Just needling the press
This is disgustingly flippant and cynical.
Marco Rubio blows off Trump’s “Chye-nah should investigate Biden” as trolling:
This morning in the Florida Keys, @marcorubio was asked about the President calling on China to investigate @JoeBiden – see his answer↓
His answer:
I don’t know if that’s a real request or him just needling the press knowing that you guys were going to get outraged by it. He’s pretty good at getting everybody fired up, and he’s been doing that for awhile, and the media responded right on task.
A reporter repeated the question.
I don’t think that’s a real request. I think he did it to gig you guys. I think he did it to provoke you to ask me and others and get outraged by it. Like I said, he plays it like a violin and everybody falls right into it. That’s not a real request.
It’s the other way around. He pretends to be just needling, just gigging, just provoking, but it’s for real. There’s no way Marco Rubio doesn’t know that.
Can we drain that swamp?
This reminds me of how I kept hearing during 2012-2015 about how “deep” the Republican bench was — they had all these supposedly great presidential candidates lined up. Rubio’s a perfect illustration of what paper tigers they all were.
I get why right-wing pundits liked him. He was young-looking for a presidential candidate but had enough experience to be plausible, he’s Hispanic, and he has a decent speech about his parents escaping Cuba and working as wait staff and bartenders and look at where their son is today and ain’t America great? But beyond that, he had nothing. He was such a lightweight that even Chris Christie* was able to turn him into a laughingstock by pointing out his dependence on set lines.
Then, after briefly trying to get in the muck against Trump with a crack about penis size, he became one of the most cowardly of GOP senators — and that’s really saying something.
It’s another reason why I think Trump’s “political genius” is exaggerated. He didn’t beat a formidable field of top-notch candidates; he beat a collection of empty suits like Rubio, charisma-vacuums like Paul and Cruz, and feckless wonders like Jeb!
*– How pissed off do you think Christie is these days? His political career was done in by one moderate dirty trick (closing a bridge to punish a mayor for not endorsing him), in which he denied all involvement. Meanwhile Trump is brazenly denying millions in military aid to a geopolitical ally for personal political gain, and most of the GOP is still defending it!
Souls are going cheap these days.
As for Christie, it’s even more humiliating. He signed on to Trump’s campaign and was put in charge of the transition, only to be tossed aside because Prince Jared was pissed that Christie had sent Papa Kushner to jail for general sleaziness (the whole lurid tale can be found here).