One of the most fascinating aspects of observing politics over the past 10 years has been the capitulation of formerly principled Republican legislators to the insanity of Donald John Trump.
Although Marco Rubio is hardly the only exemplar of cowardice in a political party that surrendered its own authority as a coequal branch of government to a deranged bully, he is as good an illustration of their spinelessness as any.
Marco Rubio is the child of Cuban refugees, so he knows exactly how dangerous a dictator—like Castro, say, or Xi, or Kim, or Putin—is to the health and welfare of the citizens living within an autocracy. This makes his transformation from champion of liberty to subservient invertebrate particularly stunning.
Once upon a time, Rubio was an ardent anti-communist, meaning anti-Xi, anti-Putin, anti-Kim. He was also a proponent of PEPFAR, USAID, and other humanitarian programs, because he understood the value of global soft-power to the national interest of the United States, to say nothing of the fact that it is morally repugnant to withhold food, water, and medicine from starving children.
When he ran in the Republican presidential primary in 2015, Rubio pointed repeatedly to Trump’s lack of experience and unfitness for the presidency. He called Trump a “con artist” and questioned his business ethics and conservative credentials, as well he should have. In those early days of Trump’s candidacy, there was not a single Republican in government who thought Donald Trump should ever be allowed anywhere near the White House.
In return, Trump—ever the schoolyard bully—heckled Rubio as “Little Marco,” mocked his tendency to sweat profusely under stage lights, and made fun of his ears. That’s Trump: a real class act.
Yet the minute the most unqualified and politically compromised Manchurian candidate in the history of U.S. politics won the presidency, the capitulation was instantaneous. The party of Lincoln vigorously supported, enabled, and shielded from consequences a Russian puppet who stood as an enemy of the republic every day that he held office and every day of his post presidency, when he made off with highly classified documents that he had no business taking. One suspects that Trump did this not just to steal and retain top secret mementos for himself but as raw intelligence for his mentor in the Kremlin.
An entire party sold its soul to Satan because shielding our democracy and upholding the Constitution took a back seat to personal and political ambition. In the second Trump administration, democracy has not just taken a back seat; it has been pushed out of a moving Tesla traveling at breakneck speed down the Highway to Hell.
Although there were a number of true believers occupying elected positions in the House and Senate, most Republicans in those days simply put their heads down, avoided the press, avoided being confronted by angry constituents, and prayed for it to be over.
They wanted him gone, but because of unbridled ambition, none of them acted to make sure he could never hold office again. They had not one, but two opportunities to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors, but they did not. Perhaps they feared for their lives, since Trump turns his gibbering minions on anyone who tries to stand in his way.
Every single member of Congress knows, absolutely, that our republic teeters, now, on the brink of oblivion. It did not have to be this way. The Republican party allowed itself to be castrated; in fact, they rushed to volunteer. Evidently, they could not wait to become eunuchs.
Anyone who is not yet quite convinced that we are witnessing the end of America should watch a rerun of Marco Rubio’s recent meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to begin a negotiation between Putin and Trump on how to carve up between them the formerly sovereign democracy of Ukraine.
Rubio sat across the table from his Russian counterpart, and if a picture was ever worth a thousand words, it was the look on Marco Rubio’s face as he sat silently staring at the Russian foreign minister, knowing that his own country had now morphed from a beacon of democracy into an evil regime. The same look could be viewed on Rubio’s face as he sat beside Trump at the first cabinet meeting of the new administration last Wednesday. While all the others at the table groveled, giggled, and applauded every asinine pronouncement of Putin’s puppet, Rubio sat there like a stone.
It is clear that Rubio not only knows exactly what is happening; he knows that he has aided and abetted it. I wonder how many times a day Rubio reflects on what his refugee father, now deceased, would have said. And here is what Rubio knows with absolute certainty: He is participating in the destruction of the democracy that welcomed his Latino family to its shores and gave them a chance to live in freedom, just one short generation ago. Now, he watches Latino migrants being shipped from the United States to a military prison in the country from which his family fled.
As Mr. Rubio sat beside his vicious despot on Wednesday, he undoubtedly reflected on the fact that the United States, along with Russia, North Korea, Israel, and almost every other country led by de facto strongmen, voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia as the aggressor in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Trump voted with Kim, Putin, Orban, and Netanyahu. One cannot help but think of every mother’s maxim: “Be careful of the company you keep.”
We have now aligned ourselves with the global Brotherhood of Thugs, and Marco Rubio knows it.
It took Adolph Hitler less than two months to turn a constitutional republic into a dictatorship that killed millions of people and ultimately destroyed his own country. The German legislature, in its infinite wisdom, decided to placate a lunatic.
Marco Rubio and every other legislative and judicial quisling in the Republican Party are the absolute equivalent of the French Vichy government that enabled and supported Adolph Hitler by maintaining the fiction of legitimacy as a sovereign and independent power. The Republican Party might want to consult that particular chapter in their compendium of world history to see that French cooperation and collaboration with a lunatic did not end well.
And while our Republican legislators are refreshing their collective understanding of exactly how dangerous their sycophancy is, they might want to recall that if not for the United States supporting our allies in 1941, every Jew, every person of color, every political dissenter, every person with a disability, and every homosexual in Europe would have been erased from the face of the Earth.
Our Republican legislators need to understand, now, that by selling American democracy down the river, there will be no one left to rescue anyone, anywhere, from the jaws of autocracy, including them and the citizens they purport to represent.
If the Republican members of Congress do not locate their spines, their character, and their cajónes with all due haste, we are finished—and Marco Rubio knows that, too.
