Marco Rubio has abandoned his fight for freedoms

Once a stalwart defender of freedom everywhere, he has turned into another Trump sycophant.

I first met Marco Rubio in a prison in Libya.

We have Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to thank for this unusual fact. It was 2011, and McCain, having championed Libya’s revolution, wanted to hold its leaders to their democratic promises. So, he asked me (I was then working for Human Rights Watch) to take him to a prison that held people the new government considered undesirable. McCain spoke with the prisoners through the bars of their cells and berated the warden about allegations of mistreatment. Rubio tagged along.

A few years later, Rubio used this story to chew me out at a Senate hearing on Venezuela. At this point, I was the top human rights official in President Barack Obama’s State Department, and Rubio wanted us to be tougher on Venezuela’s dictatorship. He brought up our meeting in the Libyan prison (adding, to laughter from the audience, “we weren’t living there”), as if to say, “I know you care about people struggling for freedom in the darkest places—so why can’t you get your president to do more?”

I respected Rubio then even when I clashed with him. He was the son of refugees from a Communist country who’d followed McCain on foreign trips and shared his belief that America’s strength derives from our values. Rubio launched his 2016 presidential campaign promising to stop “the erosion of human rights and democracy around the world.” When I served in the House of Representatives, we teamed up on bills to punish forced labor in China, help Ukraine, and fight global corruption.

Yet today, Rubio, now secretary of state, is presiding over the total retreat of the U.S. government from the cause that defines what Americans celebrate on July Fourth: freedom not just for ourselves but for everyone. Of all the acts of surrender to President Donald Trump from traditional Republicans, I can think of none more humiliating and consequential.

Much has been written about the Trump administration’s dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s anti-poverty and disease programs, and rightly so. But the administration has also been eliminating grants to organizations that support political prisoners, fight torture, document war crimes, promote independent journalism, and help peaceful advocates for democratic change in autocratic societies.

The State Department office I used to run—the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL)—oversees most of these programs, which have enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan backing in Congress. During the first Trump administration, Rubio was one of several Senate Republicans who, alarmed by Trump’s affinity for dictators, led a quiet effort that quadrupled the bureau’s budget.

But within a few weeks of Rubio’s arrival at the State Department, hundreds of DRL grants had been axed. The first to go were programs deemed “woke,” including countering the persecution of LGBT people in Africa and women in Afghanistan. Any grant with words such as “diverse,” “equity,” “sustainable,” or “trans” in its description (no joke—even a “trans-Pacific” national security dialogue) got nixed. But the administration also axed funding for exposing human rights abuses in Russia, for democracy activists in Hong Kong, and for people struggling against the military regime in Burma—all programs with strong Republican support, some legally mandated by Congress.

In February, the State Department submitted an affidavit to a federal court attesting that Rubio had personally reviewed and terminated all grants promoting “regime change, civic society, and democracy promotion.” I was stunned—this was the State Department adopting the language of Putin’s Russia, which had long disparaged America’s defense of human rights in the world as “regime change.”

A few democracy programs survived that initial purge. But last week, the White House Office of Management and Budget told the State Department to eliminate the last of those, too. Most remaining DRL staff expect to be fired soon.

Here are some examples of what the State Department under Marco Rubio has just decided to defund:

• A mobile app that Iranian women use to track the movements of the “morality police” that persecutes them for not covering their heads.

• Legal assistance for Cuban political prisoners and their families and support for the only independent trade union in Cuba.

• Support for thousands of Venezuelan political prisoners, victims of torture, and their families, and for litigation to freeze the Venezuelan regime’s stolen assets in third countries.

• A longstanding effort to smuggle information about the outside world, including news, TV shows, and movies, to the people of North Korea.

• All support for technologies that allow dissidents in dictatorships like China, Russia, and Iran to communicate securely and to access an uncensored internet.

It all seems of a piece with Trump’s statement in Saudi Arabia in May that it’s not “our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” and with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comment that “the United States is not interested in the moralistic and preachy approach to foreign policy of the past. We are not here to pressure other countries to embrace or adopt policies or ideologies.” Except for one small problem: The administration is still pressuring some countries to adopt certain kinds of policies and ideologies—as when Rubio chided Germany for labeling its neo-Nazi party “extremist” and sided with a radical faction of South African Afrikaners against their government.

So, if you are a dissident in China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, or Burma, a Trump/Rubio-led America will no longer help you. But it will defend the free speech of racists and fascists. Theirs is a value-based foreign policy but with twisted values.

A few years ago, in a speech in the U.S. Senate about an imprisoned Chinese democracy activist, Rubio said, “One of the first thing oppressors tell political prisoners is that the world has forgotten about you and you don’t matter to them anymore.” That such people have now been forgotten by a Rubio-led State Department diminishes him and the United States.

But Trump and Rubio are not the only voices of America in the world. If they won’t spend the money Congress gave them to defend American ideals, Congress can give it to the National Endowment for Democracy, an independent non-profit it created for this very purpose. Members of Congress can speak up for political prisoners, as Rubio used to do. They can pass resolutions—leading Republicans and Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, just proposed one demanding the return of Ukrainian kids whom Russia kidnapped (after Rubio defunded an effort to find them). The rest of us can speak up and demand this.

A few small-minded people with no conscience can’t be allowed to define what America stands for. Until they’re gone, we must all take up that cause.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

---