Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, ripped President Joe Biden and his administration for ongoing negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the socialist Nicolas Maduro regime in Venezuela, and other efforts by Biden to cut deals with adversaries of America.
In an appearance on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, Rubio ripped the Biden White House for sending a formal delegation to meet with the Maduro regime in Caracas, Venezuela—and then argued that Biden only seems to want to cut deals with adversaries of the United States.
“This has nothing to do with oil at the end of the day,” Rubio said. “This is an excuse that they’re using. Venezuela can’t sell us any oil. Marxism doesn’t work. Communism is a disaster. Socialism is a disaster, and they’ve destroyed their oil industry. They used to produce three million barrels a day—they’re down to 700,000 barrels a day. That 700,000 barrels a day, they send most of it to China because that’s how they pay off the loans. They don’t have money to pay China, so they pay them in oil. Then 10 percent of it goes automatically to Cuba. So they can’t ramp up production—that would take billions of dollars of investment and years and years before they ever produced enough to make a difference for us. This has to do with people inside of the Biden administration, particularly Juan Gonzalez on the National Security Council, and some people at the State Department who have been dying to cozy up to Iran, to Venezuela, to Cuba—whoever they can get close to. If you hate America, they want to cut a deal with you apparently. For them, this is a perfect excuse to say, ‘let’s go over there and pull this off.’ Obviously, they even leaked it to make themselves look like some sort of heroic figure, and then obviously it blew up in their faces. We’ll see—I don’t trust anything they say in a press conference because they may announce that publicly but privately still be working on it. I imagine down there Maduro was overjoyed by this. He’ll still be an ally to China, still be an ally to Iran, still be an ally to Russia, and he gets to have sanctions lifted on him. That’s a perfect deal for him and a terrible deal for us.”
The White House, from the podium, for now, has backed down from such a Venezuela deal after an immense political backlash in the U.S., especially among Hispanics, who now, according to the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, support Republicans more than Democrats by 9 percent. Asked about that swing toward the GOP among Hispanic voters, especially as it relates to the Venezuela negotiations, Rubio said Hispanic voters are working-class first and foremost.
“All these experts and these people who think they’re smart, what they haven’t figured out yet is that Hispanic voters, their primary identity isn’t the pronunciation of their last name,” Rubio said. “Their primary identity is that they’re working-class voters, they’re moms and dads and husbands and wives and small business owners and people that work for a living. They’re getting crushed by the Biden economy. On top of that, they have to deal with all this woke garbage. We have this bill we just passed in Florida, in the legislature, and the bill basically says you can’t be leading discussions with five-year-olds, six-year-olds, seven-year-olds about gender identity and sexual orientation. People are going crazy, and they’ve misnamed it to play their little [games] and working people—you tell that to the average person, not to mention the average working-class person Hispanic or not, they’d say ‘yeah, of course. Why are we talking to seven-year-olds about that stuff?’ Apparently, these people think we do. The surgeon general went on a Twitter rant about how harmful this supposedly is for kids at age 7 and 8 not to talk to them about it. So, that’s turning off working-class voters—and then you add to that this sort of notion where okay if you’re a socialist, if you’re a Marxist, if you hate America, then we’re always trying to cut a deal with you be it Iran, be it Venezuela, but if you’re an ally of America like Colombia we’re always undermining you. We’re cutting, we’re declassifying the Marxist narcoterrorist groups that are attacking you, and we’re going to classify them as no longer terrorist groups and that kind of thing. So people sort of reach their own conclusions on that, and I think you’re seeing it express itself in the polling and ultimate in the elections.”
Rubio’s interview came just moments before Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the U.S. Congress, and Rubio previewed the address by correctly predicting that Zelensky would have a number of asks of the United States in his speech.
“I think he’s going to continue to outline the things he needs to fight Vladimir Putin and the equipment he needs at this stage of the conflict and supplies,” Rubio said. “We’ve seen him now—he’s done that with Canada yesterday, the U.K. last week, I think he’s speaking to the Spanish parliament tomorrow. As he’s going to all these legislative bodies, it’s a smart thing because these democracies are the entities that have to support this and provide the funding for it, so we’ll see what he has to say.”
Zelensky also again implored the west to institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine, something Rubio has warned could drag the United States and NATO into a prolonged war with Russia. Rubio said during his appearance on Breitbart News Daily that he was concerned some people do not understand that implementing a no-fly zone is a huge military undertaking and explained some of what it would entail.
“A couple things on the no-fly zone. A no-fly zone isn’t just you announce it and put it out there, and everybody follows it,” Rubio said. “You got to enforce it, which means you can’t have a no-fly zone if you have surface-to-air missiles that can shoot down your planes—you’d have to knock out all those surface-to-air missile batteries. Those are Russian surface-to-air missile batteries. They’re in Belarus, they’re inside of Russia, and they’re inside of Ukraine. So you’ve got to knock those out, and then second you’d have to put jets up in the air, and you’ve got to be willing to shoot down any planes that violate the no-fly zone. If you shoot at their planes, they’re going to shoot at ours, and you’ll be in a hot war, and I think that’s the thing that most people or a lot of people don’t understand when they use this phrase. They think it’s like an FAA requirement or something—it’s not some rule you put out, it’s an active engagement.”
Rubio does, however, think there are some other forms of aid—both in terms of weapons and other supplies like fuel—that the United States can provide to Ukraine.
“In terms of aid we could provide, I think their biggest need right now are basic things, to begin with. They need fuel. Fuel is going to become a problem,” Rubio said. “They need ammunition. They’re going to continue to need all the things they’re getting now. The two things that probably would be very helpful to them is the surface-to-air missiles like we talked about, the ability to go after these planes and these strategic bombers that are flying at a high level, the ability to go after those and knock those down because they can get the lower-flying aircraft with the stingers, but they can’t get those bombers that are up high without surface-to-air missiles. It’s got to be a system they know how to run and operate, so they have [to] be trained on how to operate it. And then something to deal with these, if it’s possible, transfer them some way to knock down some of these missile launches and rockets that are being used against them in addition to artillery because that’s really how they’re being attacked right now is primarily through artillery and missile launches from short-range missiles.”
Rubio also warned that the Chinese Communist Party’s rise on the world stage makes Russia’s aggression pale in comparison. He called for a full decoupling of the U.S. economy from China and called out woke leftist corporations, including Florida-based Disney, for not saying anything about severe human rights abuses that the CCP is currently engaged in.
“China is Russia times a hundred. It won’t be as easy to sanction China as it is to sanction Russia because we just depend too much on them,” Rubio said. “The first thing we have to do is we need to begin to decouple our economies. This idea that capitalism was going to change China turned out to be a massive, terrible mistake. It’s China that’s used capitalism against us. We need to stop letting them steal our intellectual property. We need to start going after their spies. The Justice Department two weeks ago announced it was going to get rid of this special unit that goes after Chinese espionage because they were afraid it was leading to anti-Asian prosecutions. Listen, a lot of the people caught spying for China are not Asian. They’re Americans that got paid to do it. We need to start calling out these corporations that are happy to do business in China and not say a word about them putting Uyghur Muslims in work camps but are the first ones to attack and buy a billboard—Disney is right now doing it in Florida, attacking political leaders here in America. They won’t say a damn word about what happens in China. We need to build up our military capability. We need to strengthen our alliances around the world, and we need to have our own industries. We need to start making things in America again. We need to have our own energy. We need to make our own medicine. We need to start making things because it creates jobs for Americans, but most importantly, it doesn’t leave us dependent on China. If China cuts us off of these things, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. They know that. They’re using it against us. We’ve got stupid people in charge of a lot of important things that apparently don’t realize it, or there’s just a lot of money being made right now, too much to care about it.”
LISTEN TO SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R-FL) ON BREITBART NEWS DAILY: