One of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s former Senate colleagues is concerned that partial brain death might be the only thing to explain his conduct since joining President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
“It seems like he’s had, you know, a total lobotomy or heart transplant,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, told CNN in an interview on Monday morning. Van Hollen previously sat alongside Rubio on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Only the day before, Van Hollen joined his fellow Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut in expressing remorse for having voted to confirm Rubio as the nation’s top diplomat.
Their statements came as the secretary of state continues to defend Trump and Vice President JD Vance for attacking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a disastrous White House summit on Friday, accusing him of lacking gratitude for U.S. support amid Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“Senator Rubio was somebody who understood that Putin was the aggressor and the Russians were the aggressor,” Van Hollen lamented during his CNN appearance on Monday.
“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,” he added.
Van Hollen further accused Rubio of enabling ongoing efforts to “dismantle” the United States Agency for International Development as well as allowing Trump’s top campaign donor, Elon Musk, to “take over the operations of the State Department.”
He also suggested that Rubio has turned a blind eye to what Van Hollen described as the Republican president’s efforts to “realign” global politics in a way that rewards authoritarianism and dictatorship.
“[President Trump] 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,” Van Hollen said, adding: “In my view, that’s not America first. That is America in retreat.”
