Rubio or Ohio Gov. John Kasich to be his running mate. He is competitive in both Ohio and Florida, two very key swing states. But with Rubio or Kasich on the ticket he gets even more than their home states he gets a stability factor and a counter balance needed in the general election.
The Floridian said he still didn’t agree with Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants or his recent embrace of conspiracy theories around the 1993 suicide of an aide to President Bill Clinton, but that dislike of Clinton, this year’s Democratic front-runner, was animating support for Trump.
