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      Val Demings to Challenge Marco Rubio for Florida Senate Seat

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      Representative Val Demings, a Florida Democrat who was floated as a potential vice-presidential pick in 2020, will challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, in a 2022 race likely to be fought over the legacy of a third Sunshine Stater — former President Donald J. Trump.The announcement on Wednesday by Ms. Demings, the former police chief of Orlando and one of the managers of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, was expected for weeks.But it came as welcome news to embattled Democrats in the state, giving them a high-profile and well-funded opponent against a tough and wily incumbent who once scorned, and now supports, Mr. Trump.Ms. Demings, who is Black, made it clear she would not abide by the middle-of-the-road messaging favored by recent Democratic candidates like former Senator Bill Nelson. In her kickoff announcement, she made a direct appeal to her party’s diverse, urban base, speaking bluntly about her race, gender and experiences growing up in segregated Jacksonville in the 1960s.“When you grow up in the South poor, Black and female, you have to have faith in progress and opportunity,” she said in a video posted on her Twitter page early Wednesday, showing her walking past a church in her hometown. “My father was a janitor, and my mother was a maid. She said, ‘Never tire of doing good, never tire.’”Mr. Rubio, responding with his own Twitter post, previewed his counter messaging, attacking Ms. Demings as a “far-left liberal Democrat” and “do-nothing” member of Congress.Two other Democrats from the Orlando area, Representative Stephanie Murphy and former Representative Alan Grayson, are also considering jumping into the race.Ms. Demings faces a daunting task. Florida Democrats have been battered by mounting losses in a perpetual battleground state trending red, capped by Mr. Trump’s comfortable win in the state last year.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has emerged as a leader of the Trump wing of the party and is said to be considering a 2024 presidential run, also faces re-election next year.The presence of Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Rubio on the same ballot is almost certain to boost turnout on both sides and elicit massive small-donor contributions in a state with several big, expensive media markets.Ms. Demings seemed to be leaning toward the governor race earlier this year: When Representative Charlie Crist declared his Democratic candidacy against Mr. DeSantis this spring, her team released a polished biographical video on the same day.Nikki Fried, a Democrat who serves as Florida agriculture commissioner, is also running for governor. She is one of the few statewide officials who is a Democrat; Florida’s other senator, Rick Scott, is a Republican.In 2016, Mr. Rubio easily defeated his Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy, then a congressman. But that same year Mr. Trump demolished him in the Republican presidential debates, mocking him as “Little Marco” and hammering him for supporting a bipartisan immigration bill that would have offered undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship.Over the past four years Mr. Rubio has focused on policy work and avoided high-profile political fights, careful to support Mr. Trump when he could, while politely parting with him over several foreign policy issues, including Mr. Trump’s ill-fated overtures to North Korea, China and Russia.The former president reciprocated in April, offering his onetime critic a “Complete and Total Endorsement” to quell rumors of a primary challenge against Mr. Rubio from the right. More

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      Shades of 2016: Republicans Stay Silent on Trump, Hoping He Fades Away

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      Just like when Donald J. Trump was a candidate in 2016, rival Republicans are trying to avoid becoming the target of his attacks or directly confronting him, while hoping someone else will.It was a familiar scene on Sunday when Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, tried to avoid giving a direct answer about the caustic behavior of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump had called Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, “dumb” and used a coarse phrase to underscore it while speaking to hundreds of Republican National Committee donors on Saturday night. When Mr. Thune was asked by Chris Wallace, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” to comment, he chuckled and tried to sidestep the question.“I think a lot of that rhetoric is — you know, it’s part of the style and tone that comes with the former president,” Mr. Thune said, before moving on to say Mr. Trump and Mr. McConnell shared the goal of reclaiming congressional majorities in 2022.Mr. Thune was not the only Republican straining to stay on the right side of the former president. The day before Mr. Trump delivered his broadsides against Mr. McConnell, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, presented Mr. Trump with a newly created award for his leadership.And Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Mr. Trump who enraged him when she criticized his actions in connection to the Jan. 6 riot, and indicated the party needs to move on, has also been trying a delicate dance to work back into a more neutral territory.This week, she told The Associated Press that she would not run if Mr. Trump did, a display of deference that underscored the complications the former president represents to Republicans.Like many Republicans, Mr. Thune, Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley were navigating the impulses of a former president who talks privately about running again in 2024, and who is trying to bend the rest of the party to his will, even after the deadly riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He retains a firm hold on a devoted group of Republican voters, and party leaders have discussed the need to continue appealing to the new voters Mr. Trump attracted over the past five years.To some extent, their posture recalls the waning days of Mr. Trump’s first primary candidacy, in 2015 and 2016. While Mr. McConnell and a few other Republicans have been directly critical of Mr. Trump’s conduct following the Capitol riot, most are trying to avoid alienating the former president, knowing he will set his sights on them for withering attacks, and hoping that someone or something else intervenes to hobble him.Even as Mr. Trump makes clear he will not leave the public stage, many Republicans have privately said they hope he will fade away, after a tenure in which the party lost both houses of Congress and the White House.Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, was critical of Mr. Trump after the Capitol riot in January.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“It is Groundhog Day,” said Tim Miller, a former adviser to Jeb Bush, the only candidate to repeatedly challenge Mr. Trump during the early stages of the Republican presidential primaries in 2016.“I always thought that was like a rational choice in 2015,” Mr. Miller said, referring to the instinct to lay back and let someone else take on Mr. Trump. “But after we all saw how the strategy fails of just hoping and wishing for him to go away, nobody learned from it.”Throughout that campaign, one candidate after another in the crowded field tried to position themselves to be the last man standing on the assumption that Mr. Trump would self-destruct before making it to the finish line.It was wishful thinking. Mr. Trump attacked not only Mr. Bush but several other candidates in deeply personal terms, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and the businesswoman Carly Fiorina. Only Mr. Bush sustained a response, though he eventually left the race after failing to gain traction; Mr. Cruz, in particular, told donors during a private meeting in late 2015 that he was going to give Mr. Trump a “big bear hug” in order to hold onto his voters.They all tried to avoid being the target of his insults, while hoping that external events and news media coverage would ultimately lead to his downfall. Instead, Mr. Trump solidified his position as primary voting began.“He intimidates people because he will attack viciously and relentlessly, much more than any other politician, yet somehow people crave his approval,” said Mike DuHaime, who advised former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in that primary race. Mr. DuHaime recalled Mr. Trump attacking Mr. Bush’s wife in one debate, only for Mr. Bush to reciprocate when Mr. Trump offered a hand-slap later in that same debate.“Trump did self-destruct eventually, after four years in office,” Mr. DuHaime said. “But he can still make or break others, and that makes him powerful and relevant.”Even John Boehner, the former speaker of the House whose criticisms of Mr. Trump in his memoir, “On the House,” have garnered national headlines, told Time magazine this week that he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 — well after the former president had spent months falsely suggesting the election would be corrupt.Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, has said she will not run for president in 2024 if Mr. Trump does.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressIn his speech before R.N.C. donors on Saturday night, Mr. Trump, in addition to attacking Mr. McConnell, also criticized a host of perceived enemies from both parties; among them was former Vice President Mike Pence, whose life was in danger on Jan. 6 because he was in the Capitol to certify the electoral votes. Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Pence, who recently signed a book deal, should have had “the courage” to send the electoral vote tallies back to the states, despite the fact that the vice president had made clear that he did not think he had the authority to do so.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, disagreed with the comparison to 2015, saying that Mr. Trump had more dominance over the base of the Republican Party now than he did then, according to public polling, and a greater number of senior Republican officials speaking out against him five years ago.“In 2021, there are no candidates trying to take out President Trump, just some occasional sniping from menthol-infused nitwits like John Boehner,” he said.Still, Mr. Trump does not have the complete control over the party that he did during four years in office. His critics include leading Republicans like Mr. McConnell and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House. Asked on Fox News on Tuesday if she would vote for Mr. Trump if he ran in 2024 Ms. Cheney replied “I would not.’Ms. Cheney, whom Mr. Trump has threatened as a target of his anger, also said her fellow Republicans shouldn’t “embrace insurrection.”And not all Republicans think that ignoring Mr. Trump is a mistake. One senior party member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he didn’t want to engage in a lengthy back and forth with Mr. Trump, said that with the former president out of office and off Twitter, his reach is limited.The Republican said there had been anecdotal evidence from members of Congress during the recess that Mr. Trump was less omnipresent for voters in their districts than he had previously been.While Mr. Trump was ascendant in 2015 and 2016, said an adviser to another Republican who may run in 2024, that wasn’t the case now. And if party leaders fight with him publicly or try to take him on, it could only strengthen him, the Republican argued, giving him more prominence.What’s more, the first senior Republican argued, Republican lawmakers have found common cause not just in battling President Biden’s policies but in the backlash to the Georgia voting rights law. Those fights have continued without Mr. Trump, and will accelerate, the Republican said, without being driven by the cult of personality around the former president.Other Republicans are privately hopeful that the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump’s business by the New York district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., will result in charges that hobble him from running again or even being a major figure within the party. People who have spoken with Mr. Trump say that he is agitated about the investigation.While all of that may represent just a slow turn away from Mr. Trump, those Republicans believe the turn has begun.David Kochel, a Republican strategist and supporter of Mr. Bush during the 2016 campaign, sounded less optimistic.He noted that even the horror of Jan. 6 did not break the hold Mr. Trump has on other elected officials, and that several anchors on Fox News — the largest conservative news outlet — had consistently downplayed the attack on air, numbing viewers to what took place as time passes.In an interview on Fox News with the host Laura Ingraham late last month, when asked about the security around the Capitol, Mr. Trump said: “It was zero threat right from the start. It was zero threat.”He added: “Some of them went in and there they are hugging and kissing the police and the guards. You know, they had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in and then they walked in and they walked out.”Mr. Kochel said Jan. 6 was “being stuffed down the memory hole” with the help of Fox News, noting that the strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump and hoping he fades away has had a less-than-perfect history of being effective.“We’ve seen this movie before — a bunch of G.O.P. leaders all looking at each other, waiting to see who’s going to try and down Trump,” he said. More

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      A Trump-Supporting Congresswoman in New York City Stands Her Ground

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionTrump’s RoleKey TakeawaysExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Trump-Supporting Congresswoman in New York City Stands Her GroundRepresentative Nicole Malliotakis represents Staten Island, where new Republican voters out-registered Democrats during the Trump administration.Representative Nicole Malliotakis said it was her duty to represent her more conservative, pro-Trump constituents. “There’s more of a burden on me now to hear their voice,” she said.Credit…Samuel Corum/Getty ImagesFeb. 4, 2021Updated 8:08 a.m. ETWhen Representative Nicole Malliotakis voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud, constituents and local Democrats protested outside her New York office.An editorial in her local paper, the Staten Island Advance, said she “let America down.”On Monday, a new political action committee — NICPAC, or Nicole Is Complicit PAC — raised more than $20,000 within four hours of launching its website.But Ms. Malliotakis unseated Max Rose, a Democrat, this past November in no small part because of her allegiance to former President Donald J. Trump, who endorsed her. The congresswoman has continued to stand firm with the former president’s base, even if that means leaving others behind.She said her loyalty was to New York’s Republicans, but especially to the narrow, conservative pocket of New York City — a swath of Staten Island and a portion of Brooklyn — that made her the only Republican elected to Congress from the five boroughs.“There’s more of a burden on me now to hear their voice,” Ms. Malliotakis, 40, said in an interview. “They want someone who is going to fight to be better, who is going to bring their perspective to the forefront, who is going to push back when policies are being proposed that will hurt them or cost them money or make their lives miserable.”Her stance could alienate the majority of New York voters, overwhelmingly Democratic, whom she needs to rise to higher office — or it could cement her place in New York politics as a rare Republican voice. Though there are more registered Democrats on Staten Island, which makes up the majority of Ms. Malliotakis’s district, Republicans registered far more new voters during the Trump administration than Democrats did, creating an invigorated, Trump-loving base that Ms. Malliotakis plays to.Ms. Malliotakis campaigning door to door in September in Staten Island. She unseated Max Rose, who was the Democratic incumbent.Credit…James Estrin/The New York TimesBut if she runs again in 2022, Ms. Malliotakis may face a completely different playing field. Congressional districts will be redrawn following the results of the 2020 census. New York could lose up to two congressional seats, decreasing its representation in the House from 27 people to 25, according to a prediction by Election Data Services, a political consulting firm.New York’s 11th District, which Ms. Malliotakis represents, will likely extend further into Brooklyn or into Lower Manhattan, picking up more Democratic voters and putting her seat in jeopardy.Some residents have been so unnerved by the events of Ms. Malliotakis’s nascent term that they are already plotting for her removal. NICPAC officially launched on Monday, establishing itself as a bipartisan watchdog organization of constituents both outraged over her decertification vote and disappointed in her lukewarm response to the Capitol riot. (Ms. Malliotakis’s statement condemned rioters and thanked the law enforcement officers.)The group plans to buy ads and conduct outreach to Ms. Malliotakis’s constituents, in order to “keep her accountable,” said Jonathan Yedin, a Democratic political operative and founding member of the PAC.“Some of us voted for her, some of us didn’t, but we’re all united in the message that she’s unfit to serve, given her actions,” Mr. Yedin said.Dan Hetteix, host of Radio Free Bay Ridge, a progressive politics podcast based in the 11th District, said Ms. Malliotakis had to try to secure her base to fend off opposition.“She needs to keep these new voters engaged in a ticket that doesn’t have Trump on it anymore,” Mr. Hetteix said. “She needs to make the most of Staten Island’s red voters. The more she can whip them up, the more she can resist whatever redistricting does to her.”Ms. Malliotakis defended her vote not to certify the presidential election results in a tweet. “I voted against certification of the two challenged states not to ‘overturn an election’ but to highlight need for a proper hearing into unconstitutional rule changes, irregularities and alleged fraud,” she wrote. “I swore an oath to the Constitution and REFUSED to turn a blind eye.”Peers find her ambitious, hardworking and sharp, and she has positioned herself as the antidote to the state’s far-left politicians. The congresswoman has even joined the “anti-socialist squad,” to counter a fellow New York representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and “the Squad.”Ms. Malliotakis is as much against unauthorized immigration and universal health care as she is in favor of strengthening bail laws and protecting father-daughter dances. But some local Democrats say that she’s a reactionary ideological flip-flopper.“She is someone who has changed everything she’s believed in every time she’s ever run for office,” said Kevin Elkins, a longtime adviser to Mr. Rose, whom Ms. Malliotakis defeated in November.Mark Murphy, a local businessman and former Democratic congressional candidate in the district, said he wants Ms. Malliotakis to move to the middle to better speak for all residents. “I want her to dial back the hard-core conservative ideology that is driving her, and think about who we, as a community, really are,” Mr. Murphy said.But Staten Island tends to vote Republican. In 2016 and 2020, it was the only borough in New York City that Mr. Trump won. Her base is expecting her to represent the sentiment of Trump voters in the district.In an interview, Ms. Malliotakis praised the successes of Mr. Trump’s term, proof, in her eyes, that he deserved to be re-elected: improved health care for veterans, low unemployment numbers, renegotiated trade deals. “People didn’t even know about the good things because the other side has been so busy criticizing him and trying to impeach him and investigate him over the four years, which I think was very unfair,” she said.Some believe that Ms. Malliotakis’s vote simply represented the wishes of a district that wanted to see Mr. Trump re-elected.“I really do believe she had a mandate from her constituents, who also overwhelmingly voted to support Trump, to object to the election results, as well as vote against impeaching the president,” said Peter Giunta, president of the Staten Island Young Republican Club.Allan Katz, a financial planner on Staten Island, voted for both Ms. Malliotakis and Mr. Trump last November. “Max Rose, when he was in office, voted for impeachment when most of his constituents wanted him to vote against it,” said Mr. Katz.In May, Ms. Malliotakis spoke at a rally in support of a tanning salon whose owner opened the business in defiance of coronavirus restrictions.Credit…Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesSome of her supporters believe she is making all the right moves.“Number one, she is a rising star,” said Mike Long, the former chairman of the Conservative Party of New York, who has known Ms. Malliotakis for over a decade. “She knows exactly what she believes in and where she wants to go.”For years, Ms. Malliotakis has fought to be a significant Republican voice in the state.Born in New York in 1980 to Greek and Cuban immigrant parents, she grew up on Staten Island. Her mother fled the Castro regime in the late 1950s; her father arrived in the United States from Crete in 1962, with $50 to his name. One point of familial pride, she has said, is that neither of them took any public assistance.After working on state campaigns, Ms. Malliotakis was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2010. She gained citywide recognition when she faced Mayor Bill de Blasio in his 2017 re-election campaign, losing but ultimately seeing overwhelming support in her home borough, where about 70 percent of the population voted for her.In 2020, she challenged Mr. Rose in a particularly aggressive race. Ms. Malliotakis’s campaign seized on conservative backlash to the protests against racial injustice in the summer. Mr. Rose’s attendance at a single protest became a focal point of the campaign, enabling Ms. Malliotakis — who boasted the endorsement of five police unions — to accuse Mr. Rose of being a supporter of efforts to defund the police.She also grabbed Mr. Trump’s endorsement. Just four years earlier, she had served as the New York State chair for Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, and had openly criticized Mr. Trump’s behavior, using the #NEVERTRUMP hashtag on social media.But once Mr. Rubio lost the nomination, Ms. Malliotakis shifted from being against Mr. Trump to entrenching herself fervently in his camp. She even hosted a get-well rally for him after he tested positive for the coronavirus.Longtime friends and local politicians were confused by the sudden switch, claiming that she swung right to secure votes.Mike Arvanites, a surveyor for the city’s Board of Elections in Staten Island, has known Ms. Malliotakis for so long that he was present at her 40-day blessing and baptism in their Greek Orthodox Church. He pointed out that Ms. Malliotakis was elected to the New York State Assembly during the rise of the Tea Party, but she rejected the group’s extremism.“The year she was running for mayor, she explained to me that she was terrified of some Trump supporters,” Mr. Arvanites, a Democrat, said.He said he believed that Ms. Malliotakis has been radicalized by several in her camp, including Leticia Remauro, a Republican operative associated with Ms. Malliotakis’s congressional campaign and a longtime friend of the congresswoman. Last month, Ms. Remauro was pilloried for saying “Heil Hitler” in an earlier protest against coronavirus restrictions. (Ms. Malliotakis released a statement repudiating Ms. Remauro’s remarks.)Ms. Malliotakis made her loyalty clear, joining three New York-based representatives and other Republicans in Congress to vote to overturn the election results.But she said she would keep an open mind when it comes to President Biden.“I’m willing to hear him out,” Ms. Malliotakis said in her interview. “There are opportunities for us to work together where there is some common ground, when it comes to vaccine distribution, reopening the economy and returning the jobs that we lost.”“But,” she said, “I’m also mindful of the fact that I’m going to need to push back.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Marco Rubio Deserves Ivanka Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarco Rubio Deserves Ivanka TrumpWill the senator’s sycophancy and shape-shifting come to naught?Opinion ColumnistJan. 29, 2021Credit…Ben WisemanIt’s a measure of the Republican Party’s current depravity that I think of the period when Marco Rubio was besmirching Donald Trump’s genitalia as the good old days.It was early 2016, Trump hadn’t yet locked down the Republican presidential nomination and Rubio, smarting from Trump’s nickname for him (“Little Marco’) and cracks about his overactive sweat glands, began pointing voters toward Trump’s private parts.“He’s, like, 6-2, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5-2,” Rubio told voters at a campaign rally in late February that year. “Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands.”In that age of innocence, we were talking and even laughing about the nether regions of Republican anatomy. Five years later, we’re talking and most certainly not laughing about the nether regions of Republican morality, which Rubio plumbs as shamelessly as his more exposed Senate colleagues Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton do.All four seem to have dreams of 2024 and don’t want to run afoul of Trump and his base, no matter how thoroughly that debases them. They’re vain weather vanes of his hold on the party, the strength and stubbornness of which are evident in the populous crowd of Trump-smooching presidential aspirants (these four, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, etc.) versus the sparse crew of Trump-spanking ones (Larry Hogan, Ben Sasse and that’s about it).As Trump’s impeachment trial looms, everything that these young or youngish senators say and do can be seen as an audition for his mantle, which Hawley and Cruz reached for with special cynicism when they joined six other senators in voting not to certify Joe Biden’s election. Rubio and Cotton didn’t go quite that far, but I’m sure Rubio was tempted. Ever since, he has mustered extra energy for showing what a fierce Trump loyalist he can be.On Fox News recently, he dismissed Trump’s upcoming Senate trial as “stupid,” seemingly daring Hawley, Cruz and Cotton to top his disdain and his adjective. He paired that exalted commentary with an inadequately punctuated, inelegantly worded and ineptly reasoned tweet: Five people died when a Trump-loving mob, whipped into a violent frenzy by his and his Republican enablers’ lies about election fraud, stormed and trashed the Capitol. But sure, Senator Rubio, Democrats’ upset is purely theatrical. Absolutely, the lesson here is the bloodthirst of “the radical left.”That’s no garden-variety misdirection. That’s pure derangement.Marco Rubio greeted Ivanka Trump at the Capitol in 2017.Credit…Erica Werner/Associated PressIt also smacks of desperation. “Little Marco,” you see, may have big trouble. It’s blond, it’s relentless, it has a new address in Florida and it’s spelled I-V-A-N-K-A. The shiniest Trump and her smug husband, pariahs now in New York City, have moved on, and there’s some speculation that their relocation presages a Senate candidacy for her in 2022, when Rubio is up for re-election.She’d potentially challenge him in the Florida Republican primary. Now there’s a reason to sweat. Rubio confronts what Republican lawmakers all over the country do, the prospect of being ousted, en route to their general elections, by rivals who are even Trumpier than they are. Only there’s no out-Trumping an actual Trump. And there’s no defaming this Trump progeny without inflaming the Trump patriarch.Ivanka would be Rubio’s worst nightmare. She’d also be his perfect comeuppance. He would have done all that shape-shifting, summoned all that sycophancy and sold out for naught.Maybe Ivanka would take pity on him and take a pass.Yes, that was a joke.As, at this point, is Marco Rubio.I can remember back to 2013, when, as a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in the Senate, he helped to draft legislation for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for millions of people in this country illegally. He was then styling himself as a pragmatist determined to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.Now he rails against “amnesty.” He’s a Trump-style populist, content with a clownish part in the Republican Party’s circus.I remember how his parents’ flight to the United States from Cuba was the supposed cornerstone of his political convictions, the prompt for a hawkish foreign policy with no tolerance for autocrats at odds with our democratic values.But he just spent four years blowing kisses at an American president more autocratic and more contemptuous of those values than any in his lifetime.I remember how, for much of 2016, he pledged that he would not-not-not run for re-election to the Senate, framing that resolve as a point of honor. He said that it was an impotent institution and that lawmakers needed to limit their time in Congress, lest they become hacks. He expressed indignation at any suggestion that he would change his mind, tweeting: “I have only said like 10000 times I will be a private citizen in January.”That was in mid-May of that year. Little more than a month later, he announced his re-election bid. So much for private citizenry.Rubio says whatever he feels that the moment demands, whatever keeps the wind in his sails, because he’s unfazed by the fact that he once said something completely different, by the possibility that he’ll contradict himself down the line or by the bald selectiveness of his self-righteousness.He’s a creature of Republican vogues, so he’s polishing his anti-elitist riffs, like a tweet with which he slammed the emerging Biden administration: Politeness! Order! The horror! But that’s not the best part. Biden stands out from his five immediate predecessors in the White House, including Trump, for not having the Ivy League degrees that they did. Where there’s fancy education aplenty is in Rubio’s ranks: Hawley has degrees from Stanford and Yale, Cruz from Princeton and Harvard and Cotton from Harvard two times over.Maybe Rubio was slyly knocking those potential 2024 competitors, too, and previewing a line of 2024 attack. His own degrees are from the University of Florida, the University of Miami and the School of Unchecked Opportunism.To his anti-elitism he has added overwrought, indiscriminate media bashing, as when he responded to the coronavirus’s rampage through America with a tweet last March that accused journalists of “glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China” and called it “grotesque.”I don’t recall such glee. I’ll tell you what’s grotesque: training more of your fury about the pandemic’s devastation at the unelected people covering it than at the elected one minimizing and mismanaging it.He was preening for Trump. He was parroting him. He still is, and he’s proving that while Trump may be gone from the White House, he remains deeply present in Washington, because it’s lousy with minions who remade themselves in his image.Rubio’s fate was to become what Trump once called him, not just exuberantly but prophetically: a little man, at least by the yardstick of integrity, which is the only endowment that matters.I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More