Sen. Marco Rubio says if he could do it all over again he wouldn’t have gone personal with insults to Donald Trump.
“At the end of the day, you know it’s not something I’m entirely proud of,” the Florida Republican told MSNBC during a town hall airing Wednesday night. “My kids were embarrassed by it, and if I had to do it again, I wouldn’t.”
But Rubio told NBC’s Chuck Todd in a clip released early by the network that aside from the personal insults, Rubio stands behind his attacks on Trump’s business record.
He repeated the regret in an interview with Fox’s Megyn Kelly filmed before a live audience at his rally here Wednesday evening.
“I want my kids to be proud of me and I don’t think it reflected well on my faith,” Rubio said. “That’s not who I am.”
After months of staying out of the GOP front-runner’s way, Rubio made a sharp turn at a Republican debate in Houston in late February and subsequent days, attacking the mogul repeatedly as a “con artist” and mocking his bodily functions, hand size and makeup.
Trump responded in kind, even defending the size of his manhood — in reference to the hand comments — in the GOP debate in Detroit last week.
Rubio’s remarks on Wednesday were a sharp turn from comments he made over the weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when he defended his sometimes racy attacks in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash.
The Florida senator has seen his poll numbers drop and has failed to pick up delegates in some states since going negative, and has scaled back the amount of attacking Trump in his stump speech.