Kasich, Rubio Hedge on Supporting Trump If He’s the GOP Nominee
”A significant number of Republicans will not vote for Donald Trump at the voting booth, no matter what I say or anybody else tells them,“ Rubio says on CNN Sunday
Donald Trump’s rivals have begun to hedge in their responses to questions about whether they would support the GOP frontrunner if he were to become the Republican Party’s nominee for president.
Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sunday morning, Ohio Gov. John Kasich said of Trump, “I would like to support the nominee. But he’s not going to be the nominee. That’s just not going to happen.
“But I said at the last debate he makes it difficult,” Kasich continued. “And we will see how this goes. I mean, we have to — he’s got to have — begin to lift people and stop dividing people. And the toxic environment must end. This is not making us proud.”
Earlier, the Ohio governor noted that Trump has “created a very toxic atmosphere. … There’s no doubt that he’s run this divisive campaign.”
Kasich concluded by saying that people around the world look at videos of Trump rallies and “are shaking their heads … saying, what the heck has happened to America?” But, in his view, “We will be fine. The people are smart. They’re going to make the right decision, in my opinion.”
Meanwhile, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that Trump “has turned the most important election in a generation into a circus, into a complete fiasco and a carnival.”
He added, in response to a query from host Jake Tapper, that he is “very concerned” that someone could lose their life, adding “I think that all the gates of civility have been blown apart.”
As a result, the Republican establishment favorite said that he is starting to question his own pledge to support Trump as the party’s nominee.
“It’s getting harder every day to justify that statement to myself, to my children, to my family, and to the people that support me,” Rubio said. “This country deserves better. At some point, people have to wake up here. This is really going to do damage to America.”
9 More Donald Trump Fudges and Lies From Primary Season (Videos)
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.
During the CNN South Carolina town hall debate, Anderson Cooper asked Trump about a interview posted on Buzzfeed in which Trump voiced support of the Iraq invasion. Trump responded by saying that he opposed the Iraq invasion by the time it started, but Buzzfeed countered with a clip from another taken the weekend after the invasion started, in which he said the invasion looked like "a tremendous success."
On Jan. 29, Trump said that he "never once asked" for Fox News' Megyn Kelly to be removed as a moderator for a debate that he boycotted. While Trump didn't directly request the removal, he did question Kelly's qualifications. On Jan. 23, he tweeted: "Based on @MegynKelly's conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate."
During his New Hampshire victory speech, Trump claimed the unemployment rate of 5 percent was false, and was actually somewhere between 28-42 percent (fast forward to 12:00). While the unemployment rate most commonly reported does not count people who are not actively seeking jobs, there is another which includes more people attached to the labor force. Under this, the unemployment rate only rises to 10 percent.
Another claim from the N.H. victory speech is that Trump is the only candidate who self-funds his campaign. A check of documents from the Federal Election Commission shows that as of the end of 2015, Trump had put in nearly $2 million to his campaign, but he had received just over $6.5 million from donors.
During a Jan. 20 town hall in Iowa, Trump said that he could make Mexico pay for a border-spanning wall by using the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico to cover the cost. Politifact debunked it, citing several economic experts who noted that the trade deficit is based largely on private trading, and that Mexico's trade surplus does not mean that they have the resources to fund such a wall.
This attack ad against Ted Cruz that aired in South Carolina this past month is one of many examples of Trump claiming that illegal immigrants are "pouring in." The hyperbole ignores a 2015 Pew Research study that shows that the illegal immigrant population in America has actually declined by about 1 million since the start of the recession.
At a rally on Feb. 19, Trump claimed that General John Pershing captured 50 Muslim terrorists in the 1920s and executed them via firing squad with bullets dipped in pigs' blood. The truth is that while Pershing fought against Muslim swordsmen in the Philippines to stop the massacre of Christians, he only sprinkled them with pigs' blood -- which they considered to be unholy -- to strike fear. He never ordered such an execution.
Trump continues to insist that torture techniques like waterboarding work. He does this despite the fact that just two years ago, a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques made headlines when it called them "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees."
In a Jan. 14 debate, Trump claimed that there were very few women and children among the Syrian refugees. Two surveys by the U.N. count the number of Syrian refugees in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the number of refugees that have crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. In both surveys, women and children make up approximately 50 percent of the total refugee count.
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In just the past two months, the GOP frontrunner has raised many red flags with fact checkers
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.
