Days after attending GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s fundraiser for veterans, former Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum announced he would back donor-class favorite and amnesty advocate Sen. Marco Rubio.
On Wednesday evening, Santorum appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s On The Record during prime-time to declare he would suspend his presidential campaign.
“The best way I would do what I set out to do when we announced to run for president, to help working men and women in this country, to defeat ISIS and stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, to take on national security threats to our country, and to really help foster and support stronger families,” Santorum said, awkwardly balancing a protectionist domestic agenda with a globalist foreign policy.
We decided we really wanted to find a candidate that espoused the values we believed in, someone who had really focused their campaign on trying to help — I always talked about the 74 percent of Americans that don’t have a college degree, who are struggling on the margins, you know, the middle of America hollowing out, and understanding the central role of the family and supporting that opportunity.
“Family breakdown is one of the key reasons it’s hollowing out. It’s not just the lack of opportunities,” he continued. “You talk about manufacturing and that important thing…” he trailed off.
“You’re killing the political people out there,” Van Susteren impatiently said. “They’re waiting for, they’re waiting for the names.”
“And the final thing,” Santorum began again, “someone who has a real understanding of the threat of ISIS, a real understanding of the threat of fundamentalist Islam, and has experience — one of the things I wanted was someone who had some experience in this area, and that’s why we decided to support Marco Rubio.”
“I don’t endorse lightly,” he said, later adding Rubio is a “tremendously gifted young man” and a “born leader.” Rubio can take the “wine I’ve been trying to sell and put it in new wineskins.”
Santorum’s endorsement of Rubio, whose Gang of Eight bill would grant mostly third world immigrants 33 million green cards in 10 years while legalizing the estimated 11 million to 30 million illegal aliens present in the U.S., in addition to the 59 million immigrants admitted since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, starkly contrasts his earlier statements on protecting blue collar workers.
“This debate should not be about what we’re going to do with someone who’s here illegally. This debate should be about what… What’s in the best interest of hardworking Americans? What’s in the best interest of our country?” Santorum said during an undercard debate in September when discussing immigration policy.
“Seventy to 90 percent of people who’ve come into this country — 35 million over the last 20 years — are wage-earners that are holding [Americans’] wages down, taking jobs away from America,” Santorum said.
At the Value Voters Summit which took place last September, Santorum slammed Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and warned other candidates not to embrace unpopular, extreme levels of immigration.
“Immigration is one of the issues that cuts across and gives us an opportunity as Republicans to get voters who otherwise would not support us. And I’m excited about the opportunity to talk on immigration about how we help working men and women get better jobs in America,” he said.
“Senator Cruz wants to increase the number of H-1B visas by 500 percent. I mean, this is a program that right now is under scandal because we are bringing people in who are supposedly high-skilled workers—computer programmers—and they’re displacing American workers,” he added.
“These are important issues that some of our candidates are on the wrong side of, and I think is a real impediment for us to be able to make the case to working men and women that we’re on their side,” he insisted.
In December, Santorum appeared on Breitbart News Daily to express measured support for Trump’s proposal to halt Muslim migration into the U.S., after two Muslims vetted by the American government’s national-security apparatus murdered over a dozen co-workers in San Bernardino, California.
“I have proposed actual concrete things in our immigration law that would have not the effect of banning all Muslims, but a lot of them,” he said. “We start changing our immigration laws, we can deal with this problem. I think the way Trump has proposed it, it may have some constitutional infirmity. We can do it in a more practical way than the way that Donald Trump is suggesting.” He proposed abolishing chain migration, which wrests control over immigration policy from Americans and puts it on autopilot for foreigners.
After Santorum joined Trump to raise millions for veterans, The New York Times warned he might lose “respect” as Republican pundits fiercely attacked both him and Huckabee for participating in the charity event.
“Like conquered kings paraded in a Triumph through the streets of Rome, Santorum and Huckabee were paraded through Drake University, now the vassals of Donald Trump. What a pathetic end to the last two men to win Iowa,” wrote Rubio-boosting blogger Erick Erickson.
In January, Erickson advised the GOP establishment to back amnesty-pushing Rubio in order to stop Trump and Cruz, both of whom have adopted Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions’ popular immigration agenda putting American workers and national security before corporations’ interests.
Santorum’s endorsement of Rubio comes at a time when the Trump campaign revealed Fox News’s vice president of news and Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, is the father of Rubio’s press secretary, Brooke Salmon. As Breitbart News reported, Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch is deeply invested in a globalist agenda:
Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, is a co-chair of what is arguably one of the biggest immigration lobbying firms in the country, The Partnership for a New American Economy. Via his lobbying firm, Murdoch has endorsed Rubio’s 2013 amnesty bill, as well as Rubio’s 2015 immigration expansion bill. Murdoch has also endorsed President Obama’s trade agenda, which Rubio has said would be the “second pillar” of a President Rubio’s three-pillar foreign policy strategy.
The day before the Iowa caucuses, Rubio set himself apart from the rest of the GOP field by boasting about his La Raza-backed Gang of Eight bill, calling it the “best that could be done.”
It’s unclear what role Santorum will now play in national politics after setting aside an issue which presents perhaps the last existential threat to Western culture and civilization, and which has electrified an American electorate once resigned to a Hillary-vs-Jeb matchup.
As Santorum weakly backs Rubio, Trump is offering an alternative to future in which Mexican cartels and illegal alien drug mules pump heroin into the nation and profit as half a million Americans die from drug overdoses in a single decade, and in which the Muslim world storms Europe and inflicts massive sex-attacks on German women in the shadows of the Cologne cathedral.
It’s likely that Trump’s explosive campaign with promises to build a border wall simply dwarfed Santorum’s, who has also branded himself a hawk on foreign policy similar to Rubio.
Van Susteren asked Santorum the first state he would hit to campaign for Rubio, but Santorum demurred and said he would let Rubio know after he made his endorsement. An appearance on Fox News post-Trump could be all that was planned.
Email Katie at kmchugh@breitbart.com.