If I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t guess, because he doesn’t think like a lawyer. In fact, he’s never been a lawyer. He went straight from law school into politics. That paid off for him, he’s a senator now.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), bio here, is a politician with a law degree. He’s 100% politician and 0% lawyer. He could have used the practice. Thinking like a lawyer, I mean.
Because it’s clear he doesn’t know how, seemingly having forgotten everything he learned in law school, including (1) getting the facts right and (2) applying simple logic.
Okay, by now you’re wondering what roused my lawyer instincts. This did, from The Hill (read article here): “[He] defended the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity last week, saying that the justices ‘clarified what the law is.'”
That ruling, which gives presidents carte blanche to commit crimes while in office, is indefensible. So, strike one against Rubio for defending it. What is he thinking? Certainly not about rule of law.
Next, Rubio said Trump is being politically targeted for prosecution. Strike two, that’s a flat-out lie. In fact, a lawyer who perpetrated a whopper like this in a court proceeding would face sanctions.
When asked if he was “comfortable” with the Supreme Court’s ruling, he deflected and said, “Well, first of all, I’m uncomfortable with the fact now that we have a president who targets political opponents. That’s what’s happened under Joe Biden.”
No lawyer would be so careless with facts. Biden has taken great pains to stay at arms-length. His involvement in the Trump prosecutions is zero. Even his attorney general isn’t involved. To avoid any political influence, the job was farmed out to an independent special prosecutor. That’s what special prosecutors are for — to maintain a firewall between political authorities and decisions to prosecute or not prosecute.
This lie is all the more absurd because Biden didn’t fire or replace the Republican special prosecutor who convicted his son, and has stated he will not pardon his son or commute his sentence. Being the president’s son gets Hunter Biden nothing when he faces the bar of justice. That’s material, and lawyers don’t ignore material facts; they address them (and concede them, when the facts are indisputable).
Here, in Biden, is a president who believes in the rule of law, is upholding it, and practices extreme non-interference where there’s a conflict of interest involving his own son. That’s how it should be done. This is a template for how we should want all presidents to behave. Where is Rubio’s defense of this?
Then he said, “When Donald Trump was president, I can’t think of a single prominent Democrat who was chased around, persecuted, prosecuted.” Hello? Senator Bob Menendez? New Jersey Democrat?
Strike three, another factual omission. Menendez was indicted for corruption in 2015, a hung jury failed to convict him, and charges were dropped in 2018 while Trump was president. It wasn’t Biden who failed to pursue those charges. Then in 2023 and 2024, Menendez was indicted three more times; those charges are pending. (Read all the details here.) He’s getting no special treatment under Biden. Rule of law is being allowed to run its course.
That’s all the proof anyone should need that the Biden administration doesn’t provide cover for crooked Democrats, nor do Biden and his allies go around squealing “political persecution!” when one of theirs is hauled before the bar of justice.
As for why other Democrats aren’t “chased around, persecuted, prosecuted,” who does Rubio have in mind? The president? (I’m guessing here, although it seems like an obvious guess.) Republican efforts to tar the father with his son’s influence-peddling have gone nowhere for lack of evidence the father did anything wrong or illegal. But based on Menendez’s case, if Rubio can come up with a Democrat who should be prosecuted, we have every reason to believe that person will be prosecuted.
Returning to Trump, who’s been breaking rules all his life, he’s being “chased around, persecuted, prosecuted” (to use Rubio’s description of accountability) because he committed crimes, and that’s what happens to criminals. That’s not my opinion, or even Alvin Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s or Fani Willis’s opinions; Trump was indicted by grand juries of ordinary citizens in all those cases.
Rubio concluded his squealing with, “It’s funny to me to read these people and hear these people out there warning about all the horrible things they ridiculously claim Donald Trump is going to do if he becomes president again.”
Listen, nobody’s talking about Trump doing anything he didn’t say he would do. When someone says something, you’re entitled to take them at their word, even if it sounds like they’re joking. (On the principle there are things you don’t joke about.) That’s especially true of Trump, who has no sense of humor whatever, so we very reasonably assume he’s not joking.
Rubio once was taken seriously as a GOP rising star and even a future presidential prospect. He’s not taken seriously anymore, and the sun probably has set on his presidential ambitions, because of stuff like this and his fawning and scraping to a lowlife like Trump.
His critics call him “Little Marco,” because he’s a small thinker and little person, not the towering giant of character and leadership qualities some people once thought he was. He even was compared to JFK, can you imagine that? I can’t anymore.
Especially when he does stuff like this. By that I mean playing extremely fast and loose with facts, and the sheer illogic of his arguments. He doesn’t argue like a lawyer. He merely sounds like a hyper-partisan squealing politician trying to suck up to a madman and a MAGA mob.