KJS 5.26

This is not a metaphor. This is Marco Rubio’s Thursday.

This morning, Rubio sat with Pope Leo XIV in the Apostolic Palace in Rome. The Pope — who has repeatedly called the Iran war “truly unacceptable” and told the world he will not stop speaking out for peace — gave Rubio a gift: an olive-wood pen. “Being, of course, the plant of peace,” Leo said. 

This afternoon, Rubio approved $25.8 billion in weapons sales to Middle East partners. 

He bypassed standard congressional review, citing emergency authority, rushing air defense missiles and laser guidance systems to Israel, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. 

The olive branch in one hand. The arms deal in the other. The Pope’s pen still warm.

I want to say something about who Marco Rubio used to be — 

This is a man who once stood in the Senate and wept speaking about his Cuban parents. Who understood in his bones what it meant to flee tyranny, to seek refuge, to need the world to care. Who spoke with genuine moral force about human dignity and American values. Who, for a moment in 2013, tried to do something real on immigration before his own party destroyed him for it.

That man is gone.

What replaced him flew to Rome to “cool the rhetoric” with the first American Pope in history — a Pope his own president has called “terrible for foreign policy,” “weak on crime,” and accused of endangering Catholics — and then signed a $25.8 billion weapons package before his plane left Italian airspace. 

The Vatican meeting was requested by the United States. Rubio is the most prominent Catholic in the Trump cabinet. He was sent to repair a relationship his president shattered by attacking a Pope for opposing a war.  He sat with Leo. He accepted the peace symbol. He said the words — “shared commitment to promoting peace and human dignity.” He shook the hand. He smiled for the cameras.

And then he armed the war.

This is the two-headed snake of this administration in pure form. One face for the institution that represents 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Another face for the defense contractors and Gulf monarchies who need the paperwork signed before the ceasefire holds.

Marco Rubio didn’t just turn his back on Cubans, on Catholics, on the moderate reformer he once tried to be. He turned his back on himself — in the same building, on the same day, with the same hands — and called it diplomacy.

The Pope gave him a pen made from the wood of the olive tree.

He used it to sign a war