Conservative columnist shreds Marco Rubio for abandoning his potential to become Trump sycophant

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has thrown away all of his principles — and his concern for the country's national security — to grovel at former President Donald Trump's feet and carry water for him at his darkest legal hour, wrote conservative columnist and former Rubio admirer Matt Lewis in a scathing Daily Beast essay published on Thursday.

"In 2016, Rubio was the hope of conservatives looking for an optimistic, youthful (daresay Kennedyesque) contrast to Hillary Clinton. But something happened on the way to Camelot; Donald Trump, a grifter Rubio correctly identified as a 'con artist,' humiliated 'Little Marco,' and Rubio hasn’t been the same since," wrote Lewis. "Examples abound, including Rubio cheering on the roadway harassment of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign bus in Texas and Rubio voting against convicting Trump at his second impeachment trial in 2021, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Indeed, things have only worsened since then."

Then came what Lewis described as the "new low": Rubio — the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a well-versed official on national security — called Trump's Espionage Act indictment "political in nature," defending a man who hoarded national defense information in a country club frequented by foreign nationals.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for Lewis, who once backed Rubio as the GOP's future and expected voters to choose someone like him over Trump in 2016.

"My big regret isn’t that I misread the Republican electorate in 2016. When you write three columns a week, you’re going to blow some political predictions — sometimes in an overtly embarrassing fashion. What bothers me most, though, is that I was cheering on someone who was so personally flawed that — like Trump — he probably shouldn’t have access to the nuclear codes," wrote Lewis. "This only became clear to me after 2016. After being forced out of the presidential race, Rubio might have played his cards differently. Perhaps he could have found a palatable way to embrace or address the GOP’s obvious populist trend, without completely abandoning his principles. Instead, he became a Donald Trump cheerleader."

Trump maintains that he has not done anything illegal and claims — without evidence and in contradiction of his own private conversations — that he had blanket authority to declassify and take for himself any document he wanted.