Senator Chis Van Hollen (D-MD) said on Monday on CNN’s “News Central” that he regreted voting to confirm Secretary of State Marco Rubio, adding that Rubio seemed to have had a “total lobotomy.”
Van Hollen said, “What we’re watching, in my view, is a big realignment. You have president Trump, who no longer believes that the United States is the leader when it comes to defending and promoting freedom and the rule of law and democracy. however imperfectly we’ve we’ve done that. He is discarding that whole paradigm. He sees himself more like Putin or Xi as this, like, strongman who is going to, you know, abandon our friends whenever he thinks it’s in his personal interests. In my view, that’s not America first. That is America in retreat.”
When asked about his vote, He added, “I regret that vote because, you know, when it was Sen. Rubio, Sen. Rubio was somebody who understood that Putin was the aggressor and the Russians were the aggressor. He didn’t go around calling Zelensky a dictator, but it seems like he’s had a, you know, a total lobotomy or heart transplant. I don’t know what it is. But first of all, he allowed Elon Musk essentially to take over the operations of the State Department. We saw how they’re trying to dismantle USAID – that was an Elon Musk initiative, and now he is just parroting Donald Trump. Now, if that’s why he took on the job, just to do the ‘dear leader’ thing with Donald Trump, then I’m extremely disappointed. But that seems to be the direction that he’s headed.”
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