In the wake of President Donald Trump's lie that Ukraine was to blame for Russia sending troops into the country three years ago, a 2016 video of then-Florida Senator Marco Rubio making a prescient prediction about Republican support for Trump is going viral.
On Tuesday, after Ukraine President Zelenskyy called out his country's absence from U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, which were attended by Rubio, Trump slandered Zelenskyy by repeating Russian talking points blaming Ukraine for the war.
Trump said:
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
In Riyadh, delegations led by Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to establish teams to explore restoring staffing levels at the U.S. and Russian embassies in Moscow and Washington, which have been severely reduced due to a series of reciprocal diplomatic expulsions.
Rubio, now a devoted Trump supporter and cabinet member, had his past fierce criticism of Trump resurface amid these talks. At the time, he unsuccessfully ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary and made the following observation about the “third-world strongman”:
"He's running for president so no matter what he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles, which I don't anticipate it will."
"Here's what happens in many countries around the world: You have a leader who emerges and says, 'Don't put faith in yourselves, don't put your faith in society. Put your fith in me. I'm a strong leader and I'm going to make things better all by myself."
"This is very typical. You see it in the third world, you see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It's basically the argument he's making, that he singlehandedly turn this country around. We've never been that kind of country. We have a president."
"We have a president who is an American citizen, serves for a period of time, constrained by the Constitution and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he's going to do ... without regard for if it's legal or not, I think people are going to have to make up their minds."
"For years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large, that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well, one way or the other.”
You can see the video below.
Rubio's words came back to haunt him—and he was swiftly criticized.
Trump's swipe at Ukraine prompted a response from the country's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who criticized Trump for living in a Russian “disinformation space.”
He said:
“Unfortunately, President Trump, I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us, unfortunately lives in this disinformation space."
Trump, meanwhile, claimed he "could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down."
