Comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday before thousands of State Department were expected to get pink slips drew the attention of MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire and the New Yorker's Susan Glasser.
With the Supreme Court giving Donald Trump's administration cover to pursue mass firings, Rubio went ahead with the a purge in a department he called "bloated" and then added he was rooting out adherents of a "radical political ideology."
That led to raised eyebrows on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
"The mass firings are a part of a reorganization of the agency that includes closing or merging more than 300 bureaus and offices," Lemire prompted his guest. "The plan was unveiled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio back in May. He called his department 'bloated' and said that the changes would better align it with core American values and root out pockets of 'radical political ideology.'"
"First of all, that quote is a remarkable quote from Marco Rubio, formally, not only an establishment type Republican, but a huge proponent of diplomacy and American soft power around the world," Glasser offered. "You know, the flip-flop by Marco Rubio is one of the more dramatic, if underappreciated stories in Trump 2.0."
"And you know that quote, what does it do? It underscores the idea that it's not just a kind of an inward-looking, isolationist foreign policy that the Trump administration is pursuing right now, Jonathan. But it's actually a war against radical political ideology. It's 'that's the enemy within,' this is a modern day version, essentially, of a kind of McCarthyism that you're seeing," she added.
"I think this administration isn't so much focused on countering adversaries overseas as it is in a series of loyalty purges from within," she later elaborated. "We just heard those horrifying statistics about FEMA and not only the vacancies there, but the idea that the secretary of Homeland Security would want to be personally signing off on minor decisions because they don't trust federal government employees."
"But, of course, Russia and China have radically expanded their presence overseas in countries around the world in order to counter the United States and its soft power, so this is like an own goal once again," Glasser told the host.
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