In the aftermath of the bruising midterm elections, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a moment on Friday to remind voters why they had elected President Donald Trump two years earlier.
Rubio, began with a light-hearted crack about the multiple jobs he holds within the Trump administration — currently serving as National Security Adviser in addition to his duties at the State Department — and attributed at least a portion of the damage wrought in Tuesday’s elections to President Trump’s willingness to make tough decisions, even when they might not give him any political advantage.
“I see firsthand that this is a man who wakes up every morning with one thing as a priority: you,” Rubio said. “Our country and its future. The most important thing a president can do for a country is to keep it safe, and there are people around the world that want to destroy it. They want to destroy our country, they want to destroy our way of life.”
“[Trump] was elected to do the hard things — the hard things. It would have been very easy to do what multiple presidents before him have done, which is to ignore the Iran thing, leave it for the next guy,” Rubio continued. “Put it aside and don’t worry about it — that would have been the easiest thing to do, honestly, to just basically say leave it alone, who cares, that’s going to be someone’s problem in the future. But this president didn’t do that.”
“He confronted it because what Iran wants to do is not just destroy our country and to destroy our way of life, and threaten our children — we cannot live in a world in which the most radical terroristic regime on the planet possesses a weapon of mass destruction. And we’ve had president after president ignore it and allow it to linger, but this president wasn’t allowed — wasn’t elected to ignore it,” the former Florida senator concluded. “And he wasn’t elected to allow threats to linger. And he did it for you. Not for him, not for anybody else — he did it for you and for our country, and for that we, our children, and children not yet born owe a sense, a deep sense of gratitude. And I know he’ll continue to do it and that’s why I’m so honored to be his Secretary of State. And that’s why I know he’s so honored that all of you are here today.”
Democrats swept the midterm elections on Tuesday, retaking control of both the House and the Senate and flipping a number of traditionally Republican seats in the process. Many of the Democrats who won big in those elections campaigned on putting an end to the war in Iran and fixing kitchen-table issues to make life more affordable for Americans — but in the days since, they have suggested that they are more interested in investigating and prosecuting anyone who has ever been in President Trump’s orbit.
