Marco Rubio will campaign for Ed Gillespie, Virginia’s Republican candidate for Governor, who has recycled Trump’s anti-immigrant playbook.
Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who has repeatedly turned his back on immigrants, is trying to help elect a xenophobic Republican as Virginia's next governor.
On Monday, Rubio will make an appearance next to Ed Gillespie, a man who has used fear and racist anti-Latino ads as part of his gubernatorial campaign, at a get-out-the-vote rally in a swing county in Northern Virginia.
Nevermind that Ed Gillespie is the latest Republican to recycle one of Donald Trump's most toxic and bigoted tactics - criminalizing immigrants to fuel his race-based gubernatorial campaign.
Once again, Marco Rubio is putting politics over people, proving that he will do just about anything to appear as a loyal member of a Republican Party that has lost track of its values and principles for personal attacks and backward-looking ideals.
By supporting Ed Gillespie for Governor, Marco Rubio is doing nothing short of selling out to the Republican extremists who not only dictate his party's agenda in Congress but also dominate Virginia's state legislature - where politicians do nothing to serve the growing diverse electorate they claim to represent.
Marco Rubio's support for a far-right candidate is unsurprising to anyone who has watched his career from the beginning. As a perpetual hypocrite, Rubio has a solid record of doing and saying anything that will advance his own personal interests.
During the 2016 election, Rubio wasted no time in stating that the United States should not entrust an "erratic individual" like Donald Trump with the nuclear codes. And yet, Rubio ultimately endorsed Trump for president because he signed his name to a piece of paper saying he would support the Republican nominee.
That same year, the same Marco Rubio who repeated over 10,000 times a bogus claim of becoming a private citizen by January 2017 ended up pushing his friend, and current Lt. Governor of Florida, Carlos Lopez-Cantera out of the way that he could run for a second term as Florida's junior senator.
And let us not forget how Marco Rubio, once part of the immigration working group known as the "Gang of 8," lied to the faces of immigrant mothers from Florida who had traveled to Washington D.C. to confront him about rumors that he was backing away from his own immigration reform bill in 2013.
Marco Rubio is and will continue to be the same chameleon-colored empty suit that we have known him to be since he first ran for the United States Senate. There is simply no changing that fact.
That is why Rubio will declare his support for Ed Gillespie's anti-immigrant campaign next Monday, just so that he can later brag to Spanish-language media about his non-accomplishments on immigration and lackluster political career. Because that is who Marco Rubio is, a self-serving politician who works from the sidelines in hopes that, by casually supporting the extreme right, her can one day landing a leadership post he is unfit to hold.