It’s really hard to take Secretary of State Marco Rubio seriously. He’s a child of immigrants who has cynically sold his political soul to the most anti-immigrant administration in modern American history, one headed by the man from whom Rubio endured humiliating verbal abuse during his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. But Rubio is all-in for Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. Last week he was on the world stage in Athens, Greece, for the sixth U.S.-Greece Strategic Dialogue, trying to put a good spin on what he called the Trump administration’s “unapologetic pursuit of national power.”
The hollowness and hypocrisy of this boasting is plain to see: When Rubio warns that such pursuit of power is justified because “there is war again,” it’s impossible not to think of the administration’s needless war of choice against Iran and its catastrophic impact on the global economy. Same with his attempt at celebrating Trump’s investment in the “new frontier” of “super intelligence,” the president’s favored term for the deeply unpopular products of the environmentally and economically disastrous artificial intelligence industry. The lengths to which Rubio has to go to try to praise this administration’s unpopular policies would be laughable if they hadn’t all been so harmful on a global scale.
