Marco Rubio
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is a Trump loyalist and was a top contender to be Trump’s VP candidate in 2024. Rubio will not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 elections if Biden wins and has repeated disproven claims about the 2020 election. He has also claimed that news outlets “censored the Biden laptop story” in 2020.
Rubio has consistently defended Trump against investigations and impeachment efforts. Following January 6th, Rubio initially condemned the attack as unpatriotic and “3rd world-style anti-American anarchy,” but he later voted to acquit Trump for his role in inciting the mob to storm the Capitol and trying to subvert the election. He also voted against creating a January 6 commission, demonstrating his unwillingness to hold Trump accountable for his actions.
He has embraced Trump’s attacks on undocumented immigrants and has endorsed roundups, asserting “unfortunately, we’ll have to do something dramatic to remove people from this country here illegally, especially people we know nothing about, and 10 million, 11 million was the number 15 years ago. Today, it’s upwards of 25, 30 million, maybe more.”
Rubio is a climate change denier who has stated “I don’t agree with the notion … that somehow, there are actions that we can take today that would actually have an impact on our climate…our climate is always changing.” When asked to clarify his views, Rubio asserted: “I by no means am going to go out and tell people that if we do these things that they’re proposing, by changing [energy] laws and the way we conduct our energy policy, that it would have any measurable impact on our weather because it’s not accurate to say that.”
Among Rubio’s largest and first supporters, donating over $167,000 to Rubio over his races, is Florida Crystals and its patriarch, Jose “Pepe” Fanjul, which continue burning sugar crops and producing polluting, poisonous “black snow” across low-income, black and brown communities west of West Palm Beach. Rubio has also received over $138,000 from PACs and employees of private prison operator, Geo Group, which faces human trafficking charges for paying its inmates just $1 per day for labor in its prisons.
Born in Miami to Cuban immigrant parents, Rubio tells his family’s story as a central part of his political narrative. He has described himself as the “son of exiles,” implying that his parents were forced to flee Cuba after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. However, a closer examination of official documents, including naturalization papers, shows that his parents arrived in the United States more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government on New Year’s Day 1959. In response to such questioning Rubio said “The real essence of my family’s story is not about the date my parents first entered the United States. Or whether they traveled back and forth between the two nations.”
He worked at the Miami law firm Becker & Poliakoff from 2001 to 2004 and has taught at Florida International University. His political career began in the Florida House of Representatives, where he was Speaker from 2006 to 2008. He then pursued a seat in the U.S. Senate, successfully campaigning as a Tea Party supporter in 2010. As of 2022, Senator Rubio had among the worst voting attendance records, missing 9% of Senate votes.