5 Times Rubio Slammed Trump—Before Promising to Vote for Him

He now thinks this “lunatic” and “con man” is the best choice for president.

Wilfredo Lee/AP

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Marco Rubio will vote for Donald Trump this November. He’s not yet ready to say the words “I will vote for Donald Trump,” but based on this tweet, a quick process of elimination makes his intentions clear.

The senator from Florida has come a long way since this past winter, when he attacked Trump with increasing savagery. In the final weeks of his presidential campaign, Rubio swung hard at the Republican front-runner in an attempt to win his home state. He failed, and dropped out the night he lost the Florida primary, but not before calling Trump a whole lot of names.

Here’s a sampling of the epithets and insults Rubio slung just a few short months ago at the man he is now supporting for president:

February 26: Rubio called Trump a “con artist who is telling people one thing but has spent 40 years sticking it to working Americans and now claims to be their champion.”

February 26: Rubio questioned Trump’s most basic qualifications, including his ability to spell words. “How does this guy—not one tweet, but three tweets—misspell words so badly?” he asked. “And I only come to two conclusions. No. 1, that’s how they spell those words at the Wharton School of Business, where he went, and No. 2, just like Trump Tower, he must have hired a foreign worker to do his own tweets.” Zing!

February 27: He said Trump is a “a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons in America.”

February 29: He implied Trump has a small penis. “He’s like 6’2″, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″,” Rubio said. “Have you seen his hands? They’re like this. And you know what they say about men with small hands?” Rubio paused, then added, “You can’t trust them!”

March 12: He went after Trump for encouraging violence at his rallies, accusing him of “[feeding] into language that basically justifies assaulting people who disagree with you.” The same day, he called Trump “rude and obnoxious and offensive—deliberately offensive for the purposes of driving media narrative.”

Now Rubio will be voting for Trump. What happened to the man who said, “Friends do not let friends vote for con artists”?

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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