Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida declined to say whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election Sunday, while also taking a far-right stance on immigration after once being seen as a moderate working to find bipartisanship solution.
Rubio’s positions on both issues come as he has been publicly proposed by Donald Trump as a potential vice presidential pick. His comments aligned him more with the presumptive presidential nominee as Trump deliberated on his running mate.
“Will you accept the 2024 election results no matter what, Senator?” Meet press moderator Kirsten Welker, Rubio asked on Sunday.
‘Whatever happens? No, if it is an unfair election, I think it will be contested by both parties,” Rubio said.
Welker clarified ‘it doesn’t matter who wins?’ but Rubio claimed that it was actually the Democrats who sowed distrust in the election.
“The Democrats are the ones who have opposed every Republican victory since 2000,” Rubio said.
Although Democrats often point out that their presidential candidates won the popular vote in both 2000 and 2016, despite not winning the elections, there has always been a concession by the Democratic candidate and a peaceful transfer of power.
Rubio continued to criticize Hillary Clinton, saying she said the 2016 election was stolen, but in the end, Clinton essentially conceded the election to Trump in a public speech.
The Florida senator also became animated, raising his voice and asking Welker if she 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 has not proven this in court.
Rubio voted back in 2021 to certify the 2020 election results in Congress. He told Welker at that point in the trial that he had no other options.
Ex-President Donald Trump with Senator Marco Rubio during a rally in Miami, Florida in 2022
Hillary Clinton gives a speech conceding the 2016 election to Donald Trump
Rubio was also asked about Trump’s plan to build migrant detention camps, deploy the military and carry out the largest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in US history if he is re-elected.
Rubio suggested that the number of people who would be rounded up and deported from the country would be more than 20 million.
‘The answer to your question is yes. We cannot accommodate the 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 claimed they cannot be vetted and come from countries that do not have document systems.
‘Yes, we’ll have to do something. Unfortunately, we are 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 change from where he stood when he ran for president in 2016.
Migrants line up to be transferred by U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the Bravo River in El Paso, Texas on April 18, 2024
Senator Rubio debated Trump in 2016. While running for president in 2016, Rubio called the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants unreasonable, but his position 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 fair to say you’re going to round up and deport 11 million people,” “I don’t think that will work,” and that he didn’t believe it was a realistic policy.
Rubio claimed the issue has “completely changed” since he made those earlier comments.
“When I was involved in immigration reform in 2013, we had 11, 12 million people who had lived here for more than ten years. Now we’ve had that number almost in the last three years alone from all over the world,” Rubio said.
He said ‘this is not immigration, this is mass migration’ and even called it an ‘invasion’ of the country.
He opposed the bipartisan immigration deal that Republicans blocked earlier this year.
A decade ago, Rubio was considered a champion of bipartisan immigration reform and supported the 2013 immigration deal. But he has since disavowed the bill advanced by the so-called Gang of Eight, of which he was once part.
Senator Rubio during a hearing on border security and immigration on Capitol Hill in 2020
But in 2016, even as he continued to call some of Trump’s proposals “unrealistic,” he shifted much further to the right on the issue as he launched his own presidential bid.
He promised during his campaign to end the DACA program and later supported Trump’s border wall and the separation of families at the border.
But even with Rubio mentioned by Trump as a potential running mate, the two haven’t really discussed the possibility.
“I haven’t spoken to the president, I haven’t spoken to anyone in the campaign,” Rubio said.
He said the only people who talked to him about becoming Trump’s running mate were mainly members of the media.
“There is only one person on this planet who knows who the vice presidential choice will be and his name is Donald Trump.”
