Marco Rubio was once the Great Republican Hope. Charismatic, Cuban-American, and conservative, the 39-year-old was the face of the party’s future when he rode to the Senate on the “Tea Party tidal wave” of 2010. GOP leaders called him “our Barack Obama.” National Review cheered, “Yes, he can.” He was exactly the corrective the Republican National Committee prescribed in its autopsy after Mitt Romney lost to Obama in 2012, and Time even dubbed him “the Republican savior.”

Except he wasn’t. Not even close. Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, like virtually every GOP bid for the White House not run out of Trump Tower, was a massive disappointment. He won only the state of Minnesota. He was eviscerated for repeating the same tired talking points like a short-circuiting robot. When he made his last stand in his home state of Florida, voters handed him what The New York Times called “a humiliatingly distant second-place finish”: 27 percent to Trump’s 46. A day later, Rubio dropped out.

Rubio had been diminished by Trump in numerous ways. Trump tried to emasculate him, suggesting his shoes were effeminate. He called Rubio a “little boy” and a “frightened little puppy.” Significantly, he also got Rubio, a sitting senator, to respond in kind, hurling his own juvenile taunts—including a penis size joke—yet they were always ineffectual in the face of Trump. It was as if Trump’s insults were a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That may have be the future nominee’s last masterstroke, in fact. He turned the Republicans’ next big thing into someone quite small: “Little Marco.”

Given that history, it might have been surprising when Rubio confirmed Tuesday that he’s still supporting Trump for president, despite the Access Hollywood tape in which the nominee brags about his ability to commit sexual assault—and which Rubio had condemned in a tweet hours after the news broke on Friday.