In a speech today, Rubio said that if he had watched Game of Thrones during his 2016 campaign, he would have been president because of the “good strategies” one can learn from the show:
“If I’d have watched [Game of Thrones] two years ago, I would’ve been president,” Marco Rubio says. “It’s got a lot of good strategies.”
— Haley Byrd (@byrdinator) October 3, 2017
To which I say: Seems like a stretch! Comparing the 2016 election, which was like a game of thrones, to Game of Thrones was a big trend among the short-of-ideas media class. This was all well and good until Donald Trump won said game and it was no longer funny to compare a fictional TV show to a real-life tragedy. But Rubio, who only started watching the show in the last two years, apparently thinks that he could have turned the tide if only he had been hip to George R. R. Martin’s show earlier. But who does Rubio see himself as in Game of Thrones? Here are my best guesses:
- Renly: Renly had no real claim to the throne. Unlike Joffrey, he was not (publicly) the son of Robert Baratheon. Unlike Stannis, he was not the oldest Baratheon brother and technically next in line. And unlike Daenerys, his crown was not usurped from his family, thus enabling him to claim that he surpassed every other bum in Westeros. Similarly, Rubio was fourth in line, but he refused to release his delegates after he dropped out of the race, sending a letter to state parties that misspelled a very important word (“Untied States”). It was rumored that he was holding out hope that he would be the establishment’s pick over Trump at a possible brokered convention at the RNC. But Renly, at least, was well-liked by the common people—Rubio was not.
Viserys: Viserys met his downfall because he had no idea how he appeared to everyone else around him—rich, vain, entitled, and out of touch with reality. Then there’s Rubio, who went to a campaign stop in New Hampshire wearing incredibly expensive-looking high-heeled booties.
- Melisandre: If there is anything my lady in red is good at, it’s ineffectually repeating the same line over and over again—“okay this man is definitely the prince who was promised”—hoping that by the third or fourth time it would become a winning one. This was Rubio’s strategy, whose programming got memorably stuck when he repeated the line “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing,” four times during one of the debates. This led Rubio to getting owned by Chris Christie, which is the GOT equivalent of getting owned by Rorge.
- Hot Pie: Ha! Just kidding! Rubio only wishes he could be the shining beam of light that is Hot Pie.
But the correct analysis is that Rubio would most certainly have died in Game of Thrones even if he had already watched all of Game of Thrones and knew everything that was going to happen.