Leading Republicans have continued to criticize presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for attacking a Mexican-American judge. Trump has said the judge should recuse himself from a lawsuit against the defunct for-profit Trump University, because his Mexican heritage represents a conflict of interest, since Trump wants to build a wall on the Mexican border. On Monday, Florida senator and former Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio criticized Trump’s comments in an interview with Florida news station WFTV.
Sen. Marco Rubio: “I think it’s wrong. He needs to stop saying it. That man is an American and born in the United States. Beyond it, even if he hadn’t been, I mean, he’s a judge, who has earned that position and in the end should be treated with the same level of respect as any other officer of the court. I don’t think it reflects well on the Republican Party. I don’t think it reflects well on us as a nation. There shouldn’t be any sort of ethnicity, religious or racial test for what kind of judges should hear what kind of cases. If you take that argument and you expand it, you can make that argument, I mean, about anybody in some circumstance or another. It’s wrong, and I hope he stops.”