Josh Barro quotes:

I thought it was remarkable in July [2016] when he pointedly declined to endorse Ted Cruz at the Republican convention, because I thought that was not in his political best interest...

I thought there was something in Ted Cruz`s dignity that prevented him by endorsing a candidate like that, because that was the best explanation of what he did.

[Ted Cruz] is changed his mind, decided it`s in his best interest to be for [Donald] Trump, which what that says to me is Ted Cruz is a totally craven politician and will say anything to win, but isn`t even good at it.

Marco Rubio is really to the right of Chris Christie, when Jeb Bush and John Kasich and he hasn`t been able to pull away from them.

I think [Donald] Trump is going to try to be fairly low key, but the problem is that I don`t think he is going to very well with [Hillary] Clinton attacking him fairly relentlessly for 90 minutes.

I think the immigration thing has really stuck to Marco Rubio. He was on the wrong side of what`s emerged as probably the most important issue for the conservative base.

There was a whole set of issues that the other Republican candidates couldn`t go after Trump that hard on. They had this difficult position where they were trying to knock Trump down while appealing to the voters who liked a lot of the outrageous things about Donald Trump.[Hillary] Clinton is giong to have no such restrictions. She`s going to attack him on a wide variety of fronts and I don`t think Trump is going to deal very well with being attacked in that way.

In the one-on-one it is going to be harder for [Donald] Trump to get away from those sorts of things because there will be more opportunities for Hillary [Clinton] to follow up on those sorts of things. And I also think to your previous point, I think she really does need to induce errors from him because the biggest hazard to Hillary Clinton is that Trump could clear the low bar of acceptability in debate.

When people floated this idea that this was a conspiracy by the [Jeb] Bush campaign to undermine [Marco] Rubio, at first, it was like it`s too complicated, wheels within wheels but as I thought about it more I did buy that, that this is part of a campaign by Jeb to make it look like there`s no backup plan to Donald Trump, try to blow everything up and then all that will be left is Donald Trump and Jeb who nobody really likes but who has a ton of money and then he`s the only option left.