Marco Rubio posted two third place finishes and two fourth place showings on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, Rubio tried to move past his recent disasters at the ballot box during a town hall appearance on MSNBC. With his campaign limping along and seemingly on the brink of succumbing to Trumplash, Rubio did what only an endangered politician would ever dream of doing—he struck a reflective tone.
Rubio went on the attack in the lead up to Super Tuesday, but when that didn’t work, the one-time GOP establishment darling appeared no longer concerned with where his blows landed in relation to Trump’s belt and, in a strategic shift, seemed to decide either he wasn’t going down without a fight or the only way to beat Trump was to talk more like him. On Wednesday, speaking to NBC’s Chuck Todd, Rubio said he was “not entirely proud” of his stooping to dick jokes. Or mocking Trump’s hair or tan or spelling, presumably. In fairness, we were all thinking it, but we aren’t all running for president.
“In terms of things that have to do with personal stuff, yeah, at the end of the day it’s not something I’m entirely proud of. My kids were embarrassed by it, and if I had to do it again I wouldn’t,” Rubio said during the town hall which airs Wednesday night on MSNBC. Not only were Rubio’s attempts to out-Trump Donald Trump often cringe-worthy, they also appear to have been wholly ineffective as his poll numbers slumped and his vote tallies dwindled leaving him at this perilous political point of candidate introspection.
