Beneath The Mask, Marco Rubio Was Always MAGA
No real ‘Breaking Bad’ moment here
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has presided over Donald Trump’s gutting of soft power and his equally lawless removal of international students for thought crimes. Yet every Senate Democrat joined Republicans in supporting Rubio’s confirmation. It was an obviously bad move, rooted in outdated concepts of Senate congeniality and bipartisanship.
Rubio returned to the Senate last week, where some of his former Democratic colleagues expressed their shock and disappointment over his behavior. Rubio was obviously prepared for this confrontation, but what stands out is how much he seemed to enjoy it.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland said he believed Rubio would stand up for human rights and democracy in the world — even though he accepted a position in convicted felon and wannabe despot Donald Trump’s administration. That’s like thinking a marketing executive for McDonald’s is going to promote veganism.
“You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite,” Van Hollen said. “And you used to speak with conviction about the importance of foreign aid as a tool to advance American values and interests. Then you stood by while Elon Musk took a chainsaw to USAID and other assistance programs. That has left a staggering toll.”
Van Hollen also criticized Rubio for fast-tracking Afrikaners from South Africa — who coincidentally are all white — for U.S. refugee status while blocking other, browner refugees who were already approved for admission. (After the hearing, Rubio directed U.S. embassies to stop scheduling international student visa interviews, as the State Department reviews applicants’ social media feed as part of the administration’s ongoing assault on free speech.)
“And I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for secretary of state,” Van Hollen told Rubio, but if he thought that would chasten his former colleague, he’s not watched enough Fox News.
Rubio replied, “Well, first of all, your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.” Van Hollen dismissed this as a “flippant” statement, but it’s actually quite revealing. Rubio doesn’t consider it his job to serve the entire nation, which might require bipartisan consensus. His job is sticking it to the libs. That is the MAGA GOP’s entire operating principle.
Predictably, Rubio’s remark spread like wildfire on right-wing media. He was making his bones. Later, he pushed lies about Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador, where he met with his constituent, Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration sent to a torture prison without due process. (Watch below.)
“We deported gang members … gang members, including the one you had a margarita with,” Rubio quipped, providing the desired 30-second hit clip.
The Trump administration hasn’t actually proven that Garcia is a gang member, and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele staged Van Hollen’s apparent visit to Margaritaville. During their meeting, Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia had glasses of water and a coffee cup on their tables, but after a while, officials placed glasses on the table with salt or sugar on the rims. Neither Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia drank the mystery liquid, so we don’t even know if it was that delightful combination of tequila, lime, and orange liqueur. Van Hollen likely refused on general principle, but I would’ve declined because I assume a Salvadoran torture prison only serves Jose Cuervo. (Watch below.)
Rubio willingly sided with a dictator — I’m specifically referring to Bukele but Trump also counts — over the senator he served with for seven years. But Van Hollen is a Democrat who has stood up to Trump. This makes him MAGA’s enemy twice over. Van Hollen protested Rubio’s smear, telling Chairman Jim Risch: “He can’t make unsubstantiated claims like that.”
Oh, but Rubio just did. It’s a common dilemma for Democrats when objecting to the Trump administration’s most egregious actions. Once they deliver their cheap shot, they don’t feel shame. They savor it.
Beneath the mask
During an appearance on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast, journalist Ezra Klein talked about how so many Republicans have given themselves personality transplants to fit into Trump’s GOP.
“When you make it part of the way you get ahead in a political party is to unleash the part of yourself or grow the part of yourself that treats people as less than human, with contempt,” Klein said, accurately describing the transformation of so many Republicans like Rubio who once at least posed as respectable. (Watch below.)
Marco Rubio, JD Vance, Elise Stefanik, and even Ted Cruz were not always such craven lickspittles, but now they seem content to serve as a Disney villain’s henchmen — even if Iago eventually got sucked up into the lamp with Jafar. They don’t care. They’re along for the ride and they don’t mind offering their souls up as fare.
Klein lamented watching Republicans “unleash a cruelty and anger that maybe was always inside of them, maybe it’s put on for show and becomes real.” That is the key point, though. These Republicans have either become their MAGA mask or simply removed the mask that hid their true nature. Elise Stefanik or Nancy Mace might’ve imagined themselves following a different path to power but when they realized the only path to their imagined glory was through Trump, they had no problem unveiling their inner Marjorie Taylor Greene. Perhaps that was their true self all along.
Rubio positioned himself in 2016 as a loyal conservative soldier in the breach against Trump’s invasion of the GOP. He declared at a Texas rally that “time to pull off his mask so that people can see what we are dealing with here.”
“He is a con artist,” Rubio said. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy — his entire career.”
But Trump wasn’t the one wearing a mask. It was Rubio and all other mainstream Republicans who denounced him but eventually fell in line.
Rubio doesn’t seem uncomfortable in his new role as a front line general for Trump’s global fascism. He’s defended Trump’s monarchal view of the presidency that argues that no other branch of government can dare check or balance him.
“There is a division in our government between the federal branch and the judicial branch. No judge, and the judicial branch, cannot tell me or the president how to conduct foreign policy,” Rubio raved during his Senate hearing. “No judge can tell how I have to outreach to a foreign partner or what I need to say to them. And if do reach to that foreign partner and talk to them, I am under no obligation to share that with the judiciary branch.”
I hope Van Hollen and other Democrats realize now that Rubio was always going to help enable fascism. He didn’t surrender some better version of himself to MAGA. He just stopped pretending. He removed the mask and beneath was the MAGA stooge who was always there.
I can't wait for the American version of the Nuremberg trials to see all that smugness wiped off their fascist faces.
Little Marco's one saving grace is that he is completely useless, like he is a screen door on a submarine. So much so that Pope Slayer has had to pick up the slack in gutting American diplomacy and power on the world stage.
Maybe he's just a parking position for other jobs as a sinecure while the actual assets and agents do the wetwork of destruction.