This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 16 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
In 2019 a group of U.S. senators wrote a letter to Donald Trump ahead of his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to “express concern about Hungary’s downward democratic trajectory.”
“In recent years, democracy in Hungary has significantly eroded,” the letter read.
The senators noted that the country had “experienced a steady corrosion of freedom, the rule of law and quality of governance according to virtually any indicator” under Orbán, adding that elections had become less competitive, the country’s judiciary was “increasingly controlled by the state” and press freedom was under threat.
The group went on to urge Trump “to not diminish the importance of democratic values in our bilateral relationship with Budapest.”
That 2019 letter was making the rounds again — thanks to the managing editor of The Bulwark, Sam Stein — on Monday, because one of the signatories on it was then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
I guess you could call it a useful read in light of Rubio’s news conference in Hungary on Monday. During his remarks, the secretary of state said Trump was “deeply committed” to the country’s success.
“Because your success is our success,” he continued. “Because this relationship we have here in Central Europe through you is so essential and vital for our national interest in the years to come.”
Rubio stood side by side with Orbán and threw the administration’s full support behind him, despite his own supposedly heartfelt and principled revulsion at the Hungarian leader’s dictatorship just a few years ago.
Presumably, beclowning oneself like this is what wins you favor in the Trump administration.
It is probably why Rubio, in addition to being secretary of state, keeps being given other jobs on top of that, like the chief of the United States Agency for International Development.
He’s also running the National Security Council. You may remember that Trump slashed the NSC last year, presumably because he did not know what it was for. At that point, he put Rubio in charge of the smoking husk of it.
The NSC is supposed to handle interagency conflicts and coordination around national security issues.
Like, say, the kind of thing that arose in El Paso last week, when Customs and Border Protection officials took a laser gun from the Pentagon and started firing it into the Texas sky.
The Federal Aviation Administration apparently had no idea what was going on, freaked out and announced that the El Paso Airport would be closed due to “special security reasons” for 10 days.
The whole situation was like a Cub Scout troop playing Model United Nations after accidentally eating a whole bag of what they thought was the troop leader’s gummy bears.
Too bad the guy in charge is busy with his other day job: licking the boots of foreign dictators.
But this is the United States of America under the Trump Republican Party, wherein the Transportation Department and the Defense Department are both run by former Fox News hosts hired mostly for their hair.
Top administration officials quickly claimed that the El Paso airport closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels. Of course, that wasn’t true, either. Turns out what they were actually shooting the laser at was party balloons.
Among the many other things going on with this story, it sure seems like an effective National Security Council might have helped in this instance.
Too bad the guy in charge is busy with his other day job: licking the boots of foreign dictators.
Allison Detzel contributed.
