Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said rival Donald Trump was “the most vulgar person to aspire to the presidency” during a Friday interview on CNN’s “New Day.”
With a deep sigh, Rubio called the debate, which included Trump referencing his genital size, “par for the course,” but said he wanted more policy questions.
“It hasn’t been that way because Donald Trump has been perhaps the most vulgar—no, I don’t mean perhaps—the most vulgar person to aspire to the presidency in terms of how he’s carried out his candidacy. And it’s cut into a lot of these debates and some the things that are asked. I’m not complaining. It is what it is what we get asked. But the majority of the questions had something to do with something he said or she said,” Rubio said.
Co-anchor Alisyn Camerota responded that Rubio has recently been dealing in insults, too.
“Of course, you have taken a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook. You talked about his little hands. And last night that came up. He talked about his endowment,” she said. “And I don’t mean to his alma mater.”
Rubio stumbled as he tried to put the blame back on Trump.
“He’s injected a level of vulgarity into the political discourse that we’ve never seen. And as far as you know, what, I said something—first of all, I didn’t say what he was saying and I said it one time, he’s personally attacked the disabled journalist, everyone basically,” he said. “There’s no one who he has not personally attacked, sometimes in the most vulgar ways. That’s not what I want my campaign to be about.”
Rubio also dodged questions about his campaign’s path to the nomination after only winning one state so far. He called the path “hard,” but when Camerota asked Rubio to “explain the math,” he sidestepped the question.
“Well, our path obviously is to go into the convention with the most number of delegates of anybody on the ballot and we have a path to doing that. It may take a while,” he said.
“Other people have done the numbers on this and they can show you,” Rubio added.
“Beyond Florida, what state are you banking on?” Camerota pressed.
“I think you can ask that of anyone in this race,” he replied.
Watch the exchange, captured by TPM: