Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in 2016, on Donald Trump as President: ‘This Is Not Going to End Well One Way or the Other’

A clip from this 2016 interview with Marco Rubio — then a candidate for the Republican presidential primary, today Trump’s secretary of state — by CNN’s Jake Tapper is making the rounds on social media. It’s extraordinary. I’m linking here to the full video, hosted on Rubio’s own YouTube account (for now — watch for this to go down the memory hole) starting at the 7:54 mark:

Tapper: You compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times. How so?

Rubio: Well, I don’t know about a dictator. I said a third world strong man. You know, 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. But, yeah, here’s what happens in many countries around the world: You have a leader that emerges and basically says, Don’t put your faith in yourselves. Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith 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, single-handedly, is going to turn the country around. We’ve never been that kind of country.

We have a president. The president is an American citizen who 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, he’s going to single-handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it’s legal or not.

Look, I think people are going to have to make up their mind. I can tell you this. No matter what happens in this election, 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. He’s going to be the nominee, and he’s going to lose. Or, he’ll have thrown this party into its most chaotic and divisive period ever. And that’s unfortunate because the Republican Party is the home of the limited government free enterprise movement in America. And if it crumbles or divides or it splits apart, it’ll be very difficult to elect candidates that hold those views at any level of government until we can bring the party back together.

Breathtakingly prescient and succinct.

★ Tuesday, 11 March 2025