Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said in an interview with a statewide publication last week that the country was much “safer” and “more respected” around the world when Donald Trump was president.
“From the very beginning, I think Trump was the heavy favorite to be the nominee. I said from the beginning he is the incumbent president, in essence, he is the incumbent Republican president. People want him to be able to finish it. I think having Joe Biden in office has only helped him,” Rubio told The Floridian.
“Even people that don’t like some of the things that Trump says have to admit that the country was safer, more respected, we didn’t have a mass migration crisis, our economy was better, all these things when Trump was in office,” he continued.
“I think there are a lot of people that are like, no matter what we may feel about what he said about this or that, our lives were better, and the country was safer,” he said.
“If you think about the Western Hemisphere, when Donald Trump was in the White House, and I worked very closely with him on this, Argentine, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, for a little while Bolivia of all places, and Ecuador, we had this arc of nations in the region all united, not just against [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro and what he was doing, but with pro-American policies,” the Senate Intelligence Committee member said. “All that is gone. Argentina is now anti-American, the new president of Columbia is a leftist, anti-American guy who undermines everything we’re for, and Brazil has switched back as well.”
“Maybe some elections were fixed in some of these places, but we went from having unity in the region that aligned with our views, including in the Caribbean, to now a bunch of countries that have flipped and a bunch of countries that want to be friendly to the United States that feel like this administration treats their friends bad and their enemies good,” he noted further.
We cut deals with Maduro, but we are harsh on the president of El Salvador, who was friendly to Trump, but this administration has been hostile towards them. We ignore the president of the Dominican Republic and their needs. We actually, at one point, imposed sanctions on them, visa sanctions, because they were trying to deal with illegal immigration from Haiti that was coming into the Dominican Republic,” he said. Panama feels ignored. You go down the list of all the countries that want to be friendly to the U.S. the outgoing president of Guatemala was a U.S. ally, he didn’t even go to the Summit of the Americas because this administration beat him up over the fact that they had socially conservative policies in a socially conservative country.”
“What you hear repeatedly from leaders in the region is that it seems like it is better to be America’s enemy than friend because if you’re a friend, you get sanctioned and mistreated. If you’re the enemy, you get deals and concessions. That’s a very dangerous place to be,” he concluded.
WATCH:
