Heading into Monday’s Iowa caucuses, former President Donald Trump was still picking up momentum.
In the face of unprecedented legal challenges from Democratic prosecutors, he’s not only maintained a towering poll lead among GOP primary voters, he’s also seen former rivals joining his side.
And on Sunday, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio announced his backing with a simple message for his party:
“It’s time to get on with the work of beating Biden & saving America,” Rubio wrote in a social media post declaring his support for the 45th president, who is aiming to become the 47th president, too.
When Trump was in WH I achieved major policies I had worked on for years (like expanded Child Tax Credit & tough sanctions on regime in Cuba & Venezuela) because we had a President who didn’t cave to special interests or let bureaucrats block us.
I support Trump because that…
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 14, 2024
Rubio knows firsthand the power Trump can wield among conservatives and Republicans.
As a contender for the 2016 GOP nomination himself, he checked all the right boxes: A charismatic conservative, Rubio had won his Senate seat by basically driving former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist out of the Republican Party (facing certain defeat in the 2010 GOP Senate primary, Crist launched an independent run that ended in a distant second place).
But even after rocking the Florida Republican establishment, Rubio couldn’t defeat Trump in his home state primary in 2016 (Trump was still a New Yorker then, though he did have his estate at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach County).
Does Trump deserve the GOP nomination?
It was Rubio’s turn to find out what distant second felt like as Trump took almost 48 percent of the GOP vote to Rubio’s 27 percent.
Rubio did win re-election to his Senate seat that year with a solid 52 percent of the vote. That kept him in the upper chamber for Trump’s first term, where he could watch the relentless establishment media-Democrat war on the White House play out, from the “pee tape” to the “Russia collusion” hoax to the sham of a first impeachment trial based on a manufactured gripe that’s barely remembered now.
And he wants to see Trump back — because even in a term hindered by savage partisan fighting and an establishment media bent on Pulitzer-Prize-winning hackery, Trump saw results.
A Floridian of Cuban heritage, Rubio saw Trump reverse the Barack Obama-era warming toward the communist government in Havana and take an unflinching stand against the totalitarian rulers of Venezuela, as he wrote in the social media post.
“I support Trump because that kind of leadership is the ONLY way we will get the extraordinary actions needed to fix the disaster Biden has created,” the senator said.
Naturally, news of Rubio’s endorsement had leftist tongues wagging, pointing out the insults Rubio hurled at Trump in the heat of the 2016 GOP primary fight (and the insults Trump hurled himself, of course). A HuffPost reporter — with the finely honed instincts of a high school intern, apparently — saw fit to write a whole post on the subject.
It could be the oldest trick in American politics, using campaign lines from primary rivals to attack them in later political fights, but it only works on voters too young to rent cars — or the Peter Pan Democrats and journalists who never seem to grow up, no matter what their birth certificate says. (George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan in the 1980 GOP primary too. They managed to win the Cold War together anyway.)
Back in the adult world, where people are dry behind the ears, Rubio’s backing means both Florida U.S. senators are supporting Trump — Sen. Rick Scott announced his endorsement of Trump in November, CNN reported at the time.
It also means 24 U.S. senators are now officially backing Trump’s return to the White House, in addition to more than 100 members of the House.
And it means one more thing going wrong for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who started as Trump’s strongest challenger for the GOP nomination but not only hasn’t made much headway in denting the former president’s lead but has lost ground to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations but is now challenging him for the GOP nomination.
The most recent RealClearPolitics Republican primary overall polling average shows Trump with 69.4 percent of the vote, Haley in second with 12 percent and DeSantis in third with 10.7 percent. As the Iowa caucuses begin, results in the Hawkeye State show a similar breakdown, with Trump at 52.5 percent, Haley at 18.8 percent and DeSantis at 15.7 percent.
But most of all, it means that on the eve of actual voters actually voting (or caucusgoers actually caucusing, in Iowa’s case) the juggernaut of Trump’s drive for the Republican nomination in the 2024 election is still picking up steam.
If that momentum carries him over the finish line, President Joe Biden’s re-election team — and the rest of the duplicitous Democratic Party — are going to have a lot to worry about when November rolls around.
