Marco Rubio’s adventures in diplomacy
It’s said that Donald Trump has no friends. Not real ones. Sycophants, yes. Transaction partners, sure. Plus dictators who leverage his ignorance and pliability to use him. But making friends is not his strong suit. Quite the opposite.
Trump’s knack for alienating people is manifest in the government he now leads. See how he goes out of his way to piss off the country’s closest ally, Canada, and calls the “European Union ‘nasty’ while sitting alongside NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.“
He’s rubbed off on Secretary of State Marco Rubio who, in a rare move, is expelling South Africa’s ambassador over comments taken as hostile to Trump and his proclivities:
“South Africa’s ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country,” Rubio posted on X on Friday.
Rubio accused ambassador Ebrahim Rasool of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS”, referring to Trump by his White House X account handle. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered persona non grata.”
The up-is-downism in that statement is obvious.
Neither Rubio nor the state department gave an immediate explanation for the decision. However, Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier on Friday as part of a South African thinktank’s webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a US where white people would soon no longer be a majority.
Rasool pointed to Elon Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.
Rubio this week dropped a peace demand that Russia return the children it abducted in its Ukraine invasion. It was, as Digby pointed out, a concession to Vladimir Putin, but also another jab at our friends in Ukraine. But then, Trump and friends….
Maybe Rubio really is too “little” for the job.
More up-is-down
In a precedent-breaking visit by a president to the Department of Justice, Trump railed in a speech against his own employees, calling department officials and private attorneys who took legal action against him “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
He called for his opponents to be prosecuted:
“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. … We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”
Then he defended Judge Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who ran interference for him in cases brought by the DOJ. Criticism of judges should be “illegal,” Trump insisted.
Yes, that guy: Trump escalates attack on ‘Mexican’ judge.
Undesirables
What’s yet to be seen is the extent of the career con man’s and his SecState’s fluid definition of “rogue actors and corrupt forces.” It could be, like the South African ambassador, whoever rubs Donald Trump the wrong way. Like Mahmoud Khalil. Or the Rhode Island doctor who traveled to Lebanon recently to visit family:
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, had been studying and working in the U.S. for the last six years and had been in Rhode Island, working for Brown Medicine in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension, since last July, said her friend and fellow doctor Basma Merhi.
Alawieh was returning to the U.S. on an H-1B visa she had recently acquired at the American consulate in Lebanon, said lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine.
She is being detained at Boston’s Logan Airport and awaits deportation over some “wrinkle” in her visa application approved and issued by Rubio’s department. Unless they already deported her Friday night as officials indicated.
Lebanon is not even among the 43 undesirable countries on Trump’s new travel ban proposal.
Watch your backs.
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