“Can we talk about your state of Florida?” MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) midway through their interview Friday morning.
Explaining Florida is “one of the last states” to issue a stay-at-home order for its residents, Ruhle asked, “What in the world is going on down there? You have a whole lot of senior citizens and last I checked, they're pretty high risk.”
Despite the fact that Gov. Ron DeSantis waited until this Wednesday to lockdown his state, Rubio claimed that “for all practical purposes, we were in a stay-at-home order” and that “virtually every county in the state had restrictions in place.”
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“Senator, come on now, stop it,” Ruhle said, interrupting him. “Sir, hold on,” she added. “Those handful of counties don't have walls around them. You and I both saw pictures of partiers on beaches jamming on it, right? They're not bound by those counties. They can get all over the state. Come on!”
Rubio dismissed those photos of crowded beaches by noting that they are mostly from two or three weeks ago. “What I’m trying to say is just because you didn't have a stay-at-home order doesn't mean people weren’t staying at home,” he added. After saying DeSantis did the right thing by deferring to local officials, he admitted, “That said, I think he made the right decision at this point yesterday with regards to it.”
“So you support how he’s handled it?” Ruhle asked. “You don’t think he should have done it two weeks ago, three weeks ago?”
“You know, honestly, I think that we will have plenty of time to look back when this is all done and see all the mistakes that were made, all the errors that were committed at every level, starting at the CDC, congressional oversight, maybe we should have started on the relief bill a week earlier in Congress,” Rubio answered. “Right now, though, we can't stop to do that. We have to focus on the emergency that's at hand right now.”
But Ruhle wasn’t done. “With all due respect, sir, you're not immune to finger pointing yourself,” she said. “Earlier this week you called out people that share my job.”
She was referring to a tweet Rubio posted this past Sunday that read, “Some in our media can’t contain their glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China.” He added that “beyond being grotesque” it is “bad journalism.”
“I need to ask you this because I am a journalist, we're not just some personalities,” Ruhle said. “You called out journalism. And I need to understand why on earth you did this.” When he attempted to defend his tweet as an effort to counter “Chinese propaganda,” she added, “Sir, just a moment ago you said we shouldn't be wasting any time pointing fingers or criticizing and that's exactly what you did in that tweet.”
