Whether he runs or not, Marco Rubio WILL be a private citizen come January.

Political twitter is having a laugh at Rubio’s expense, now that he’s apparently reconsidered his decision not to retire from the Senate, by among other things resurfacing this one-month old tweet.

At a glance, this reads like an outright flipflop, and Rubio has gone out of his way to explain (in off-color fashion) that the Orlando massacre prompted him to think about his political career anew.

But a closer read dispels with that fiction. Rubio wasn’t promising not to run, just that if he did run, he’d probably lose, which still seems like an accurate assessment. After all, Rubio announced his intent to retire from the Senate to pursue the GOP presidential nomination, which he lost; and along the way he justified that decision by basically shitting all over the Senate, which may have contributed to the fact that he lost the Florida primary by a two-to-one margin. So Rubio hasn’t rescinded his promise to be a private citizen in January; he’s just going to keep his word in a roundabout way.