Marco Rubio gets shredded after he tries to stick up for Donald Trump
Various Senate Republicans have spent the week trying to figure out how to publicly respond to Donald Trump’s shockingly and psychotically racist attacks on Democratic Congresswomen. Some GOP Senators are from the kind of purple states where KKK-level racist remarks aren’t good for reelection, and so they’ve weakly expressed “concern” about Trump’s xenophobia, while some GOP Senators from red states have eagerly embraced Trump’s racist tirade. Then there’s Marco Rubio.
The trouble with Marco Rubio is that he’s too dumb to understand what’s being said most of the time. We saw this during the 2016 republican primary race, where he often came off as uniquely dumb and clueless even while standing on a stage full of buffoons. The bigger trouble for Rubio is that he’s so dumb, he often thinks he’s the only smart one. Take, for instance, when he dredged up some remarks from 2008 in which pundits asked if the late John McCain’s presidential campaign – which included tea party racist Sarah Palin – was responsible for an increase in racist rhetoric.
No one making those remarks in 2008 was accusing McCain of having been a racist himself. But Marco Rubio nonetheless tweeted quotes from that election cycle, trying to make the argument that Democrats and the media arbitrarily accuse every Republican of being a racist, and that this somehow meant Donald Trump isn’t a racist. If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t make sense period. To say that it went poorly is an understatement.
Marco Rubio’s gambit received consistently negative feedback on Twitter. CNN commentator Ana Navarro-Cárdenas summed it up best: “Ironic. Son-of-immigrants who can’t call out Trump for his blatant anti-immigrant racism, has no problem calling out everybody else for whatever else.”
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report