Behind closed doors, Marco Rubio is telling people that his path to the nomination will run through a contested convention. He’s saying these things because he’s being told these things by his Republican Establishment handlers. The reality is this: he is being played for a rube and the Establishment is trying to use him to block Ted Cruz from blocking Donald Trump.
Don’t get me wrong. The establishment would prefer to have Rubio or John Kasich as the nominee over Trump, but they’ll accept Trump. He demonstrated the week before the Iowa caucus that he’s malleable and willing to play the political game for the sake of making deals. He’s a man of action, not an ideologically driven obstructionist like Cruz. Therefore, they will accept a Trump nomination. To make that happen, they need someone to take out Cruz. That person is Rubio.
There’s one important thing to remember: Donald Trump IS the Establishment. He’s been playing their game for many years and they are happy to have him on their team. Their trepidation towards him has nothing to do with his policies or ideologies. If anything, he’s a bit more suitable for their needs than Kasich and equal to Rubio. However, they have had a hard time backing him because they realize that he would likely get obliterated in the general election. That will change after the SEC Primary if Cruz is stopped. Expect plenty of Establishment endorsements after Tuesday if Cruz comes out without winning a state other than Texas.
This is where it gets dirty. They would rather see a Trump loss in the general election than a Cruz victory. It’s very hard for anyone who hasn’t been paying extreme attention for a long time to accept this. In fact, most will dismiss it as a crazy conspiracy theory, but one need only to look back at Ronald Reagan in 1980 to realize that what they’re doing to Cruz is exactly what they did to Reagan. The difference this year is that they have a Trump card. To make sure that Trump card works, they’re playing Rubio for the fool. They’re telling him that he has a chance. They’re saying that he doesn’t have to win a primary or caucus in March, even in his home state of Florida, as long as he can win enough delegates to prevent a Trump nomination outright.
They sold him on the contested convention where he gets the lion’s share of the free second votes after the first vote fails. Unfortunately, if he wanted the first vote to fail, he needed to prevent Trump from getting enough delegates to win outright.
Somewhere along the line, his ability to think logically got lost. The logical way for this to happen is for Rubio to have been attacking Trump the whole time. Instead, they had him taking down Cruz since before the first caucus. It likely didn’t make sense to him, but they were able to convince him that Trump would eventually fall off. Now that it’s clear he’s not going to fall off, they’re allowing him to go after Trump. It may be too late, though. The damage to Cruz may already be too much for him to recover…
…just as they had planned all along.
Rubio isn’t a bad guy. He’s just a pawn. He’s been misled into believing what the Establishment has been feeding him and now it may be too late to correct course and do the right thing. Thanks to Rubio’s inability to discern the truth, he is one of the biggest reasons that Trump is better positioned than Cruz to win the nomination. Anyone who does not want Trump as the nominee must unite behind Cruz before it’s too late. Rubio is done.