Florida GOP candidates just caught hiding pro-Trump tweets, pretending to be moderates
A pair of high-profile Republican candidates in Miami just got caught furiously deleting and hiding their pro-Trump tweets.
GOP Congressional candidate Maria Elvira Salazar deleted the Tweet you see above lauding Donald Trump.
But the internet remembers everything.
I have preserved the Tweet in question from the Google Cache using Archive.is, and it reads:
“Bravo #Trump for calling for “real and positive #immigration reform”. Look forward to concrete details. #JointSession”
Maria Elvira Salazar, 6:59 PM — 28 Feb 2017 from Oaxaca, México via Twitter.
Republican state Senate candidate Marili Cancio took everything a step further by making her entire Twitter account private, according to a Miami Herald report that buried the lede about a candidate who needed to keep all of her pro-Trump tweets for later, for some reason she won’t tell voters today.
The Miami Herald buried the lede on Cancio’s secret Twitter account, but my investigation turned when one of her followers sent me multiple captured images from her hidden pro-Trump account, the screen shots of which have never been seen elsewhere, like these:
I also found some of Cancio’s tweets in Archive.org, like this one doubting “#globalwarming” reporting on the effects of climate change which leads to more extreme weather conditions.
High profile Cuban-American Republican candidates running away from Trump during their election campaigns after spending a year running towards him
Both women are seeking legislative offices in overlapping districts the heart of Florida’s largest city, Miami, which voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections.
Both women live in mansions worth triple the median home value in high-priced Miami-Dade County.
One of them is an out of work, former Univision television journalist who is praising bipartisanship today.
The other is a Republican Party insider and a failed Congressional candidate who launched an insincere moderate account just for her State Senate campaign.
The Pro-Trump journalist
Maria Elvira Salazar spent decades on Miami’s vibrant Spanish language television news where she reported on everyone from an interview with Fidel Castro — whom she controversially called an excellent revolutionary — to the exiles who bombed an air flight in the 1970s, whom she later helped exonerate in court with her testimony.
She is a first time GOP candidate for Florida’s 27th district seeking a mild upset in a solidly blue district whose current Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is the most senior and 5th most liberal Republican in the House, who announced her retirement last year.
Salazar disputes being too soft on Castro during that interview, and in 2011 she testified in federal court to the exact opposite of what bomber Luis Posada Carriles had admitted to her — that he murdered 73 people on a Cuban airline — to help him remain in the United States until his death.
Just yesterday, the Miami Herald reported that Salazar demanded secrecy about her real position on Cuban affairs after blurting out the truth without an off the record agreement to their Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Fabiola Santiago.
While Maria Elvira Salazar deleted the “#Bravo Trump” tweet, she didn’t tweet the replies, and this one is illustrative of her blind support for the President and his policy of separating families seeking refugee status at the US-Mexico border.
Salazar is the Miami-born daughter of Cuban immigrants.
A good indication of her outlook towards the importance of immigration policy emerged recently, when she went on to MSNBC to disparage immigrants:
If she sent any other pro-Trump tweets, they have been pruned from Salazar’s account, but not everything she has ever said about the head of her party.
As a former journalist, she knows that the top concern in political journalism today is the rampant practice of gaslighting by American politicians and elected officials, and it starts from the top.
Salazar’s campaign did not answer their phone during working hours, and a voicemail message seeking comment for this story was not returned. I contacted her Democratic opponent Donna Shalala’s campaign, but they did not return texts and phone calls seeking comment for this story.
From “Island Paradise” to Miami suburbs
Marili Cancio is a Miami lawyer and Spanish-language media pundit.
She recently “moved” into the suburban Florida State Senate district 40 about 15 miles from her longtime home in the exclusive island Village of Key Biscayne.
Sometime since her “relocation” to Miami’s suburban Kendall neighborhood, Cancio took this account private and opened a new public account touting her “rise” above partisan politics, an account that has never mentioned the word “Trump.”
Cancio was a moderate Jeb Bush backer that transformed from #NeverTrump into a staunch defender of the President. As far back as 2012, she didn’t like Trump’s birtherism movement which was little more than very thinly veiled racism.
After Trump’s racist campaign launch speech and public feud with Univision, Cancio was ready to fire The Apprentice tv show host.
She even taunted his populist platform of protectionism by pointing out his imported clothing from the now-defunct merchandising empire that Trump built with a shipping fleet’s worth of deliveries from China.
Of course, Marili Cancio might not just be hiding her ties to Donald Trump from voters.
Cancio is apparently very close with Florida Governor Rick Scott, whose business career was at its zenith as the CEO of a hospital chain. Scott was forced to resign as the head of a company that pled guilty to massive amounts of systematic fraud, including 14 felonies, leading to a historic $1.7 billion fine, said his first gubernatorial opponent in 2010. Politifact rated that statement as true.
Scott’s net worth rose from $73 million in what the New York Times just called a blind trust in name only, to at least triple that value after he placed his assets in the care of his wife, Ann, an interior decorator by profession.
One Republican woman’s transformation
Ironically, she had this to say about womanizers, right before her party nominated the notorious Trump as its presidential candidate.
After the nominating convention, Cancio’s tweets about Trump underwent a metamorphosis, starting with hatred for his opponent.
And culminating in Cancio’s outright admiration for Trump’s former senior White House advisor and campaign manager, Steve Bannon, and the white nationalist news outlet which launched him into political power in a candid audience last November.
It all paid off for Cancio with a trip to the White House at the start of this year.
Marili Cancio did not answer her cell-phone — which has no voicemail — for comment, nor did she answer a Direct Message on her protected Twitter account which she receives because she is following me. I contacted the campaign of Cancio’s Democratic opponent Annette Taddeo, who could not be reached for comment today for this story.
