When history gazes back upon the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, one question will stand out: Who was really running the country? Because it certainly wasn’t the so-called commander in chief.

But perhaps, it wasn’t really a question of who. Maybe we were governed by something much closer to an invisible hand of wokeness. Maybe we were governed by a twisted worldview, not a conspiracy or solitary figure.

It is reasonable, and almost comforting, to believe that Barack Obama or some other Democrat luminary was sitting at the center of the political universe like Vishnu, myriad arms pulling levers and flicking switches. But the reality might be far more troubling.

The reality might be that progressive politics have created a self-perpetuating deep state bureaucracy that, left unchecked, couldn’t care less who sits behind the Resolute Desk.

There are a handful of behind-the-scenes power brokers, hiding from public view of late, who clearly had a lot of sway in the Biden White House: Chief of Staff Jeff Zeints, longtime ally Mike Donilon, Senior Adviser Anita Dunn, and the ever-present Susan Rice.

But in all likelihood, they were not running some textbook conspiracy theory to rule in Biden’s name. In fact, the entire Biden administration looks more like a broken play in football; It really was just trying to stay on its feet.

It is telling that the front-facing cabinet members of Biden’s, unlike his hotshot behind-the-scenes team, were feckless, awful and never fired for anything.

Watching our current Secretary of State Marco Rubio cross swords with Democrats in his Senate testimony this week couldn’t help but remind us of someone like hapless Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, sitting in those same rooms, like a scolded child unable to mount a defense for his open borders.

Or how about Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who seemed to have a special Zippo lighter designed to let him fire up conflagrations from Ukraine to the Middle East? Or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — when he was available, of course — whose Afghanistan withdrawal made the Keystone Cops look like the A Team?

For four years this ‘aw shucks’ brigade of midwits was allowed to drive our nation off a cliff precisely because nobody was actually in charge.

When the border was a mess and Mayorkas embarrassed himself on the Hill, what would be the process for firing him? The boss is oblivious. Who would actually care enough to go after him? None of the insiders I mentioned above. It wasn’t their legacy, wasn’t their problem. So no accountability.

No. We were governed by a set of progressive assumptions, much like the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith wrote about. In progressive politics the questions simply answer themselves. It is a system.

Why would Mayorkas let the southern border become a turnstile for foreign gang members? Because first and foremost, we must think of the innocent migrants, even if the cruel open borders policy is getting many of them trafficked.

Why couldn’t the Biden administration back off of the hill of men playing in women’s sports when everyone without pronouns on their business card knows it’s absurd? Because progressive ideology dictates that the oppressed must be right.

Why was the Biden administration unable to forcefully call out antisemitism on our college campuses? Because Jews are now white-adjacent and privileged. 

We were governed by a set of left-wing assumptions.

Think about what almost happened. Even if Democrats had somehow gotten Methusela Biden over the finish line, with his new cancer diagnosis, we now know we would have wound up with Kamala ‘I’m not taking questions at this time’ Harris as president.

Could there be a better example of the fact that, to Democrats, it doesn’t matter in the slightest who is actually in charge?

We do not have two functioning political parties today. We have the GOP and a Democrat Party that is like the Borg from Star Trek, it speaks with a single voice that is somehow always dead wrong.

There is a reason that we have a president. Leadership matters, and in the last 120 or so days, from securing the border to securing trade deals, President Donald Trump has exemplified just how crucial his job really is.

In retrospect, we look back on four years of Biden’s presidency and ask ourselves, what the hell just happened?

What happened was a reign of woke policy agendas that flooded our border, inflated our prices, wrought war across the globe and infiltrated Catholic churches looking for fantastical right-wing extremism.

We may never know exactly what happened, but one thing we do know. It can never be allowed to happen again.

It’s the first time in nearly a decade that a special counsel is not investigating something related to a sitting or former president, but the remnants and revelations of past special counsel probes continue to break through the news cycle.

Every attorney general-appointed special counsel since 2017 has now released their reports, issued their indictments, received their verdicts, shuttered their offices, disassembled their teams and returned to their government or private sector roles.

Essentially, they’ve all moved on. 

First, in 2017, there was Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating whether members of the first Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

Then, in 2019, there was Special Counsel John Durham, who was investigating the origins of the Mueller investigation and the original FBI probe into then-candidate Donald Trump and his campaign. 

Soon, it was 2022, and Special Counsel Jack Smith began investigating then-former President Trump for his alleged improper retention of classified records held at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after his presidency. Smith also began investigating events surrounding the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Next up, in 2023, Special Counsel Robert Hur was appointed and began investigating now-former President Joe Biden’s alleged improper retention of classified records, which occurred during his vice presidency as part of the Obama administration.

Later in 2023, David Weiss, who had served as U.S. attorney in Delaware and had been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018, was appointed special counsel to continue his yearslong investigation into the now-former first son.

At this point, those investigations have all come to their resolutions: Mueller, in 2019, found there was no collusion; Durham, in 2022, found that the FBI ignored ‘clear warning signs’ of a Hillary Clinton-led plan to inaccurately tie her opponent to Russia using politically funded and uncorroborated opposition research; Smith, in 2022, charged Trump but had those charges tossed; Hur, in 2023, opted against charging Biden; Weiss, in 2023, charged Hunter Biden, who was convicted and later pardoned by his father.

But the curiosity surrounding those investigations that dominated headlines for the better part of a decade remains, largely because of so many loose ends and the prevalence of unanswered questions.

A trickle, sometimes more like a flood, of information and news related to those probes continues to seep into the news cycle.

On Friday night, audio of Biden’s interview with Hur was made public. Hur closed his investigation in 2024 without charging the then-president and infamously described him as a ‘sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.’

Some congressional lawmakers had demanded the release of the audio of Biden’s interview amid questions about the former president’s memory lapses and mental acuity.

The audio – as expected, based on the transcript of the interview released in 2024 – showed Biden struggling with key memories, including when his son, Beau, died; when he left the vice presidency; and why he had classified documents he shouldn’t have had.

In a throwback to another special counsel investigation, the United States Secret Service last week paid a visit to former FBI Director James Comey after he posted a now-deleted image on social media that many interpreted as a veiled call for an assassination of Trump.

Comey on Thursday posted to Instagram an image of seashells on the beach arranged to show ’86 47′ with the caption, ‘Cool shell formation on my beach walk.’

Some interpreted it as a coded message, with ’86’ being slang for ‘get rid of’ and ’47’ referring to Trump, who is the 47th president.

Comey later deleted the post and wrote a message that said, ‘I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down.’

Comey was the FBI director who, in 2016, allowed the opening of the bureau’s original Trump-Russia investigation, known inside the FBI as ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’ Trump fired Comey in May 2017. Days later, Mueller was appointed as special counsel to take over that investigation, thus beginning the string of special counsels.

Durham investigated the origins of the FBI probe and found that the FBI did not have any actual evidence to support the start of that investigation. Durham also found that the CIA, in 2016, received intelligence to show that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to tie then-candidate Trump to Russia; intelligence that the FBI, led by Comey, ignored.

On July 28, 2016, then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Barack Obama on a plan from one of Clinton’s campaign foreign policy advisers ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.’ 

Biden, Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper were in the Brennan-Obama briefing, according to the Durham report.

After that briefing, the CIA properly forwarded that information through a counterintelligence operational lead (CIOL) to Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok with the subject line ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’

Fox News first obtained and reported on the CIOL in October 2020, which stated, ‘The following information is provided for the exclusive use of your bureau for background investigative action or lead purposes as appropriate.’

‘Per FBI verbal request, CIA provides the below examples of information the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE fusion cell has gleaned to date,’ the memo continued. ‘An exchange (REDACTED) discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.’

By January 2017, Comey had notified Trump of a dossier, known as the Steele dossier, that contained salacious and unverified allegations about Trump’s purported coordination with the Russian government, a key document prompting the opening of the probe. 

The dossier was authored by Christopher Steele, an ex-British intelligence officer, and commissioned by Fusion GPS. Clinton’s presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS during the 2016 election cycle.

It was eventually determined that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier through the law firm Perkins Coie.

Durham, in his report, said the FBI, led by Comey, ‘failed to act on what should have been – when combined with other incontrovertible facts – a clear warning sign that the FBI might then be the target of an effort to manipulate or influence the law enforcement process for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election.’

But that intelligence referral document is just one of many that tells the real story behind the investigation that clouded the first Trump administration. 

And Trump has taken steps to ensure the American public has full access to all the documents. 

Trump, in late March, signed an executive order directing the FBI to immediately declassify files concerning the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. 

The FBI is expected to release those documents in the coming weeks. 

As for the other special counsels, Smith recently had his own moment in the news cycle.

FBI Director Kash Patel on Thursday disbanded a public corruption squad in the bureau’s Washington field office. That was the same office that aided Smith’s investigation into Trump.

As for Weiss, after the release of the Biden audio tapes calling further into question the former president’s mental acuity, some, including Trump, are now calling for a review of the pardon of Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden was found guilty of three felony firearm offenses stemming from Weiss’ investigation. The first son was also charged with federal tax crimes regarding the failure to pay at least $1.4 million in taxes. Before his trial, Hunter Biden entered a surprise guilty plea. The charges carried up to 17 years behind bars. His sentencing was scheduled for Dec. 16, 2024, but his father, then-President Biden, pardoned him on all charges in December 2024.

Trump alleged in a Truth Social post in March that former President Biden’s pardons were ‘void’ due to the ‘fact that they were done by Autopen.’ 

‘The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,’ Trump wrote.

‘In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime,’ Trump added.

Weiss, in his final report, blasted then-President Biden’s characterizations of the probe into Hunter Biden, which Weiss said were ‘wrong’ and ‘unfairly’ maligned Justice Department officials. He also said the presidential pardon made it ‘inappropriate’ for him to discuss whether any additional charges against the first son were warranted.

President Donald Trump evoked Elon Musk during his Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president on Wednesday, during talks about the ongoing attacks white farmers in the country are facing.

Trump went back and forth with President Cyril Ramaphosa over whether what is occurring in South Africa is indeed a ‘genocide’ against white farmers. At one point, during the conversation, a reporter asked Trump how the United States and South Africa might be able to improve their relations. 

The president said that relations with South Africa are an important matter to him, noting he has several personal friends who are from there, including professional golfers Ernie Els and Retief Goosen, who were present at Tuesday’s meeting, and Elon Musk.

Unprompted, Trump added that while Musk may be a South African native, he doesn’t want to ‘get [him] involved’ in the ongoing foreign diplomacy matters that played out during Tuesday’s meeting. 

‘I don’t want to get Elon involved. That’s all I have to do, get him into another thing,’ Trump said to light laughter. ‘But Elon happens to be from South Africa. This is what Elon wanted. He actually came here on a different subject — sending rockets to Mars — OK? He likes that better. He likes that subject better. But Elon’s from South Africa, and I don’t want to talk to him about that. I don’t think it’s fair to him.’

Musk, who was present at the Oval Office meeting Tuesday, has been an open critic of his native-born country’s government and has described the ongoing conflict there as a ‘genocide.’

Ahead of the meeting with Ramaphosa earlier this month, Musk-owned X garnered backlash over its AI chatbot, Grok, providing unsolicited responses about attacks against white farmers in South Africa. 

Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which makes the technology for Grok, said following complaints that an ‘unauthorized modification’ to Grok’s algorithm is the reason why it kept talking about race and politics in South Africa, according to the Associated Press.

Republicans outperformed Democrats on voter registration in four key battleground states between the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, according to research by the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC). 

The bipartisan political consultant non-profit teamed up with analysts from Data Trust, a conservative organization, and Target Smart, which has aligned with Democrats in past election cycles. Compiling data from the 2020 and 2024 elections in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the research suggests a national shift in voter registration toward the Republican Party.

‘We wanted a bipartisan analysis because there are so many conventional wisdoms this election challenged,’ Larry Huynh of Trilogy Interactive andDemocrat AAPC Board President said. ‘The data was pretty clear that the Democrats were caught off guard with voter registration and turnout efforts and failed to mount a sufficiently compelling counter-effort to compete. We should all learn from this and take a deeper dive into our voter registration and turnout operations.’

AAPC unveiled the research this week during the 2025 Pollie Awards, a political communications awards program, in Colorado Springs, Colo. 

‘The Trump campaign and the Republican Party deserve considerable recognition for their voter registration success and turnout efforts and the party should try to build on these successes,’ Kyle Roberts of AdImpact and the incoming Republican AAPC Board President told Fox News Digital. 

From 2020 to 2024, the bipartisan political analysis found the share of registered Democrat voters dropped in all four battleground states. Meanwhile, the share of registered unaffiliated and Republican voters increased in Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania, according to the data compiled by Data Trust and Target Smart. 

In three out of four of the states analyzed, unaffiliated voters accounted for the largest electoral increase. Democrats saw the largest electoral drop between 2020 and 2024 across the four battleground states, following the same trend as voter registration. 

Voter turnout across party lines dropped in three out of the four battleground states analyzed, the data revealed. And while Democrat turnout dropped more than Republican turnout in those three states, the difference was less than a percentage point in every state but Arizona. 

Data Trust and Target Smart also analyzed trends across demographic groups, including Black, Hispanic and rural voters. The overall increase in Republican registration, turnout and electoral growth was consistent across the demographic groups analyzed. 

President Donald Trump won all seven battleground states in 2024 – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans maintained control of the House of Representatives and won back the Senate. 

70% of voters believed the country was on the wrong track and wanted change in the 2024 presidential election, according to Fox News Voter Analysis. The economy and immigration were top issues as Trump tied inflation to President Joe Biden’s administration and vowed to secure the border on his first day in office. 

As AAPC seeks to analyze Republicans’ inroads with swing state voters in 2024, Democrats are facing their own reckoning this week as a new book reveals the alleged ‘cover-up’ of Biden’s cognitive decline. 

CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson’s book, ‘Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,’ released on Tuesday, paints an unflattering picture of Democrats’ losses in 2024. 

While political commentators focus on what Democrats did wrong in 2024, AAPC’s new data reveals what Republicans did right on voter registration and turnout. 

The Republican National Committee (RNC) opened ‘Black Americans for Trump’ and ‘Latino Americans for Trump’ offices across the battleground states in 2024, seeking to expand their reach among traditionally Democrat voting blocs. 

Over 160,000 volunteers joined the RNC’s ‘Protect the Vote’ efforts on election integrity in 2024, which included more than 100 lawsuits and recruiting poll watchers across the country. Seizing on Republicans’ election distrust following Trump’s loss in 2020, the RNC built a coalition of supporters across the country that propelled voters to the polls and landed Trump a win in 2024. 

House Republicans believe they are close to passing Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill.

After the meeting at the White House, with the president and members of the Freedom Caucus, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) suggested that the House could vote in the overnight on the Big, Beautiful Bill. 

But it quickly became apparent that was a physical – and parliamentary – impossibility. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) later introduced a ‘manager’s amendment’ to make final changes to the bill. Those alterations were designed to coax holdouts to vote yes. 

It’s now likely that the House debates the bill in the early hours of Thursday with a vote in perhaps the late morning. 

But Democratic dilatory tactics could further delay passage of the bill. 

It’s possible Democrats could engineer protest votes to ‘adjourn’ the House. Calls to ‘adjourn’ hold special privileges in the House and require immediate consideration.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) could also take advantage of a special debate time on the floor to ‘filibuster’ the measure. Top House leaders from both parties are afforded what’s called the ‘Magic Minute.’ That’s where they are allotted a ‘minute’ to speak on an issue. But the House really allows them to speak as long as they wish out of deference to their position. Then-House Minority Leader and future Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) set the record for the longest speech in November, 2021, delaying considering of former President Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ Act. McCarthy spoke for eight hours and 32 minutes.

The House Freedom Caucus seems much more satisfied with the upcoming changes to the bill. Especially after the meeting with the president.

But here is the main reason the House wants to move this as quickly as possible:

Republicans don’t want the bill to fester. Problems develop the longer this sits out there. So when you think you have the votes, you put it on the floor and force the issue. There could also be attendance problems later on Thursday or beyond.

This subject has been jawboned to death for weeks. Johnson said weeks ago he wanted this passed by Memorial Day. So Johnson – and President Trump – want GOPers who are skeptical or holdouts to put up or shut up. You do that by putting the bill on the floor and requiring a vote.

That said, it’s possible the GOP leadership might not have the votes ahead of the actual roll call vote. So calling a vote applies pressure on those holdouts. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) used to ‘grow’ the vote on the House floor. In other words, they would start the vote – not having all the ducks in order – and then ‘grow’ the vote during the actual roll call and cajoling or twisting arms. The same may happen today.

Also, if the vote is a little shy of passage, Republican leaders could hold the vote open and then single out those Republicans who have either voted no or have not cast ballots. Then the leadership can really turn up the heat and accuse them of not supporting the president’s agenda. If push comes to shove, they can then have the President weigh in and use his powers to coax those holdouts to vote yes.

Here’s the long-term outlook: If the House passes the bill, this goes to the Senate. This will be a project which will consume most of June. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) wants this done by July 4. But the question is what the Senate actually produces. The House and Senate must be on the same page. If the Senate crafts a different legislative product, then this must return to the House to sync up. Either the House eats what the Senate put together. Or the House and Senate must blend their differing versions together into a single, unified bill. That could take most of July. Remember that this bill includes an increase in the debt ceiling. The Treasury says Congress must lift the debt ceiling by early August.

President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ could be headed for a House-wide vote as soon as Wednesday night after its approval by a key committee in an 8-4 vote.

The House Rules Committee, the gatekeeper for most legislation before it gets to the full chamber, first met at 1 a.m. Wednesday to advance the massive bill in time for Speaker Mike Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline for sending it to the Senate.

The panel adjourned shortly before 11 p.m. Wednesday after all four Democrats voted against the measure and all present Republicans voted for it. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, was the lone lawmaker to miss the vote.

Proceedings crept on for hours as Democrats on the committee repeatedly accursed Republicans of trying to move the bill ‘in the dead of night’ and of trying to raise costs for working class families at the expense of the wealthy.

Democratic lawmakers also dragged out the process with dozens of amendments that stretched from early Tuesday well into Wednesday.

Republicans, meanwhile, contended the bill is aimed at boosting small businesses, farmers, and low- and middle-income families, while reducing waste, fraud, and abuse in the government safety net.

In a sign of the meeting’s high stakes, Johnson, R-La., himself visited with committee Republicans shortly before 1 a.m. and then again just after sunrise.

But the committee kicked off its meeting to advance the bill with several key outstanding issues – blue state Republicans pushing for a raise in state and local tax (SALT) deduction caps, and conservatives demanding stricter work requirement rules for Medicaid as well as a full repeal of green energy subsidies granted in former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

A long-awaited amendment to the legislation aimed at fixing those issues debuted around 9 p.m. on Wednesday evening.

The amendment would speed up the implementation of Medicaid work requirements for certain able-bodied recipients from 2029 to December 2026, and award states that did not follow Obamacare-era expansion plans with more federal dollars.

It would also end a host of green energy tax subsidies by 2028 if they did not demonstrate relatively quick return on investment.

Democrats, meanwhile, accused Republicans of hastily trying to change the legislation without proper notice.

Johnson told Fox News Digital during his Wednesday 1 a.m. that he was ‘very close’ to a deal with divided House GOP factions.

Returning from that meeting, Johnson signaled the House would press ahead with its vote either late Wednesday or early Thursday.

But the legislation’s passage through the House Rules Committee does not necessarily mean it will fare well in a House-wide vote.

A pair of House Rules Committee members, Roy and Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and were two of the conservative House Freedom Caucus members who had called for the House-wide vote to be delayed on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the White House bore down hard on those rebels, demanding a vote ‘immediately’ in an official statement of policy that backed the House GOP bill.

Several of those fiscal hawks were more optimistic after a meeting at the White House with Trump and Johnson, however.

Republicans are working to pass Trump’s policies on tax, immigration, energy, defense and the national debt all in one massive bill via the budget reconciliation process.

Budget reconciliation lowers the Senate’s threshold for passage from 60 votes to 51, thereby allowing the party in power to skirt the minority — in this case, Democrats — to pass sweeping pieces of legislation, provided they deal with the federal budget, taxation or the national debt.

House Republicans are hoping to advance Trump’s bill through the House and Senate by the Fourth of July.

Marco Rubio told Fox News that far-left Democrats espousing regret over voting to confirm him as secretary of state is likely just ‘confirmation’ that he is doing a good job.

Democrat Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Rubio during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday that he ‘regret[ted] voting’ to confirm him as secretary of state after indicating as much on ‘Fox News Sunday’ in March. Rubio shot back at the hearing that Van Hollen’s regret just proves he is doing a good job, and he subsequently told Fox News that the same goes for other Democrats who are expressing regret over their nod of approval to him earlier this year when he was confirmed by the Senate 99-0.

‘In some cases, depending on … whoever you’re talking about and what they stand for, the fact that they don’t like what I’m doing is a confirmation I’m doing a good job,’ Rubio said. ‘That’s how I feel about it.’

A growing number of Democrats are coming out against Rubio despite voting to confirm him, with the bulk of the criticism describing him as a sell-out to the Trump administration.

‘I don’t recognize Secretary Rubio,’ Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., added during the Tuesday Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing with Van Hollen, noting that in the past she had viewed him as ‘a bipartisan’ and ‘pragmatic’ person. 

‘I’m not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration’s destruction of U.S. global leadership. I’m simply disappointed,’ Rosen said.

Last week, Democrat Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz lamented that Rubio has aligned himself ‘so closely’ with President Donald Trump.

‘President Trump’s narrow and transactional view of the world is not news to anybody. But what is genuinely surprising to me is that Secretary Rubio is aligning himself so closely with it,’ Schatz said during a live event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations last week.

‘This is someone who, up until four months ago, was an internationalist. Someone who believed in America flexing its powers in all manners, but especially through foreign assistance,’ Schatz continued. ‘And yet, he is now responsible for the evisceration of the whole enterprise. He’s a colleague. I voted for him. We talk all the time. But what I’m trying to understand is: What happened?’

Schatz noted that he hopes to see Rubio ‘reemerge, reassert himself and save the enterprise.’

Rubio’s supportive stance on Trump’s foreign aid cuts, his defense of the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his alleged lack of action to help get him back to the U.S., his approach to the Russia-Ukraine war, and Rubio’s decision to pull visas from foreign college students in the U.S. for stoking anti-Israel sentiment on university campuses are all issues Democrats have pointed to for why they regret voting to confirm Rubio.

The secretary’s alleged role in bringing white South African refugees to the U.S. was also something for which Rubio was chastised by Democrats during his Tuesday testimony on Capitol Hill.

‘I think a lot of us thought that Marco Rubio was going to stand up to Donald Trump,’ Democrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said in March during an interview on CNN. ‘Marco Rubio has not, and that’s been a great disappointment to many of his former colleagues in the Senate.’