‘Marco Rubio Sold Out’: Senator Called Out for Wild Flip-Flops as a Trump ‘Enabler’ in Brutal Column

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been feverishly defending Donald Trump as the former president awaits a jury verdict in his hush money trial, but the senator was singing a very different tune not that long ago, as Bloomberg Opinion politics and policy columnist Mary Ellen Klas lays out in a brutal column published Thursday.

This past weekend, Rubio emphatically refused to guarantee he would accept the results of the 2024 election in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC News’ Meet the Press, indulging in a Trumpian “false equivalence,” wrote Klas, “that refuting the legitimacy of the 2020 election results was no different than Democrats raising concerns about voter suppression and Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

Among Rubio’s recent tweets are ones like below claiming the 34 felony counts against Trump are “exactly the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union” and echoing the ex-president’s habitual cry that there was “no crime!”

Unsurprisingly, a number of commenters pointed out the Florida senator’s scathing comments about Trump during the 2016 election cycle where Rubio called him a “con artist” and vowed to “do whatever it takes” to make sure he didn’t get control of the Republican Party or access to the U.S. nuclear codes.

For her column, Klas went even further back into Rubio’s political career to when he was touring the state in 2006 as Speaker of the Florida House with then-Gov. Jeb Bush (R) to promote the Republicans’ “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future” agenda. In Rubio’s first speech after he was chosen as speaker in 2005, he asked Florida House members to look in their desks where they found books with that title on the cover, but blank pages inside. Their job, he said, was to fill those pages with ideas from ordinary Floridians, and that 2006 policy summit in Orlando was one such event.

Public domain photo by the Florida Legislature.

After multiple events around the state, Rubio and the Florida Republicans collected 100 ideas, the then-speaker published a finished version of the book and set to getting them passed. In the end, all 100 passed the Florida House, 57 passed the Florida Senate and survived then-Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto pen, and several others managed to move forward as partial victories.

Back to Rubio’s 2006 comments, during those far more idealistic and hopeful days of yore. Here’s how Klas described his words, based on her notes from attending the summit, lamenting how far the current Rubio had strayed from those sentiments:

“Popularity is not leadership. It never has been,” he proclaimed before a crowd of Republican politicians and business executives. “Leaders tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”

…The Rubio I heard in that Orlando convention hall all those years ago wanted to lead followers, not fear them. He condemned political candidates who “run on wedge issues” and hate-filled slogans. Now, he has joined the MAGA chorus that sows doubt about the judicial system, portrays all Democrats and the media as deceitful propagandists and continues to perpetuate the lies that the 2020 election was stolen to distract from the fact thathe voted to certify the results that confirmed Trump’s defeat.

Back then, Rubio talked about how “leadership involves having a vision for the future and a plan on how to get there.” Now, he backs a candidate whose self-indulgent vision for a second term is focused on broadening his executive authority, undermining the Justice Department to seek revenge and requiring the federal workforce to be his partisan machine.

In 2024, however, Trump and the Trumpified GOP have no use for providing voters with hard truths, and he’s clearly seeking “an enabler” as his running mate, wrote Klas, someone “who not only won’t stand up to Trump’s nihilistic tendencies, but their passivity, weakness and slavish adherence to him encourage it.”

To Klas’ credit, she declines to get out a crystal ball and make any declarative predictions about what a Vice President Rubio definitely would or would not do, but does highlight the troubling trends of the sycophantic demands of the “MAGAverse,” a realm “where forgiveness is traded for allegiance to the cult,” and how Rubio has spent months slinking along in the footsteps of the many fellow Republicans previously harshly bashed Trump but now condone even his worst traits.

“[T]he more powerful Rubio became, the less courage he showed,” Klas continued, pointing out how “he warned of Trump’s ‘strongman’ tendencies” in a March 2016 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper and continued to criticize Trump on specific policy issues during his first presidential term, but now he “has chosen career over country and he won’t contradict Trump on the campaign trail.”

“Marco Rubio in many ways represents the most bitter disappointment for people who in 2016 had hopes for a new way forward for the Republican party,” said Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and spent many years as an adviser to Rubio. “Far from the inspirational leader he played on TV, he’s become just another ass-kisser in the long line of Republicans and MAGA extremists who line up to tell Trump that his farts smell like rosemary and sweet summer rain.”