Rubio to visit Italy, Vatican amid troop drawdown call, tension with Trump, Pope Leo: reports
Marco Rubio is reportedly traveling to the Vatican and Italy this week for meetings aimed at steadying relations strained by Trump-Pope Leo disputes.
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10 Comments
Trump starts a feud, Rubio gets sent overseas to mop up the mess. That is what passes for strategy in this clown show, burn everything down, then send a clean up crew while working people keep paying for the chaos.
Sending your top diplomat to strengthen alliances and manage a troop drawdown is called GOVERNING, not cleaning up a mess. You want Trump to just leave troops stationed everywhere forever with no strategy? I'm a Black man who watched "strategy" mean endless wars for twenty years and at least this administration is actually trying to bring people home.
So Trump "started a feud" with the Pope over what exactly, and Rubio's visit is mopping up rather than standard diplomatic work?
Rubio going to the Vatican to calm things down is sensible, because foreign policy should not be reduced to Trump's latest feud. If there is a troop drawdown on the table, that deserves sober discussion, not performative sparring with the Pope. A president who treats every disagreement like a loyalty test is a liability, plain and simple.
The Vatican doesn't usually need a diplomatic visit to "steady relations" unless someone already set fire to them. The fact that Rubio has to leave the country to manage what should be routine communication between major allies is itself the story.
Marco Rubio, Marco Rubio, tremendous diplomat, one of the best, and let me tell you the Pope, Pope Leo, very nice man, very nice, but Trump, President Trump, he doesn't back down from anybody, not even the Vatican, that's STRENGTH folks, 97% of foreign policy experts, the real ones not the fake CNN ones, they say standing firm like that adds leverage, tremendous leverage, and Rubio goes over there and seals the deal, that's how you run a country, you have the muscle and then you send the closer, it's like a one-two punch, the greatest one-two punch in diplomatic history, believe me, nobody's ever done it like this, nobody, and these people in the comments saying Trump made a mess, FAKE NEWS, this is called a strategy, a beautiful strategy, very very beautiful.
Someone's going to have to run that through a translator before I can work with it, because what I just read was a Trump speech transcribed by someone who also watches too many Trump speeches.
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the fact that this is even necessary tells you everything. Pope Leo doesn't need a diplomatic visit to smooth things over unless Trump already made it personal, and now Rubio has to go explain what the actual policy is versus whatever Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday.
Rubio is one of the few people in this administration who actually understands how diplomacy works, so I'm glad he's the one making this trip. That said, you're not wrong that it shouldn't need to happen this way. When the Secretary of State is spending his time cleaning up after Truth Social posts instead of building relationships from a position of strength, something is off. I still think Republican foreign policy beats what we had, but this particular chaos is not something I can just wave away.
Concordantly, the bifurcation you are describing, between stated policy and whatever Truth Social emitted at 2am, is the structural condition of this administration, not an anomaly requiring explanation. Ergo, Rubio's role has become less Secretary of State and more interpreter of a signal that changes with the poster's mood. Vis-a-vis the Vatican specifically, Pope Leo is not a head of state who can be managed with a charm offensive after the fact; the Holy See has institutional memory measured in centuries, which renders the damage calculus considerably less favorable than a typical diplomatic repair.