In Trump’s invasion of Venezuela, Marco Rubio is the biggest sellout of all

President Trump lit America’s eternally exploding cigar by invading Venezuela.

For more than 175 years—since the United States conquered half of Mexico—nearly every president has infected Latin America while telling the rest of the world to stay away.

We helped remove democratically elected leaders and we helped support murderous dictators. He trained death squads and offered rescue to privileged allies. He imposed economic blockades and encouraged American companies to treat the region’s wealth and workers like cookie jars.

From the Mexican American War to the Bay of Pigs invasion, from the Panama Canal to NAFTA, we have only taken care of ourselves in Latin America, even as we wrap our actions under the banner of benevolence.

It rarely ends well for everyone involved – especially us. Many of the leaders we brought to power became despots, whom we tolerated until they went their own way, like Manuel Noriega in Panama. The political turmoil we helped create led to the emigration of generations of Latin Americans. El NorteEven though many Americans think people like my family should stay in their ancestral homes, it is fundamentally changing our country.

So Trump was at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, insisting that the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife by American troops was a military action as brilliant and consequential as D-Day. He also announced that the United States would “rule the country” and did the odd “YMCA” dance on the idea of ​​making money from Venezuelan oil.

His message to the world: Venezuela is ours until we say so, just like the rest of Latin America. And if allies and enemies still didn’t get the hint, Trump announced an updated Monroe Doctrine (the idea that the United States can do anything it wants in the Western Hemisphere) called the “Donroe Doctrine.”

Because of course he did.

No one in Washington is more knowledgeable about this terrible history than Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the child of Cubans who fled when the island was ruled by U.S.-backed caudillo Fulgencio Batista.

Rubio grew up in an exile community where Batista’s successor, Fidel Castro, remained in power for decades despite a U.S. embargo. Rubio, one of Florida’s U.S. senators, represented millions of Latin American immigrants who somehow escaped U.S.-led civil wars.

Yet he is Trumpworld’s biggest cheerleader for regime change in Latin America, helping to undermine the president’s anti-interventionist campaign promise as if he were a narcotics boat off the coast of South America.

On Saturday, Rubio watched silently as Trump threatened Colombian President Gustavo Petro to “watch his ass.” When it was Rubio’s turn to take questions from reporters, he said Cuban leaders “should be worried” and offered a warning to the rest of the world: “Don’t play games while this president is in office, because things are not going to go well.”

Few people in Latin America are so humiliated sales person – sales. Betraying one’s country for personal or political gain is the original sin, leading to alliances with the Spanish conquistadors who overthrew oppressive empires, only to suffer the same sad end themselves. Sellers Together with leaders such as Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, Somozas of Nicaragua, and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, they dominated the history of the region and supported its development. yanquis at the expense of its own citizens.

Rubio belongs to this long and dirty line-up, and in many ways, it’s the worst sales person of all.

I still remember the fresh-faced, idealistic man who tried to pass a bipartisan amnesty bill in 2013. Although he was too right-wing for my taste, he seemed like a Latino politician who could thread the needle between liberals and conservatives, gringos and us.

It was great to see Trump call out his rudeness when the two were running against each other in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. “In years to come, a lot of people are going to have to explain and justify how they fell into the trap of supporting Donald Trump, because one way or another, this is not going to end well,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, in ever more prophetic words.

Unfortunately, the thirst for power can corrupt even the most idealistic of hearts. Rubio supported Trump in 2016, supported Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election, and declared at the 2024 Republican National Convention that Trump “not only transformed our party, he inspired a movement.”

The reward for Rubio’s boot licking? He sets our foreign policy agenda, which is like putting an arsonist in charge of a fireworks stand.

I’m sure all of this resonates as leftist chatter among the Venezuelan diaspora, many of whom are applauding Maduro’s fate, from Spain to Mexico to Miami to Los Angeles. He just made a mistake pendejo He could support Maduro’s actions on Venezuela, a prosperous country and a relatively stable U.S. ally for decades, while the rest of South America drifts from one crisis to another.

But for Trump, overthrowing Maduro was never about the welfare of Venezuelans or bringing democracy to their country; it was about providing a foothold that would flex American power and enrich the United States

Meanwhile, Leviathan’s deportation wiped out tens of thousands of undocumented Venezuelans and revoked the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands more.

In 2022, when Rubio was still a senator, he advocated for Venezuelans to qualify for the temporary protected status granted to citizens of countries deemed too dangerous to return. At the time, Rubio argued that “failure to do so would result in a literal death sentence for the countless Venezuelans fleeing their country.”

Now? At a press conference held in May, He argued that the 240 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador in early 2025 “are not immigrants, they are criminals”; but the Extraterritorial Data Project found that: only 16% had criminal convictions.

Rubio has long described himself as a modern-day Venezuelan Simón Bolívar, who led the liberation of South America from Spain and has been a hero to many Latinos ever since.

But even Bolivar knew to be skeptical of American hegemony, writing in an 1829 letter that the United States “seemed to have been condemned by God to the plague.” [Latin] America suffers misery in the name of Freedom.”

Plague, your name is Marco Rubio. By forcing Trump to run wild in Latin America, you are activating the same old song of US intervention that binds your family and mine together. The fact that you allow Maduro’s followers to remain in power if they align with you and Trump, even if they steal an election in 2024, proves that you are as much on the side of the Venezuelan people as Maduro is.

Sales person.