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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The World Over with Raymond Arroyo to discuss President-elect Donald Trump’s historic victory, the Democrats’ response to the election, foreign policy challenges facing our nation, and more. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube.

On the success of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign:

“It’s unlike any campaign in American history [in its] level of energy and excitement. I remember commenting on multiple occasions to people on his campaign, to [President-elect Trump] personally and others, ‘Whoever runs for president four years from now, it’s going to be boring compared to this.’ Very few people and figures in American history have been able to draw that number of people. And he hasn’t been doing it just in big rallies at the end of all these campaigns. This has been going on for years. He held a rally for me when I ran for re-election in 2022. We must have had 25,000 to 30,000 people standing in the rain to hear him speak and ruin his suit in that rain…. This has been going on for a while. [It is] just a tremendous amount of energy. You never know if that translates to the polls until Election Day, but it certainly did [this time].”

On President-elect Trump’s support from Hispanic Americans: 

“I think what drove it is that they’re Americans. What we have to start grappling with here, and what I hope people will start comprehending, is that your primary identity, for most people, is not your ethnicity or the color of your skin. Your primary identity is that you work somewhere, or you have a small business, or you’re raising children. And as a result, you’re worried about things like how much it costs to buy groceries or how unaffordable life is at the end of every month in this economy. Every day, you turn on the television and [see that] some criminal from another country that’s here illegally just raped or murdered someone. Those things concern people of all walks of life. And this notion that Hispanics are somehow immune from that and care more about some other issue, I think, is a mistake that is still being made by a lot of so-called political insiders and experts. I think Donald Trump instinctively understood [the reality], and he campaigned to people…as workers, as Americans, as parents raising children, and as people who care about our country….

“I don’t believe Americans of Hispanic descent are in favor of illegal immigration. They’re just not. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics and their children came here legally through a process where you had to wait, and there was paperwork, and so forth, and they’re not in favor of illegal immigration. Think about this: If an illegal migrant crosses the border, let’s say that person was a murderer in some other country, and they come to the United States and are committing crimes here, where do we think they’re going? They’re not going to Beverly Hills. They’re not going to some fancy community. They’re not going to where all these celebrities live. They are going to Hispanic communities. That is where they are going.

“That’s who this Venezuelan gang [Tren de Aragua] is terrorizing. They are looking to terrorize Venezuelan communities. That’s where they’re most comfortable and operating. The people that are coming face to face with this in real time, not in a documentary, but in real time, are overwhelmingly Hispanics and Hispanic communities. They’re not in favor of illegal immigration, and I don’t understand how people still can’t grasp that. Just because you come from immigrant roots doesn’t mean you are in favor of illegal immigration.”

On the potential of a U.S.-Mexico partnership to reduce illegal immigration:

“I think [Mexico] would like to cooperate with the United States. The majority of the people that cross the border illegally are not Mexican nationals. They are people from all over the world, literally over 100 countries from all over the world, and Mexico is just the transit point. So if Biden is going to say, ‘If you come here, and you show up illegally, we’re going to release you,’ then more people are going to come, but they’re going to come through Mexico. Mexico has to deal with it. That’s the policy of the United States under Joe Biden. The Mexican government is going to say: ‘Fine, then our job is to move you through as quickly as possible, because we don’t want them staying here. We want them to go through as quickly as possible. We’re going to facilitate their movement.’

“Now if the president is saying, ‘No, you can’t come here anymore, we’re not going to allow you to come in,’ the Mexican government is going to have an incentive to say, ‘Well, you’re not coming through here, either.’ And that will go right down the chain. That will apply all the way down to Panama, where the Darien Gap is, where some of these journeys begin for many of these migrants. I do expect them to cooperate, because it’s in their interest to cooperate, but they’re only going to cooperate if it aligns with our policies, and [it] will under Donald Trump.”

On President-elect Trump’s support from people of faith:

“I can speak from personal experience as a Catholic and American and someone who voted [for] and supported Donald Trump. Our faith instills in us, hopefully, a set of values that are ancient and tested and proven and have been true for successful societies for thousands of years. But we are living in an era where really important people, really powerful people, are telling us that those values are not just wrong, but hateful. 

“If we believe, for example, that biological men should not be competing against women in women’s sports, or that we shouldn’t have schools where your son is being encouraged to believe he’s actually a girl and not a boy, we’re being told that if you if you speak out against these things, you’re some sort of an evil, retrograde, Neanderthal, backwards-thinking person. I think there’s a real resistance to the fact that we have very powerful people in charge of powerful institutions who openly, not just undermine, but mock the values that our faith tries to instill in us. 

“And then, of course, I also think people [of faith] have not ignored these selective prosecutions of peaceful protesters outside of abortion clinics, who are treated worse, by the way, than the rioters who burned down major cities in this country in the summer of 2020. I don’t think people have overlooked that, either.”

On Democrats’ response to the election:

“When you lose an election, it’s a tough thing. Some people come to grips with that better than others. Understand, they thought they were going to win. They were on stage with Beyonce and Oprah Winfrey and Taylor Swift. I think they were caught by surprise, not just by the loss, but by the sheer scale and scope of the rejection. That’s hard. 

“Look, we’ve always had a loyal opposition in this country. I think you have to remind yourself, there’s a difference between being opposed and being deranged. I think a lot of the opposition to Donald Trump is really based on derangement. They hate him so much because they have not been able to destroy him. Before Donald Trump, they were able to bully and intimidate center-right Republicans into compliance or into silence on a lot of these questions. This is the first time that someone has both the power and the willingness to fight back and to fight their fire with fire. They hate that. They hate the fact that they can’t intimidate him, that they can’t control him, that he doesn’t surrender, that he doesn’t cave. It just drives this derangement. I sensed some of that in her [Kamala Harris’s] speech the other day. But I also sensed a lot of shell shock.”

On the failure of Kamala Harris’s campaign:

“I think they were completely out of touch with what millions and millions of real people in everyday life are feeling and thinking in this country. Their campaign was focused on small bubbles in Washington, in New York, in LA, in the entertainment industry, in the activist class. They think that their activists on transgender issues, climate, and immigration—all of these activists on what they call social justice—are somehow reflective of the broader country. They are not. 

“These used to be the crazy professors in the faculty club at a university, and now they’ve been mainstreamed because of the power they have over major institutions, but they are not even close to the majority in huge swaths of our country. In many cases, they’re deeply offensive, and they come across as arrogant, preachy, and condescending, as if they think they’re better than you because of their progressive values versus your backward thinking. I just think they’re completely out of touch with that. But that’s what’s taken over their party, and that’s what’s driving their policies. It’s what’s driving the way they campaign.”

On foreign policy challenges facing the United States:

“I came to the Senate in 2010. The world we have today looks nothing like the world did in 2010. In 2010, we were in the last years of this unipolar world. The United States, basically, was the sole superpower. Today we’re not in that world. Today we are in a world where China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are increasingly cooperating with one another to undermine our interests in the world. We have now entered an era that has similarities to the Cold War, in that it requires us to be pragmatic, and it requires us [to prioritize].

“We are the greatest country in the world. We’re the richest. We’re the most powerful. But we, too, have limited resources. Every country does. We have to invest both our time and our money on things that serve our core national interests. We have to. There are a lot of great causes in the world, but we can’t be involved in all of them. We just can’t. We can’t afford it. No country can. You’d spread yourself too thin. We have to define what our core national interests are, and we have to really prioritize those. And that’s what I think you’re going to get [from a Trump-Vance Administration]. Yes, there are some really bad things happening in the world. But we can’t be involved in all of them. We have to pick the things that are most important to America and to our security. That’s the era we’re now in, and we need to accept that pretty quickly and start making those right decisions. 

“I think that’s what his foreign policy is going to be driven by, that and preventing war through strength, not through weakness. Weakness leads to war. Weakness leads to disaster. I don’t want us to be engaged in a war. Wars are debilitating for countries. There are times where you can’t avoid it. The Nazis needed to be defeated. Imperial Japan needed to be defeated. But you largely want to avoid war as much as you can, not at the price of your freedoms, of course. The way you do that is by being strong, by ensuring that your adversaries know they don’t want a war, either, because they can’t win any war against us. I think you’re going to have a policy of peace through strength.”

On the future of the war in Ukraine:

“I have tremendous admiration for the Ukrainians and how they have stood up to and fought a much larger and much more powerful country. What they’ve done is extraordinary, and I think we should acknowledge that. We’ve helped them, and other countries have helped them as well. I also think we need to acknowledge what the Biden Administration knows to be true, but refuses to acknowledge, and that is that this war, right now, is a stalemate. 

“Even if we poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of Ukraine, their ability to defeat a country that is simply just much larger [is very limited]. Russia can just make weapons faster. They can just conscript more people. It’s not a realistic option [to outright defeat them]. And we’re lying to people when we tell them you’re going to be able to go to Congress and get $60 billion every 10 months. That’s just not realistic. Add to that, Ukraine is being wiped out. Every day, Ukraine is being hit and damaged in ways that are going to take 100 years to repair and restore. So we do want to see that conflict end, and it’s going to require some very difficult choices. 

“I’m not going to get ahead of myself and tell you these are what the choices are, but I think it’s one of those instances that’s going to call for pragmatism. I don’t like what Vladimir Putin did, and we do have an interest in what happens there. But I think the future of the 21st century is going to largely be defined by what happens in the Indo-Pacific. And I think China would love for us to be bogged down in Europe in a conflict and not focused on what’s happening in the Indo-Pacific, where, every day, they are threatening not just Taiwan, but the Philippines.”

On the United States’ involvement in NATO:

“[NATO is] a military alliance, and an alliance means you have partners, and every partner does their part. The countries on the eastern flank of NATO, whether it’s Germany, Poland, or Lithuania—the ones closest to Russia—they’re doing their part. The Poles, as an example, spend above the 3 percent requirement. Other countries in Western Europe do not. They have these huge social safety nets. They’ve built these massive government programs. You retire at 55, you get all these things, and they spend less on their military, of course, because they’ve got NATO to protect them, which is largely the United States. 

“I think Donald Trump’s argument is the same argument that every American president for the last 25 years has had. And that is: ‘We’re the biggest country. We’re going to contribute a lot to NATO. But you guys are rich countries. You need to do your part as well.’ Here we are, every day, in our own country, grappling with how we are to provide assistance to Americans, even as we have these defense requirements that we’re spending a lot of money on. And these countries are not making that choice. Donald Trump is just saying out loud and more repeatedly what every American president before him has complained about, and that is that rich countries in Western Europe have not done their part in terms of stepping up to the plate and contributing more to NATO. 

“I think you’re going to continue to hear him say, ‘We’re not against this alliance,’ but it has to be a real alliance. And rich countries in this alliance have to do their fair share of contribution. In the end, they are the closest in proximity to the problem. I don’t think that’s unrealistic. I think the average, everyday person in America would say that makes all the sense in the world.”

On the United States’ relationship with Communist China:

“President Trump understands what a lot of people who have spent time in politics sometimes forget, which is that you can be friendly with someone. Look, China is a big, powerful country. They have nuclear weapons. We have to be able to talk to them. No one is saying, ‘We’re not going to talk to you anymore.’ It’s not high school, where you just stop talking to somebody because you don’t like them. We have to deal with these people. By the same token, he’s also said, ‘You’re not going to be able to do in America what we’re not allowed to do in China.’ 

“Why do Chinese companies get to do whatever they want in our economy, but our companies do not? How come they get to export whatever they want here, but they restrict what we’re able to send there? How come they’re able to steal our company secrets and then open up a competitor and put American companies out of business? On the other hand, they don’t get that in reverse. All Donald Trump is saying is, ‘We’re going to get along, but we’re going to get along on an even playing field,’ not one in which China continues to be allowed to cheat and steal and get away with things that are bad for America. 

“Again, if I went out, right now, and walked two blocks to the nearest bakery, here in Miami, Florida, and I said that, everybody in there would say that makes all the sense in the world. But somehow all these highly credentialed experts in Washington think this is crazy talk. They’re the ones that are crazy. This is the way things have to be. I think China would respect that a lot more than some of this doublespeak and silliness that you get from the current administration.”

On the Iranian regime’s bid for power in the Middle East:

“It’s not just possible to restore [the Abraham Accords]. I think it’s possible to expand them. And I think it all begins by recognizing what Donald Trump understands very clear, [which is that] the source of conflict in the Middle East is not Israel. It’s not the Palestinian question. It’s the Ayatollah in Iran. The Islamic Republic, the revolution, they want to be the dominant power in the region. Without Iran, there is no Hamas. Without Iran, there is no Hezbollah. Without Iran, there are no Shia militias attacking us from Iraq and Syria. Without Iran, none of these things happen. Without Iran, the Houthis don’t exist. They don’t have the weapons they have now to threaten global shipping in the Red Sea. 

“They [the leaders of the Iranian regime] are the source of all of it. So Iran has to be deterred. And the only thing that Iran cares about more than being the most powerful country in the Middle East is surviving in power. I think Donald Trump is a threat to that, which is why they want to kill him. Let me be clear. They want to kill Donald Trump. That’s been documented in open source. And they fear him [because he would] reestablish deterrence, where they clearly understand that if they continue on this pattern, it threatens their regime and its survival. 

“I don’t know why Joe Biden doesn’t pick up the phone and say, ‘If anything happens to Donald Trump or any American, for that matter, and you guys are behind it, the Ayatollah is in danger.’ With that message alone, these threats would go away. They refuse to do it. That’s the way you have to deal [with the Iranian regime]. These are not Belgian diplomats at the United Nations. These are radical Shia clerics who believe they have a religious obligation to dominate the region and drive us out and drive every Jew out of the region as well. You have to be very clear and very firm in how you deal with them. This administration has not been, but Donald Trump will be and has been in the past.”

On the realignment in the Republican Party: 

“The Republican Party of 2008, 2010, 2012? That Republican Party doesn’t exist anymore. The Republican Party that exists now is a Republican Party that is fueled by men and women of every race and ethnicity in the country that you can imagine, who are largely working people and small business owners. They are not elites on Wall Street. They are not elites in New York. They are not elites in Washington, D.C. These are people that work for a living. They take a shower after work, not before work, and they’re raising their families. That’s the core of our party. That’s the core of the Republican Party. That is the coalition that drove us to this enormous win and a majority in the Senate, hopefully keeping a majority in the House as well. That’s the future of the Republican Party.

“More than the Republican Party, that is a governing coalition. This is a coalition in which you can put together 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House to actually get things done. The reason why we have gridlock in our political process is that we haven’t had a governing coalition in America for 25 years. You can build a bipartisan consensus on these items and govern the country, but we have to actually go do it. We can’t just sit back and say, we won the election, and now that’s a license to do whatever we want. No, this is a mandate to do what you said you would do.”