Jan. 30, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
40:43
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| I can't speak for every state in the union about exactly what their voting rights and laws are, but there are things in that bill that are mandated that Florida already does. | ||
| We already have early voting here. | ||
| We have a 14-day period, a 13-day period of early voting, and then you've got anybody can vote by mail in Florida. | ||
| You don't have to prove that you're going to be out of town or whatever. | ||
| And then you got election day. | ||
| You can go to your precinct and from 7 a.m. | ||
| to 7 p.m., as long as you're in line before 7 p.m., you can vote that way. | ||
| So it's never been easier. | ||
| When I first ran for office in 2010, there was still, you know, early voting was at one point in the state limited. | ||
| It didn't even exist 20 years ago. | ||
| When I first voted in my first election in 1989, there was no early voting. | ||
| If you wanted to vote absentee, you had to write a letter saying, I'm going to be out of town or I'm having surgery or whatever it is on that day. | ||
| And so I don't think it's ever been easier to either register or to vote in Florida. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin. | ||
| This is the Rubin Report with my first interview from the free state of Florida. | ||
| And we got the right guy for it, Florida Senator Marco Rubio. | ||
| Senator, how are you? | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| Glad to have you here. | ||
| And just a disclaimer at the outset, this is like real world right here. | ||
| I'm in my backyard. | ||
| I got, my dog is right here. | ||
| So if you hear a little barking, that's why I'm using these. | ||
| But, uh, We're not trying to stage anything here. | ||
| It's all real, man. | ||
| So I apologize ahead if he barks. | ||
| You're going full Florida, man. | ||
| So first off, as you know, I just moved here from the crazy state of California. | ||
| I've been here for a couple weeks, just moved into the house. | ||
| I'm in my makeshift studio now. | ||
| You were nice enough to do a little promo video for me, welcoming me here. | ||
| So let's just start with the state of Florida first. | ||
| I mean, what is it about Florida that Sort of allowed Florida to do it right over these last two years. | ||
| Like, I don't think it's just the political part, although that's a part of it. | ||
| What is it about just sort of the Florida man, the Florida woman that did something right here? | ||
| That's a great question. | ||
| I do think it starts with political leadership. | ||
| And maybe the truth is that the people produce that political leadership. | ||
| They reward a certain kind of leadership and don't reward others. | ||
| But, you know, I think the key thing about Florida to understand is that everyone's from somewhere else for the most part. | ||
| And that means another part of the country like you, I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of people in Florida that have done what you've done. | ||
| And that is you came here because you didn't like what life was like under the leadership of people in some other state. | ||
| And so when people come to a place to get away from that kind of stuff, they came for a reason. | ||
| So I think that's a big part of it. | ||
| And it's not just from other states. | ||
| We also have people that come from other countries. | ||
| So here in South Florida, as I'm sure you've already experienced, we have a lot of people that obviously came from Cuba, or their parents did, and then Venezuela, and then Nicaragua. | ||
| And so any time that there is, for that matter, you know, any time there's any sort of left-wing disruption in Latin America, so for example, Peru, elected a president who's far left and even anti-american | ||
| and suddenly you see the real estate purchases from Peruvians skyrocket. People come here | ||
| to get away from that stuff. | ||
| They come here from other countries, they come here from other states, and I think that's a big, | ||
| big part of what makes Florida what it is. And it's something we really need to protect, | ||
| you know, and it's a dynamic state. | ||
| In many ways, it's sort of a 21st century frontier state in that way. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I am here to protect it, as I keep telling people. | ||
| I'm here to keep Florida, Florida. | ||
| I have noticed, you know, you mentioned the international part of this. | ||
| I mean, one thing I've definitely noticed in a couple weeks here, especially in the Miami area, I mean, everyone brings their own driving customs here. | ||
| There is a certain set of ways that you drive in Florida that I have not seen in California before. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's always the game about, you know, can I beat the red light or is it, you know, it's all like a 10 second rule on the red light, you know, like the light is red, but does it really mean red? | ||
| Or do I get something like you drop something on the floor, you get, you know, it's a two second rule, whatever. | ||
| Same thing with that. | ||
| You know, everybody's trying to figure out how to use a backstreet to cut through traffic. | ||
| There's a little bit of that, you know, and it's part of the flair of the place. | ||
| I'm not encouraging people to do it, but it's part of the sort of the character of it. | ||
| I think that's true. | ||
| Probably more in South Florida than in other parts of the state, but But it is, yeah, no, it's different. | ||
| I've definitely become a bit of a Venezuelan or Cuban driver already in a couple weeks here. | ||
| But in these last two years that Florida continued to flourish while so many states collapsed, and as you said, there are quite literally hundreds of thousands of people moving in this direction right now, what do you do to stop people who made the mistakes in the blue states from repeating those mistakes here? | ||
| I'm not going to repeat those mistakes, but obviously some people will. | ||
| Yeah, I think, first of all, it's self-selective. | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm not saying that's true for everybody, but, frankly, the bottom line is this. | ||
| If you live in California and you watch MSNBC habitually, and you spend all day on Twitter, you think that in Florida we have bodies all over the streets, and we have, you know, people are just dying left and right, and Governor DeSantis is the leader of a death cult, so you're not going to move to Florida, if that's what you think, unless your job makes you or something. | ||
| So, by and large, people that are moving here are people that don't believe that stuff. | ||
| When they come now, I mean that's true for everybody and look this is a state with diverse opinions But this has always been a state that's had liberals This has always been a state that's had people that are left of center on their political views But I don't think that's the dividing line anymore. | ||
| I mean, I think you can be a liberal and not be crazy I think what we're talking about now is things that go well beyond just traditional. | ||
| I want higher taxes and more government and This is the complete, total abandonment of common sense, of balance, of reason, and almost hysteria on its approach to different issues. | ||
| And I do think we've avoided a lot of that happening here. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's not present at all, but I don't see a lot of that happening. | ||
| That doesn't mean that there aren't people that hold those views or that talk in those ways, but But I think what's really important is to show the results, right? | ||
| At the end of the day, there's a reason why Ocasio-Cortez and all these other members of Congress come down here to vacation and party on New Year's Eve. | ||
| And it's because they may be in favor of the rules, or at least publicly in favor of the rules in their home state, but when it comes time to actually enjoy life, they're coming here. | ||
| They're not going to some of these other places. | ||
| And so I think reminding people that and comparing, you know, us to these other states and what they're going through is one of the most important things we can continue to do to convince people and win this battle. | ||
| Do you ever envy the fact that the Democrats can get away with virtually anything, like AOC can be partying down here at clubs, you know, maskless and the whole thing while she's locking down her own people, when clearly if you were to do anything That the media could figure out in some slight way was hypocritical or when, say, Senator Cruz went on a vacation that was long planned for a couple days, they go bananas. | ||
| But Democrats can pretty much do anything. | ||
| Do you ever get a little jealous of that? | ||
| You know, that's a great question. | ||
| And let me tell you what happens. | ||
| And I can talk to you about my evolution on all of this. | ||
| I think when you first kind of get into politics, you know, I got elected 10 years ago and I get there and I'm new to the place and all that. | ||
| And so whether it's the people around you or just your own instincts, you sort of think, all right, these guys, yes, they're left of center and they're liberal, but at some point there's some fairness in them, right? | ||
| And so I think you waste a lot of time thinking you're gonna impress people in the legacy media. | ||
| And I think that's worse than it's ever been in terms of their bias and so forth. | ||
| And I think maybe one of the things that Donald Trump revealed is you're never gonna impress | ||
| these people. | ||
| I mean, they're never going to treat you the same as they do the other side. | ||
| I think once you abandon that and once you accept it, that's a fact. | ||
| And then the next step is realizing, by the way, a lot of people know this. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of people out there that notice this double standard. | ||
| And so I always chuckle about things like, for example, you know, I, look, I ran for president. | ||
| I finished in third place in the delegate count. | ||
| I made it all the way to Florida. | ||
| It didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, but that was God's plan for our country and for my life. | ||
| And I, you know, things, there are a lot of things I've been able to do over the last four years I wouldn't have been able to do if I had won that race or even been the nominee. | ||
| And they call me, for a long time they wrote about Marco Rubio, failed presidential candidate. | ||
| Kamala Harris didn't even make it out of California. | ||
| She didn't even make it to December. | ||
| Hold it zero! | ||
| Hold it zero! | ||
| Yeah, Cory Booker didn't even make it to December. | ||
| They didn't even make it to the first state, and they're called former presidential candidates. | ||
| So I'm a failed one, they're a former one. | ||
| I don't care, but it's an example of that sort of double standard, and it exists. | ||
| And I think there comes a point where you kind of realize, who cares? | ||
| It doesn't really matter. | ||
| People see it, and frankly, people don't believe it anymore. | ||
| We're just not living in an era now. | ||
| There are more people that will watch this podcast than will read what the local newspaper writes about me on any given day. | ||
| And once you sort of realize that, it makes life a lot easier. | ||
| Yeah, you know, so with some of the COVID stuff here, because to your point, if you watch MSNBC or read the New York Times, they make it sound like everyone's dying in Florida. | ||
| I'll tell you very straight up, I got COVID right when I got here. | ||
| My whole staff got COVID. | ||
| I was able to get monoclonal treatment. | ||
| It took literally about an hour. | ||
| I was able to get ivermectin. | ||
| I was sick for a couple of days and then I was better. | ||
| It was just fine. | ||
| That's not to say that COVID doesn't exist here. | ||
| Of course it does. | ||
| But that's in stark contrast to a place like California or New York where you can't really get those treatments. | ||
| I mean, first off, they want you to have a positive test to get the treatment, but then you can't even get the test. | ||
| So when you guys were putting together the policy on all of this and when you were talking to the governor and the other health officials, How much pressure did you feel to, like, we don't want to be the one state that is a little more open, but then we end up being the one that really screws it up? | ||
| Well, look, I mean, there's a lot of credit to be deserved by the governor. | ||
| I mean, he took some chances here in terms of what was being told to him from the national media versus what he decided to do on the basis of the information he had. | ||
| And that move to make monoclonal antibodies available to people, not just that they got sick, | ||
| but even if they've been exposed to it, I think saved a lot of lives | ||
| and kept a lot of people out of hospitals. | ||
| It really did. | ||
| And I know that firsthand from people that went through it. | ||
| I think that was a major movement and important one. | ||
| And why other states didn't follow suit? | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| I can tell you that where we got into, kind of involved in it at that point, | ||
| is which when the federal government under Joe Biden realized Florida's making us look bad. | ||
| And so they decided we're gonna start rationing this. | ||
| We're gonna start making sure that each state gets a certain amount, but they don't, you know, | ||
| even if they're not using it, they're all allotted for them. | ||
| In essence, a way to restrict Florida's access to it. | ||
| And at least for some of those drugs, the state could directly negotiate with a company, | ||
| but there's some others, especially the newer ones where you gotta go through the federal government. | ||
| And that's at the point where we really got concerned, because when the federal government starts saying, we're going to start rationing this, what you realize is they're doing it to punish Florida. | ||
| They're doing it to make sure that Florida doesn't continue to embarrass them by making this an effective way to pursue this. | ||
| But yeah, look, ultimately, It's not just about comparing us to other states. | ||
| I mean, you don't want anybody to die or get sick. | ||
| But life is about the management of risk. | ||
| There's benefits, there's rewards, and there's risks associated to virtually everything we'll do. | ||
| At some point today, you and I and others will get in a car and drive somewhere, and there's real risk involved in that, and maybe more here than other places, right? | ||
| But there's risk involved in it. | ||
| But there are things you just have to be able to do in life in order to live. | ||
| And I think once you make public policy from that perspective, it allows you to make decisions like that. | ||
| Where are you at with using the levers of power at this point when it comes to, you know, there's still a lot of kids in masks in schools here, not all the schools. | ||
| It's a little unclear to me if that's left to the counties at this point or the mayors, or there's obviously some level of school choice and private public school, all of that. | ||
| What do you think should be happening? | ||
| Are you trying to push one way or another or where are you at? | ||
| Yeah, you know, ultimately, in my view, I think one of the things that this pandemic revealed is the importance of local government and local control to make those decisions. | ||
| And so right now, at the state level, schools are being told you can't have a mask mandate. | ||
| So as an example, the public schools here in Miami-Dade have a mask mandate for employees, but not for the kids. | ||
| And there's a lot of reason that private schools can make their own decisions, right? | ||
| So I have one kid who's in a public charter school, and they don't have a mask mandate. | ||
| And I have my oldest son who's in a public private Catholic high school, and they do. | ||
| But I can tell you a couple things about it. | ||
| The first is that, again, it's a risk and reward balancing prospect. | ||
| Let me be frank, Greg, the way these kids wear the masks on a 12 to 20 hour basis whenever they're around the school isn't exactly the way You're supposed to wear them if they're even effective at all in that sense. | ||
| So that's the reality. | ||
| So you start thinking, okay, they're not going to wear the mask the way they're supposed to anyway. | ||
| All we're doing is creating an additional irritant in their educational setting. | ||
| And so you hope there's some common sense into how that's enforced. | ||
| And then I think when you talk about the Omicron variant, it ultimately is not, I mean, | ||
| if you talk to people who will speak to you honestly about it, the masks aren't gonna stop this. | ||
| This is a highly infectious variant. | ||
| Luckily, it's not as severe, but it is highly infectious. | ||
| And there are just things that aren't gonna work against it. | ||
| And so my view of it is I leave it to the states and the school boards to make those decisions, | ||
| but I would hope they would make those decisions with the best interest of the kids in mind. | ||
| I'm much more worried about them not learning how to read and write than I am about them not wearing the mask exactly right, you know, with the thing notched over their nose, and especially since they're not going to wear it right anyway, and the mask most of the kids are using isn't even effective against the old variant, not to mention Omicron. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, that's a perfect way to tie up the whole Florida portion. | ||
| So I want to move a little bit towards national politics and what's going on right now at the moment. | ||
| So in these last couple of days, obviously, we saw the stalemate in the Senate about the Voting Rights Act. | ||
| You're going to call me crazy. | ||
| I believe you have to have an I.D. | ||
| or you should have an I.D. | ||
| to vote. | ||
| The Democrats apparently don't believe that, and if you believe it, you're racist. | ||
| Now there's this fight over the filibuster. | ||
| You mentioned a few minutes ago that there used to sort of be these sane liberals that you could debate these ideas with. | ||
| Is there anyone left over there? | ||
| I mean, I suspect you probably think Joe Manchin's pretty decent at the moment, but I mean, when you hear them with these crazy policies where we're going to have illegals voting and you don't have to have an ID to vote, but you also have to have a vaccine, Yeah, look, I think there's more than just Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema that don't want to get rid of the filibuster and think some of these ideas go beyond their comfort level. | ||
| But if you watch what's happened to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema when they stepped out, there's a lot of people that are saying, you know what, I'm just going to vote with a pack and sort of keep my head down. | ||
| It's not going to pass anyway. | ||
| Thank God for Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. | ||
| And so these are people that are voting yes, but hoping for no. | ||
| And the fact that two people are willing to step out and do it kind of gave them the result they wanted. | ||
| But these guys, they don't want to be singled out. | ||
| They don't want donors threatening them with primaries. | ||
| They're scared. | ||
| And so I'm not saying that's true of everybody, but yeah, there are Democrats that view this as kind of crazy, but they're not going to say it because their base has become radicalized. | ||
| The people that knock on doors and make phone calls and that they need to mobilize for Election Day are demanding whatever the pet issue of the moment is | ||
| and that are far outside the mainstream, but if they take those people on, they may not be back. | ||
| And they certainly don't want the headache associated with it. | ||
| And so I think as much as anything else, the threats against Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin | ||
| that you've seen is not so much about Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. | ||
| It's a message to the other senators and other members of Congress who may be thinking about stepping out of line that this is what awaits you. | ||
| This is what lies ahead for you if you step out of line. | ||
| So just be quiet and do what we tell you to do. | ||
| And that's that's what I described it. | ||
| Are you surprised that the leadership folded kind of as quickly as it did? | ||
| Because I'm sure you saw it. | ||
| You may have been in the chamber at the time. | ||
| Tom Cotton did a really spectacular job of repeating a speech that Chuck Schumer gave about the filibuster. | ||
| I think it was from, you know, five or eight years ago, something like that. | ||
| And then he announced at the end, by the way, that was Chuck Schumer, that wasn't my speech. | ||
| And it's like, I don't think Chuck was truly this radically left. | ||
| And even Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, like, obviously she had some of that, but I don't think she was totally like this. | ||
| Are you surprised that they folded, not just the guys that are, you know, watching out for their back and just want to get reelected, but that the leadership just all went in? | ||
| On the filibuster? | ||
| Well, on the filibuster, yeah, that they're following just the sort of far left on all of this stuff. | ||
| I'm not actually surprised, and I'll tell you why. | ||
| They've got a 50-50 Senate, a very narrow majority in the House, but their base thinks they have a mandate to radically transform America. | ||
| And so they're getting all this pressure about, get this stuff done. | ||
| And you go back to them and say, well, we can't, we don't have 60 votes. | ||
| And then the base says to them, well, then get rid of the 60 vote thing, okay? | ||
| Because it's standing in the way of our agenda and get it done. | ||
| And if you don't get it done, then that means you're not with us. | ||
| And so after a while, they start beating on you. | ||
| So look, This fake voting rights thing is just the issue they picked to have a filibuster fight over. | ||
| But they were prepared to do it over the debt ceiling, and they were at some point talking about doing it for immigration reform. | ||
| You name it, and they would find the issue. | ||
| This is just the one they figured we'd have the best chance to make a straight-faced argument on, even though it wasn't a very good one. | ||
| And a spot folding on it. | ||
| I don't think Chuck Schumer had a choice. | ||
| I really don't. | ||
| I think if Chuck Schumer hadn't done this, he was almost certainly going to be primary in New York in his Senate race. | ||
| And I think he thought about that as he went through this cycle. | ||
| I think that's true for a lot of their leadership and a lot of the people that change their position on it. | ||
| At the end of the day, yes, they're in the leadership, but they need to win elections. | ||
| Stay in that leadership. | ||
| And in that case, in the case of New York, it means a Democratic primary where he most definitely does not want to take on a far left primary challenger that could beat him, that could beat him. | ||
| And so he's trying to avoid that. | ||
| And I think it's pretty clear to him if he didn't do this, that was what was going to happen to him. | ||
| Yeah, and there are even rumors that AOC might be that person. | ||
| Just to give the devil his due, I mean, was there anything in the Voting Rights Act that you thought was legit, or do you think the entire thing was designed for all the mail-in ballots, all the no-ID stuff, all the illegals? | ||
| Like, was it all designed just to keep them in power forever, or was there anything in there? | ||
| I mean, is there anyone in America today that wants to vote that can't vote for a legitimate reason? | ||
| Or for an illegitimate reason, I should say. | ||
| I can't speak for every state in the union about exactly what their voting rights and laws are, but there are things in that bill that are mandated that Florida already does. | ||
| We already have early voting here. | ||
| We have a 14-day period, a 13-day period of early voting, and then you've got anybody can vote by mail in Florida. | ||
| You don't have to prove that you're going to be out of town or whatever. | ||
| And then you've got election day. | ||
| You can go to your precinct and from 7 a.m. | ||
| to 7 p.m., as long as you're in line before 7 p.m., you can vote that way. | ||
| So it's never been easier. | ||
| When I first ran for office in 2010, there was still, you know, early voting was at one point in the state limited. | ||
| It didn't even exist 20 years ago. | ||
| When I first voted in my first election in 1989, there was no early voting. | ||
| If you wanted to vote absentee, you had to write a letter saying, I'm going to be out of town or I'm having surgery or whatever it is on that day. | ||
| And so I don't think it's ever been easier to either register or to vote in Florida. | ||
| So it's not for me. | ||
| The big problem is, first of all, there is no concerted effort to deny access to the ballot to anyone in America. | ||
| Some of those ideas they're talking about, OK, you know, ballot harvesting, allowing people to go out and just grab ballots and put them. | ||
| We had a huge crisis about that here in Florida. | ||
| And by the way, it was a lot of times in Republican primary races where were these people you would hire and they would go out and they would collect 150, 200 ballots. | ||
| And it just led to all sorts of shenanigans. | ||
| Look, we had a mayor's race in Miami overturned by a judge a year after the election because there was so much massive fraud on the absentee ballot front, a lot of it driven by ballot harvesting. | ||
| And so we banned those practices here in Florida. | ||
| And the biggest challenge, the biggest problem I had is this sort of the federal government is going to take over elections, which is what this is, is a huge problem for me. | ||
| Big, big problem. | ||
| Because you've now centralized election authority in America, and now it's at the whim of whoever's in power. | ||
| Well, how worried are you that that is the future of America? | ||
| I mean, my main concern as a new Floridian is that we're going to keep doing things right here. | ||
| We're going to keep electing the right officials. | ||
| Our businesses are going to thrive. | ||
| People are going to be out and about. | ||
| But the federal government simply will not let us alone. | ||
| It's sort of to your point earlier about Florida did it right with monoclonal treatment, so what was the federal government response? | ||
| Oh, we're gonna push, tamper down on who can get it and when they can get it. | ||
| So what do we do here to make sure that that sort of ever-growing federal government doesn't do what? | ||
| I can't even imagine what they could do, but I know there's stuff they can do. | ||
| Yeah, you know, that's a great question to a senator, because if you look at the design of the Senate, the Senate was designed to represent the states, to be the voice of state. | ||
| That's why every state gets two of them. | ||
| Small states get two of them, big states get two of them. | ||
| And part of our job is to keep that balance in place between the federal and state government, between the different levels of government. | ||
| And oftentimes people think it's not because I'm against the federal government doing something on | ||
| an issue doesn't mean the issue is not important. I just think the local government or the state | ||
| government would do a better job of dealing with it than the federal government would. It's actually | ||
| a fascinating question. If you go back to 1500, from the year 1500 forward, and you look at the | ||
| rise and fall of great powers, there are a lot of reasons why great powers fall. But one of the | ||
| things many of those great powers had in common is they centralized government control. | ||
| And what that meant is that entrepreneurial spirit, that competition to see who had better ideas, that creativity and innovation that you would see when powers decentralized, they lost that. | ||
| They lost it and the places are a little bit more place. | ||
| One of the key reasons why Europe surpassed the Asia Pacific region in global leadership because they didn't have a strong central government that sort of quashed that. | ||
| So there's historical reasons for it. | ||
| I think it's true. | ||
| I think it's also aligned with our constitution. | ||
| And look at every innovation in public education in America over the last 20 years, | ||
| they've all been driven by state initiatives like school choice and things of that nature. | ||
| They've all been driven by it at the state level because states wanna have a better education system | ||
| than other states so that people will move their businesses and their families there. | ||
| And so I'm gonna work very hard to continue to make sure that the Senate stands in the way of any effort | ||
| to have federal takeovers of big public policy issues of that type. | ||
| So speaking of federal takeovers, Biden obviously gave this big press conference | ||
| in the last couple of days. | ||
| From where I'm sitting, I mean, the guy is not the Joe Biden of 10 years ago. | ||
| I think that's a pretty deep underestimation, actually. | ||
| Do you think he's really running the show at this point? | ||
| I mean, he constantly at the end of these Press conferences, he constantly says, oh I'm not allowed to say that, or they don't want me to say this, or they rush him off, or he sits there awkwardly as people yell questions and he doesn't answer. | ||
| I mean, what do you think is going on here? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I don't know Joe Biden very well personally. | ||
| I never served with him in the Senate. | ||
| I did interact with him when he was vice president. | ||
| And obviously, you know, the person that's there today is not the same person. | ||
| And I'm in no position to speculate as to what has changed, but it's just not. | ||
| And that said, I mean, he has a long history of sort of saying things that are silly and gaffe-prone. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| I mean, that's a well-understood dynamic. | ||
| I think the Obama administration understood that about him as well and tried to protect him from himself and certainly the administration from some of those things. | ||
| Where I think it really becomes relevant. | ||
| Look, I'm not one of these people that, because someone misstates a word or doesn't perfectly phrase something, suddenly goes crazy. | ||
| Oh, look what they said. | ||
| I mean, that's silly. | ||
| I talked to the camera for a living. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm not big on that kind of stuff, but I do think it's relevant when you watch this and you see a consistent pattern of saying things. | ||
| You know, in the big speech he gave in Georgia a couple of weeks ago, he talked about when he had been arrested. | ||
| It's been well documented. | ||
| He's never been arrested in a civil rights protest. | ||
| And I think if you're Vladimir Putin or you're the Chinese leadership of the Communist Party, you're watching that and saying, there's something wrong with this guy. | ||
| I mean, I think there are things we can get away with as long as that guy is there. | ||
| And the fact that they would have the same question that you have, who's actually running the place, who's actually making the decisions. | ||
| It's a dangerous thing for the country. | ||
| I mean, they had to spend basically the last 24 hours cleaning up what he said about Ukraine and, you know, a partial invasion versus a full invasion. | ||
| That's just one element of something he said on that day. | ||
| The other is he kind of alludes that maybe midterms aren't going to be legitimate. | ||
| They had to clean that up as well. | ||
| So, you know, I don't he's not the same person. | ||
| I don't know who's running the show. | ||
| I'm in no position to speculate about that, but I can tell you they spent a lot of time having to sort of clean up the things he says, and our adversaries notice it. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I mean, we've already talked about the election stuff, so we can let that part of what he said go, because it's sort of, and it's basically like they spent four years under Trump questioning elections. | ||
| Now we can't, now they're preparing us to question elections when they get, you know, shellacked at the end of this year. | ||
| But on the Putin-Ukraine stuff, I thought that was one of the worst few minutes a president has had, at least in my lifetime, of basically just saying, You can kind of do what you want. | ||
| We don't really know. | ||
| And you pretty much know we're not going to do anything. | ||
| I mean, what happened to some level of deterrence or a red line, perhaps, or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, look, I mean, the most important thing is we have to explain to people why this even matters. | ||
| That's a very legitimate point. | ||
| I think Americans are very wary of sort of engaging us in conflicts around the world. | ||
| So let me be frank. | ||
| I mean, there's not going to be American troops in Ukraine taking on a Russian invasion because you can't really have a conventional war between two nuclear powers. | ||
| It's too risky. | ||
| has the real danger of escalating in the battlefield into something. | ||
| It's just not, that's not what anybody's talking about. | ||
| I think what is important is Vladimir Putin has to sit there and we've got to do everything | ||
| possible so that he calculates that the price of doing this is higher than the benefits | ||
| he's going to gain from it. | ||
| And that's not an easy thing to do because the guy is convinced that we're going to make | ||
| Ukraine a member of NATO. | ||
| There are going to be American missile and troops there at some point right on his border. | ||
| And so we've got to change. | ||
| That's how high the risk is for him. | ||
| We've got to change the reward pattern on it. | ||
| I think part of that is economic. | ||
| I think part of it is you're starting to hear people say it is the reality that Ukrainians aren't going to welcome these guys and say, oh, thank you for taking over our country. | ||
| I mean, they're going to face a protracted insurgency of Ukrainians, not Americans, of Ukrainians I don't know what significant percentage of that population has a history or training or background in military service. | ||
| And you're going to have, you know, years and years and years of people taking shots at you. | ||
| And I think this country, as much as any, understands that when you invade a country, you now have to govern and occupy it. | ||
| And if the people there aren't that happy, they make life miserable for you. | ||
| It's really, it's going to bleed and drain the Russian government and Vladimir Putin. | ||
| He's going to have to explain to Russian moms why their sons are coming home in boxes. | ||
| for a country, because they took over a place that doesn't want them. | ||
| And those risks have to be made clear up front, in addition to the economic pain and suffering. | ||
| I believe Vladimir Putin is going to do something. | ||
| I think probably the highest probability is he moves straight into Kiev, goes right after | ||
| Kiev, decapitates the government. | ||
| He's already setting up the pretext for it. | ||
| And we just need to make sure that if he does it, he pays a tremendous price. | ||
| Because it's not just about Putin. | ||
| This matters because if he can get away with it, China says, well, that's the model for Taiwan. | ||
| And maybe North Korea says, that's the model for us to take over the entire peninsula. | ||
| And who else? | ||
| And who knows who else is thinking about things like this? | ||
| Is that our biggest problem outside of our borders, that if we don't do anything, nobody else will, and sort of after 20 years of failed nation building, like the American people, as you said, people don't want, well, they certainly don't want a ground war, I don't think they want any sort of war, I don't want a war, I don't want a nation build, but I understand we do have a unique place in the world, and if we're not the ones kinda saying, bad guys, you can't always do whatever you wanna do, it's like, then all bets are off. | ||
| Yeah, look, I mean, if you're going to be a country as big and as powerful with an economy as advanced as ours, then what happens around the world is going to matter to you because you're sourcing products, you're sourcing raw material, energy, trade, commerce all over the world. | ||
| And so you need there to be stability. | ||
| The one thing you can never allow happen, for example, is let's say China comes to dominate the Asia-Pacific region. | ||
| And so suddenly we can't trade. | ||
| We've just lost all those countries in Asia that we sell things to and buy things from. | ||
| We have to deal with China and they decide what to sell or buy from us. | ||
| So a lot of that's really domestic. | ||
| Like we have to have an industrial capability in this country. | ||
| We have to have the ability. | ||
| You cannot be a great power if you're not an industrial power. | ||
| I don't care what people tell you. | ||
| You can't just be the place that invents things on paper and then ships it off for someone else to make it. | ||
| Eventually the people making these things are the people that will invent it. | ||
| Not to mention the national security ramifications of it. | ||
| So number one, we have to be an industrial power. | ||
| Number two, we have to make sure that we don't live in a world in which a great power dominates a region and basically we have no access to people that want to trade in commerce with us. | ||
| That said, that has to be balanced against the notion of overextension. | ||
| There are a lot of bad things that happen in the world. | ||
| We need to speak about it and do what we can, but most of them do not have an American military solution, nor should they, in terms of us getting involved and overextending ourselves. | ||
| Our number one priority must always be the national interest of our country and protecting it from threats, both at home and our interests around the world. | ||
| And it's a balance that's They have to pull off on public policy, but to your greater point about no one else will do it, I think a lot of times what happens is if America isn't involved, then some people will get involved, but they're going to get involved in ways that may not necessarily further our national interest. | ||
| The draw from Afghanistan, for example, has led a lot of countries to increasingly turn to China and Russia as their defense Do you think some of this is sort of by design? | ||
| Like, when you see the way a guy like, say, Bill de Blasio kind of wrecked New York City, which is just an absolute disaster, a place that I lived most of my adult life before moving to L.A., you know, people are like, oh, you know, he, this is an accident. | ||
| Like, these policies, he didn't realize what was gonna happen, but he, Just gave a speech a couple days ago where it's like, oh no, this was great. | ||
| It's all, it's all great here. | ||
| And I feel the sort of similar way with Biden. | ||
| It's like, I don't know that he really thinks things aren't going well. | ||
| Now you look at the shelves and you look at people's jobs and everything else and you clearly realize the price of gas, the price of food, et cetera. | ||
| You realize things aren't, but do you think some of it is actually by design that it's, it's a feature, not a bug in a way of the way they govern. | ||
| Both. | ||
| I think it's the natural consequence of these decisions. | ||
| They always lead to disaster. | ||
| But I also don't think, I think they're not necessarily overly troubled by it. | ||
| Inflation's a great example. | ||
| Inflation, if you believe that you want Marxism, or socialism, and you want the government to control more of our economy, then inflation isn't necessarily a bad thing. | ||
| Because the way you view it is, the more expensive life gets, right, the harder it is to afford things, the harder it is to get childcare, the harder and more expensive it is to go to school, The more people are going to be open to the argument that these things cost too much, the only way you're going to be able to have it is if the government provides it for you. | ||
| And so once the government begins, the government doesn't just take over early childhood education, it decides when it takes it over what's being taught and who gets to teach it. | ||
| It doesn't just take over higher education, it decides what you have to teach and who gets to go. | ||
| It doesn't just take over when it sends you a check in the mail every month, you know, it doesn't Just decide how much money you have in the bank. | ||
| It makes you dependent on that program continuing and having to increase taxes on other people in order for the money to be there to do that. | ||
| So, in many ways, I think this inflation is an example. | ||
| And even the supply chain shortages create a scenario in which people, they think, become more open to becoming dependent on government to fill in their needs. | ||
| Because the economy can't do it, only government can do it. | ||
| And that's the fundamental argument they're making, right? | ||
| Is that these are important things in life, Private economy cannot provide it for you, cannot provide you this security. | ||
| Only government can. | ||
| But that always comes at the price of your freedom and liberty, both economic and personal. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what I mean about feature, not a bug. | ||
| It's like a guy like de Blasio, he wrecked New York City, but in his view, it's like, oh, but the government's doing more now. | ||
| So thus, this is good. | ||
| And I think that that's sort of what's going on all over the place. | ||
| So to that point, obviously there's midterms coming. | ||
| You know, everybody's talking about some, some big red wave or something. | ||
| I'm pretty sure we're going to be safe here in Florida. | ||
| Do you, by the way, do you say Florida or Florida? | ||
| I'm a New Yorker originally, so I say Florida. | ||
| You say, everyone else is saying Florida here, but I also say orange juice, not orange juice. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No one's ever, I mean, I've heard about Nevada and Nevada, but I've never heard of Florida and Florida. | ||
| I don't know what, I say Florida. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You say Florida. | ||
| I say Florida. | ||
| People are telling me it's in New York that we say Florida. | ||
| We say orange instead of orange. | ||
| But what do you, what do you think is going to happen in this midterm situation? | ||
| I mean, do you think Well, the easiest way to lose at anything is to act like you're winning. | ||
| but I think it's we at this point, you know, get the house back. | ||
| It sounds like the Senate's gonna do pretty well. | ||
| And what do you, what do you say? | ||
| Well, the easiest way to lose at anything is to think, is to act like you're winning. | ||
| So I think that's the first thing we have to keep in mind. | ||
| The second is, I mean, these guys raise a lot of money. | ||
| As an example, Chuck Schumer went out and handpicked Val Demings, the Congresswoman from Central Florida, who's just a puppet of Nancy Pelosi, and said, that's who I want to be our candidate in Florida. | ||
| And she's raising, I don't know, $10 million a quarter or more online, just sending out an email. | ||
| So they're going to raise that kind of money for candidates. | ||
| I mean, every Senate Republican incumbent was outraised in 2020 and in 2018. | ||
| So we can't overlook the fact that these people are going to outrace us. | ||
| We're also not going to get any benefit from media. | ||
| As a perfect example, I was ranked the most effective Republican senator by the Vanderbilt University of Virginia program that looks at the effectiveness of members of Congress. | ||
| Another group Again, nonpartisan ranked me the second, number two in leadership score, passed a bunch of really meaningful bills, not the least of which was the creation of the Paycheck Protection Program that literally saved millions of small business jobs in this country. | ||
| You wouldn't know that. | ||
| I mean, a couple weeks ago, it was my work and having to blow up the defense bill that forced Nancy Pelosi in the House to pass. | ||
| A bill that banned the import of products made by Uyghur slave laborers. | ||
| None of that stuff is reported on. | ||
| The media is a real challenge for us because they're not going to report on our accomplishments or accurately in many cases put out what we're working on or what our position is on these issues. | ||
| Do I feel good about the fact that people are realizing Joe Biden is a disaster? | ||
| are going to have more money and they're going to have the benefit of mainstream media. | ||
| So we're going to have to work real hard to make sure that our base knows what's going | ||
| on and that people turn out and vote. | ||
| Do I feel good about the direction of Florida? | ||
| Do I feel good about the fact that people are realizing Joe Biden is a disaster? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But the election isn't today. | ||
| It's in November. | ||
| We've got a long ways to go between now and then. | ||
| We've got to make sure that people keep learning, not just about what they're doing wrong, but what we're going to do right if they give us the chance to be in a position of controlling the Senate and House. | ||
| So putting aside politics as we get close to wrap here, you know, we've talked a couple times before and I know all about your family's story of coming here and your dad washing dishes and the whole thing. | ||
| And then you rise to become a senator. | ||
| It's exactly what the American story is. | ||
| Are you still hopeful for that story? | ||
| Because so much of what we hear is designed at destroying that story, that the whole purpose of this country was based on systemic racism, that that's the founding principle. | ||
| I mean, all the woke nonsense. | ||
| When you get through all that, are you still hopeful that the dream that your parents came here with is still available to other people and that we can actually strengthen that? | ||
| Yeah, I am. | ||
| In fact, I'm not just hopeful about it. | ||
| I think that's our destiny as a country, but we're constantly reinventing ourselves. | ||
| And when you reinvent yourself, and I mean that in a positive way, reinvigorate yourself really is the term, It gets messy and conflicted. | ||
| In every generation, every 30, 40 years, we have some group of people that rise in politics and say, you know, this America thing isn't actually that good. | ||
| It isn't as good as people make it out to be. | ||
| We really need to change. | ||
| We really can't continue to do these sorts of things. | ||
| And it gets traction for a little while because they take advantage of some peculiarity of the moment. | ||
| But eventually what happens is that the overwhelming majority of Americans, including people that don't agree on a lot of issues, right? | ||
| People may not agree on what the tax rate should be or whatever, but they generally agree on one thing, and that is, look guys, what we have here is pretty good. | ||
| I wouldn't rather be anybody else, and we can't walk away from the things that made it that way, and we got to build on that. | ||
| And I think that's what you see that's happening right now, okay? | ||
| I think that's what you see happening right now. | ||
| There are a lot of people out there that voted for Joe Biden, maybe didn't like Donald Trump, maybe had never voted for a Republican, But they don't understand why their kids are being pulled out of school. | ||
| They've got a four-year-old. | ||
| They're on their fifth 10-day quarantine, even though their child is tested negative because some kid in class tested positive. | ||
| And no one seems to care or listen to them. | ||
| There are people that are saying, look, my kid has really not been in a stable learning environment for two years. | ||
| How are we going to make that up? | ||
| And what's that going to mean down the road and in the future? | ||
| They're small business owners. | ||
| Many of whom maybe are liberal Democrats, but they're like, I can't hire anybody. | ||
| And if I hire someone, they hire them on Monday. | ||
| Thursday, they just stop showing up and all my products cost more and I can't pass it through to the consumer. | ||
| So there's an awakening going on in this country about the consequences of these policies. | ||
| And sometimes it's messy and it's loud. | ||
| But I would say this. | ||
| Who would I trade places with? | ||
| Who would you trade places with? | ||
| There's no country in the world that I look at and I say, I wish I were them instead of us. | ||
| And we build on that. | ||
| So yes, the raw elements, there's nothing. | ||
| The American people would be fine. | ||
| It's our government that's broken. | ||
| It's people making decisions at the highest levels of corporate America that are broken, not our people. | ||
| And it's going to take some time to work its way through to the top. | ||
| All right, Senator, one more for you on that note, actually. | ||
| So as Mayor Suarez down here in Miami said in that famous tweet, I believe it was to Keith Raboy when he was considering moving to Florida, Mayor Suarez says, what can I do to help? | ||
| Well, hey, I'm a new Floridian, man. | ||
| What can I do to help you right here? | ||
| And by me, I mean literally me, but I mean anyone watching this and especially anyone that lives right here. | ||
| Well, at the... What can we do to help? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, at the expense of sounding shameless, as I just pointed out, I mean, I've got an opponent running against me that's outracing me online, you know, donors from all over the country, honestly, these MSNBC binge watchers that are sending stuff in the mail, so I just ask people if they can to go on MarcoRubio.com, MarcoRubio.com, and give whatever you can, because I need that help to get our word out and our message out. | ||
| And I think beyond that, it's just continue to be a platform like you've done, where people can speak truth, where people can hear from the people, not just in office, but people that are in the periphery of politics, but who have opinions on these issues. | ||
| It's become harder than ever. | ||
| To have these sort of long-form conversations and nuanced conversations so people can hear what we actually stand for and have debate. | ||
| Maybe there's a disagreement about what people stand for. | ||
| Nowadays, it's harder than ever. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| I mean, you just can't get a message out anymore on legacy media. | ||
| And it's platforms like this that are protecting the First Amendment and making that possible. | ||
| So keep doing what you're doing with that Florida flair now that you're down here and talking about what really is happening down here. | ||
| And hopefully that'll inspire people across the country to elect the people and follow the direction we followed here. | ||
| Well, Senator, I'm pretty sure, not totally sure, I'm pretty sure I can speak for all of my staff that you have at least eight new votes in Florida that have just moved here and we're going to see what else we can do. | ||
| It was a pleasure talking to you as always. | ||
| I appreciate the time. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me on. | ||
| Welcome to Florida. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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