Rubio stuck by his pledge to support the GOP nominee, and some of his hawkish fans are not amused:

Today, Rubio said that he wasn’t backing away from any of his remarks about Trump. But Rubio argued that—because he signed the RNC pledge and because he doesn’t want Hillary Clinton to win—he must support a man so unfit for office he can’t be trusted with access to the nuclear football.

What does Rubio’s logic say about his own fitness for the highest office in the land? Nothing good.

Rubio’s decision to honor the RNC pledge he made must come as a nasty shock to the many anti-Trump Republicans that supported him and tried to build him up into a major contender for the nomination. After all, Rubio is the one that they desperately tried to anoint as the party’s future, and he is the one they kept trusting would derail Trump’s juggernaut. There was a period in late February and early March when Rubio could maintain that he would support the nominee without admitting that meant he would support Trump, and he embraced the #NeverTrump motto as his own, but it is no longer possible for him to keep up that pretense.

Even after Rubio failed to defeat Trump, his fans and boosters kept alive the hope of a future Rubio candidacy. Once again, his fans created a role for Rubio that he wasn’t able to fill. I joked that he was being turned into the anti-Trump King over the Water, the last claimant to a deposed dynasty. Unfortunately for his fans, Rubio has disappointed them once again by doing something as simple as keeping his word.

Perhaps the other candidates shouldn’t have agreed to the RNC pledge to support the eventual nominee, but when they agreed to it none of them thought that Trump would be the one they would be bound to support. Rubio’s predicament stems from his decision to make two mutually exclusive promises over the course of the campaign: to back the nominee and to oppose Trump to the bitter end. He can’t fulfill one without reneging on the other. He can’t be both loyal party man and die-hard Trump opponent, and in the end Rubio opted for party loyalty over other considerations. That probably means that he has burned his bridges with a lot of his would-be future supporters, but Rubio must know better than anyone else that his national political career was already coming to a close.