Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump won the Florida Republican primary for president with 46 percent of the vote–the same margin Mitt Romney’s win mustered in 2012, and 10 points higher than John McCain managed in 2008–Gov. Rick Scott announced his endorsement of the New York businessman.
“With his victories yesterday, I believe it is now time for Republicans to accept and respect the will of the voters and coalesce behind Donald Trump,” Scott wrote in a Facebook post a little before noon Wednesday. Scott likened himself and his political trajectory to that of Trump, whom he described as “a businessman outsider who will dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington.”
Scott, a former hospital executive, wrote that when he first ran for Florida governor, “the political class and party leaders opposed me with great vigor, and some even said if I won the primary they would never vote for me. But the voters had other ideas, and they are the only ones who count.”
The endorsement was as much a plea for party unity as another signal from Scott that he is open to Trump’s invitation as his vice president nominee. In January, Scott wrote a fawning OpEd in USA Today about Trump, admiring him as a candidate “who speaks and tweets his mind freely” and who is “capturing the frustration of many Americans after seven years of President Obama’s very intentional government takeover of the American economy.”
Scott, in a reference to verbal clashes on the campaign trail between Republican candidates and their organizations, called for an “end to the Republican on Republican violence,” but did not mention actual violence at Trump rallies between Trump supporters and protesters. Last week, Trump refused to disavow Trump’s indictments of Islam and Muslims in general as haters of the United States.
Other than Attorney General Pam Bondi who endorsed Trump just before the primary, no prominent Florida Republicans–among them Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush–have endorsed the real estate mogul as a realignment within the Republican Party continues between Trump’s brand of insurgents and the GOP establishment, which is angling for a brokered convention by denying Trump the delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. But it is still not clear whether the party is ready to fall behind runner-up Ted Cruz, who has few friends in the Republican establishment, while John Kasich, the Ohio governor, has won just one state in primaries so far–his own.
On Wednesday, Trump warned that if the party attempts to hand the nomination to another candidate if he doesn’t clinch the delegates necessary before then, “I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous, many, many millions of people.” He was speaking in an interview on CNN’s “New Day.”
Trumpster says
We crooks have got to stick together and stick it to the fools who support and elect us. Thank you all for supporting our criminal enterprise.
r&r says
Endorsing Trump was one of his best endorsement he’s made.
Makeitso1701 says
Ha Ha Ha Ha……….love it!!!!!!!
Sherry says
Those two belong together. . . interested in some actual FACTS about the Donald’s wealth. . . greatly exaggerated smoke and mirrors. . . take a look, if you dare:
http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2016/03/14/trump-biographer-timothy-obrien.cnnmoney/index.html
The puckered mouth of Donald Trump says
I hope that he’s Trump’s running mate, because he deserves all of the accolades he can get for his astute business practices and the many great things that he has done for the blue collar worker and children of this great state, Florida. I only hope he can make Pam Bondi attorney general so that the good ol’ USA can reap the benefits he bestowed on us here!
TRUMP 2016
Dave says
I guess evil identifies with evil.
Sherry says
Please enlighten us. . . Rick Scott’s accolades are what, precisely?
Let’s see how accurate Rick Scott’s statements are. . . this from Politifacts:
Scott’s statements by ruling
True14 (10%)
Mostly True32 (23%)
Half True37 (27%)
Mostly False26 (19%)
False21 (15%)
Pants on Fire7 (5%)
So, only about 1/3 of what he says is mostly true. . . not surprising to me!
Makeitso1701 says
What a ticket that would be, Trump and Scott. I have a great idea for a bumper sticker “Dumb and Dumber”
YankeeExPat says
Before the Governorship, before Columbia/HCA Health……………………
Joe says
Hahaha this is the best, divide and conquer, GOP is so screwed..lol
Ron says
Jump on the train when the out come is decided. Another political move to advance himself. Not the people of this country.
Sherry says
CRUZ and the horrific TEA PARTY is just as dangerous as TRUMP. . . just in a different way. . . this from Yahoo Finance:
Forget Trump: Here’s Who’s Really Destroying the Republican Party
The Fiscal Times By David Dayen
March 18, 2016 6:15 AM
The seminal event in the crackup of the Republican Party is not the rise of Donald Trump as their presidential nominee, contrary to popular opinion. It was the overthrow of John Boehner as Speaker of the House. That showed the power of the forty-odd members of the House Freedom Caucus, and their incompatibility with the GOP establishment and the compromises required by divided government (or for that matter, math).
The change in leadership at the top has not bridged this divide. Despite months of happy talk, the Freedom Caucus rejected Paul Ryan’s budget resolution, likely leaving the Republicans with no budget this year, after they made returning to regular order a campaign promise in 2014. The lack of a budget is just a sidelight to the continuing irreconcilable differences between conservative factions. Trump will not be able to fix this either; only a purge of one side of the party or the other would.
Related: Is This the GOP Plan to Deny Trump the Nomination?
The Freedom Caucus essentially wants to control government from a base of 40 members of the House, with only a few allies in the Senate and no president willing to agree to their demands. They want to defund Planned Parenthood, balance the budget through massive spending cuts, dismantle government healthcare programs, and overturn every executive order of the past eight years, regardless of not having the two-thirds support in Congress that would be required currently to override Obama vetoes and make that happen.
Conservatives had to beg Ryan to take the Speaker’s job. His prescient leeriness stemmed from seeing Boehner put in the impossible spot of rounding up votes for routine government functions. And absolutely nothing changed when he received the gavel.
For months, Ryan has attempted to broker a deal on a budget resolution, which sets topline numbers for the appropriations committees to use to fund government operations. A bipartisan deal at the end of last year set those numbers in stone, at $1.07 trillion for the next fiscal year. But the Freedom Caucus wants to cut that by $30 billion, back to the level mandated by sequestration, the automatic spending cuts implemented in 2011.
Related: Why There’s Trouble Ahead for Paul Ryan’s Trillion-Dollar Budget
Ryan and his colleagues tried to offer the Freedom Caucus incentives to come aboard. He promised $100 billion in future cuts over the next 10 years, if they’d just sign onto the topline $1.07 trillion number. He offered votes on cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program and taking away tax credits for undocumented immigrants with U.S. citizens as children. And he threatened to cancel the appropriations process without a budget resolution, meaning no opportunity for the kinds of ideological policy riders the Freedom Caucus cherishes as a way to get their priorities into law.
Nevertheless, the caucus formally announced its opposition, unable to stomach the nominal $30 billion spending increase (all of which was offset by cuts elsewhere). Members dismissed the additional votes as meaningless, because the Senate was unlikely to take them up.
Consider that Ryan is the architect of perhaps the most sweeping conservative budget in history, one that would balance the budget in a decade, mostly by pulling the safety net out from low-income Americans. In the past, he has proposed ending Medicare as we know it, cutting Social Security benefits and simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy, necessitating even more budget trims. And now this guy is a big-spending liberal!
Related: Paul Ryan Is Taking a $30 Billion Gamble With the GOP’s Budget
Because Democrats don’t typically agree to budget resolutions from the other side, losing a 40-member bloc is enough to ensure that the Republican budget won’t have enough votes. That means it’s likely the government will be funded with a continuing resolution at current levels for the near future. And Democrats will have to supply most of the votes for it.
Democrats, indeed, have largely been in charge of budgeting for the past year because of this dysfunction. Freedom Caucus members have tried to claim that they are listening to the public will as expressed by Trump’s primary successes — “the establishment has been rejected in every one of our states,” Rep. Raul Labrador said recently — but this has been going on since before Trump ever announced his candidacy.
Indeed, this implacability is more reminiscent of how Ted Cruz has operated in the Senate, with his demands to shut down the government over Obamacare in 2013. Cruz actually sees that event as his defining moment, even though it accomplished nothing. And his acolytes in the House are following this script. We’re seeing the Cruz-ification of the Republican Party, not the Trump-ification.