Marco Rubio used to call him a “con artist.” But now, the Florida senator says he’d be happy to be Donald Trump’s running mate. “I think anybody who would be offered that should be honored,” Rubio said Thursday, amid reports that he’s among the leading contenders in Trump’s veepstakes. He hasn’t “spoken to anybody in the Trump world about it,” he told NBC News, but reiterated, “Anybody who would be offered the chance to serve their country as vice president should consider that an honor.”
Of course, the gig in question is less about serving the public as it is about serving Trump himself, as Mike Pence learned the hard way. Though obsequious through Trump’s first campaign and term, Pence’s refusal to help his boss overturn the 2020 election results was a “career killer,” as the former president reportedly warned him on January 6, 2021. So it seems the chief qualification for a 2024 running mate would be a willingness to do what Pence didn’t that day.
Who’d want such a job? Plenty of Republicans, it turns out. “The list is long,” a Trump adviser told NBC News and is said to include Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard—the Democrat turned right-wing darling who is also believed to be under consideration as a possible running mate by third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Yes, RFK Jr.’s name has even been floated as a potential contender for Trump: “He’s very Trumpian,” former Bob Dole campaign manager Scott Reed told the New York Times this week.)
These figures have already debased themselves on Trump’s behalf or, at the very least, indicated a willingness to do so. But none—not even Scott—would better reflect the GOP establishment’s embarrassing surrender to Trump than Rubio. As Trump bullied him as “Little Marco” during the 2016 Republican primary, the Florida senator descended into the muck—speculating, on the campaign trail, about the size of his opponent’s penis. “Have you seen his hands?” Rubio asked his supporters at the time. “And you know what they say about men with small hands?” Trump’s debate stage response: “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” The two feuded throughout that primary. Trump belittled Rubio as so “desperate” and sweaty that he “looked like he came out of a swimming pool.”
Back then, Rubio initially discouraged Republican voters from backing Trump, quipping, “Friends do not let friends vote for a con artist,” before he ended up grudgingly backing Trump in 2016, more enthusiastically backing him in 2020, and even more enthusiastically backing him in 2024—endorsing him in January over their home state governor, Ron DeSantis, the day before the Iowa caucus. “I support Trump because that kind of leadership is the ONLY way we will get the extraordinary actions needed to fix the disaster [Joe Biden] has created,” Rubio gushed. Will that kind of flattery be enough to land him the most humiliating job in politics? “I can’t tell you that really,” Trump, ever the reality TV showman, said of his veepstakes back in January. But, he added, “I know who it’s going to be.”
