Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio declined to say Sunday whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election while also taking a far-right stance on immigration after being seen as a moderate who worked to find a bipartisan solution. .
Rubio’s stances on both issues come as Donald Trump has publicly floated him as a potential vice presidential pick. His comments put him more in line with the presumptive presidential nominee as Trump deliberates on his running mate.
‘Will you accept the results of the 2024 election no matter what, senator?’ Meet press moderator Kirsten Welker, she asked Rubio on Sunday.
‘It does not matter what happens? No, if it’s an unfair election, I think both sides will dispute it,” Rubio said.
Welker clarified ‘it doesn’t matter who wins?’ but Rubio affirmed that it was actually the Democrats who sowed distrust in the elections.
“Democrats are the ones who have opposed every Republican victory since 2000,” Rubio said.
While Democrats often point out that their presidential candidates won the popular vote in both 2000 and 2016 despite not winning the election, there has always been a concession on the part of the Democratic candidate and a peaceful transfer of power.
Rubio continued to rant against Hillary Clinton saying that she said the election was stolen in 2016, but in the end, Clinton actually conceded the election to Trump in a public speech.
The Florida senator also became animated, raising his voice and asking Welker if he had ever asked a Democrat on the show if the election was stolen.
Trump continues to claim that he actually won the 2020 election, which is not true and his team presented no evidence of this in court.
Rubio voted in 2021 to certify the results of the 2020 election in Congress. He told Welker that at that point in the process he had no other options.
Former President Donald Trump with Senator Marco Rubio at a rally in Miami, Florida in 2022
Hillary Clinton giving a speech conceding the 2016 election to Donald Trump
Rubio was also asked about Trump’s plan to build immigration detention camps, deploy the military and carry out the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history if he is re-elected.
Rubio suggested that the number of people who would be arrested and deported from the country would be more than 20 million.
‘The answer to your question is yes. We cannot absorb 25, 30 million people who entered this country illegally,’ Rubio stated emphatically. They are here illegally. What country in the world would tolerate that? Rubio said. “We don’t even know who most of these people are.”
He stated that they cannot be examined and that they come from countries that do not have document systems.
‘Yes, we’re going to have to do something. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to do something dramatic to remove people who are here illegally from this country, especially people we know nothing about.’
His statement marked a dramatic shift from his position when he ran for president in 2016.
Migrants queuing to be transported by US Border Patrol on April 18, 2024 after crossing the Rio Grande in El Paso, TX
Senator Rubio debated Trump in 2016. While running for president in 2016, Rubio called the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants unreasonable, but his stance has since shifted much further to the right since Trump became president.
Meet the Press played clips of him in 2015 saying, “I don’t think it’s reasonable to say you’re going to arrest and deport 11 million people,” “I don’t think that would work,” and that he didn’t believe it. It was a realistic policy.
Rubio stated that the issue has “completely changed” since he made those earlier comments.
‘In 2013, when I was involved in immigration reform, we had 11 or 12 million people who had been here for more than a decade. “Now we’ve had that number almost in the last three years around the world,” Rubio said.
He said ‘this is not immigration, it is mass migration’ and even called it an ‘invasion’ of the country.
He was against the bipartisan deal on immigration that Republicans ended up blocking earlier this year.
A decade ago, Rubio was considered a champion of bipartisan immigration reform and supported the 2013 immigration agreement. But he has since rejected the bill of the so-called Gang of Eight, of which he was once a part.
Senator Rubio during a hearing on border security and immigration at the Capitol in 2020
But in 2016, even as he still called some of Trump’s proposals “unrealistic,” he was moving much further to the right on the issue as he prepared his own presidential bid.
He promised to end the DACA program during his campaign and later acted to support Trump’s border wall and the separation of families at the border.
But while Trump has mentioned Rubio as a possible running mate, the two haven’t actually talked about that possibility.
“I haven’t spoken to the president, I haven’t spoken to anyone on the campaign,” Rubio said.
He said the only people who have talked to him about becoming Trump’s running mate were mostly members of the media.
“There is only one person on this planet who knows who the vice presidential candidate will be and his name is Donald Trump.”
