“Grow Up”: Marco Rubio Brushes Off Trump’s Cartoonishly Evil Meetings

Secretary of State Marco Rubio doesn’t see anything wrong with how Donald Trump is interacting with America’s foreign adversaries.

The secretary defended Trump’s intended meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, telling reporters Tuesday morning that the U.S. president’s detractors need to “grow up.”  

“People need to grow up when it comes to foreign policy a little bit. I don’t think it’s unusual for the three most powerful, nuclear-armed nations on earth—for their leaders to communicate with one another,” Rubio said. “I think it makes all the sense in the world.”

Rubio argued that Trump “does not consider talking to someone to be a concession.”

“For example, how are you going to reach a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine if you don’t talk to Russia and Ukraine? You have to talk to them, right?” Rubio continued. “That’s the bottom line of diplomacy and negotiation.”

“Frankly, I think if there’s an opportunity … to have a conversation about things like arms control, that would be a very positive thing for the world,” he said. “I think the world is a safer place when the leaders of the world are at least communicating with each other.”

Trump mused Monday that he would be open to an unprecedented three-way meeting with Xi and Putin regarding nuclear weapons and disarmament. 

“We would have it to talk about nuclear weapons and denuclearization,” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it. I’m sure we’d talk about other things like trade too.”

But the optics of Trump’s latest encounters with China and Russia have leaned more toward kowtowing than communicating. Last year, Trump had the U.S. military literally roll out a red carpet for Putin during his first visit to the U.S. in more than a decade. Trump did the same for Xi last month, when service members were filmed on their hands and knees picking and brushing imperfections out of the carpet fibers.

Why was President Donald Trump waving at empty space?

A video of the president departing for Kansas Monday afternoon showed him wandering off across the White House’s newly renovated helicopter pad, waving, saluting, and bowing as if he were interacting with a crowd of onlookers. When the camera panned out, however, it was clear that there was no one in the vicinity.

From another angle, Trump can be seen dragging his right leg and patting it as he approaches Marine One. He suddenly stops walking and starts waving to no one. Meanwhile, his aides approached from an entirely different direction.

Users on X speculated that the president might’ve been hallucinating or waving at his reflection—both troubling possibilities.

Brian Krassenstein, a political podcaster and social media influencer critical of Trump, responded to the strange moment. “I now have absolutely no doubt that Donald Trump has major mental decline,” he wrote on X. “Just think for one minute if Joe Biden had waved into the abyss like Trump just did here. Imagine what Fox News would be saying.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has appeared to wander off confusedly. In October last year, Trump seemed to forget where he was going as he walked through a room filled with dignitaries and a military band during a visit to Japan, at one point even leaving Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi behind.

This strange behavior is just the latest example of Trump’s apparent cognitive decline. Since returning to office, the president has often appeared to lose track of his thoughts, his whereabouts, and even his grasp on the English language.

Harris County, Texas—Texas’s most populous county, which Kamala Harris won in 2024 with 52 percent of the vote—broke its early voting record on Monday, eclipsing the previous mark by a whopping 41,000 votes.

More than 104,600 people in Harris County voted in person on Monday, the first day of early voting in Texas, according to the county’s elections department. That breaks the previous record set in 2018, when 63,188 votes were cast and Democrats went on to recapture the House.

While Monday’s turnout isn’t necessarily indicative of a Democratic advantage, the broken record indicates that Texans have been strongly compelled to participate electorally by any number of factors, which could include affordability, ICE raids, and President Trump’s war on Iran.

“The coffee that I buy two years ago was $12 for a big can, and now it’s $25 for the same thing, it’s ridiculous,” one voter told KPRC-TV’s Sandy Torres.

“[The] cost of living is way too high, war in Iran, our support to Ukraine,” said another.

“Thirty years of one party dominating the state; it’s time to get the other guy’s chance,” said one more.

This comes ahead of one of the most contested Senate races in the country between Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico—a contest that could turn the state blue for the first time in over three decades.

This positive development also comes less than a week after voting rights groups sued the Texas Department of Public Safety over a “glitch” that caused 600,000 Texans to have their voting registration delayed.

Early voting is open for 11 more days in Harris County.

President Trump is claiming that the U.S. will burn like France if Democrats triumph in November’s midterm elections.

At a rally in Park City, Kansas, Tuesday, Trump referenced the student protests in France, using anti-immigrant bigotry and Islamophobia to try and scare Republicans into turning out over the next two weeks.

“Globalist left-wing have treasonously imported millions and millions of third world migrants who are totally incompatible with the West, and they are incompatible with Western values. They despise everything about France, and they’re destroying that country, and we’re not going to let that happen to this country,” Trump said during his speech. Despite interruptions by protesters, the crowd broke into applause at Trump’s words.

“When you see burning steeples and raging fires in ⁠France, just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America,” Trump added.

Trump is only in Kansas because the Republican Party is polling historically low, putting normally safe candidates in jeopardy thanks to his own bad economic policies and an ill-advised war he started. Republican Senator Roger Marshall was expected to coast to victory in the state, but is now polling neck and neck with Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton.

Trump’s fearmongering over the invented specter of riots is a desperate effort that isn’t likely to sway any voters on the fence, who can plainly see skyrocketing fuel prices and inflation with their own eyes. Besides, if Republicans lose big, which side of the American political divide, based on recent history, is more likely to violently protest?

Vice President JD Vance isn’t so sure that the president will have his back in the 2028 election.

The 42-year-old is theoretically supposed to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man and political successor. Yet nearly two years into Trump’s second administration, the two still aren’t on the same page. In a sit-down interview with conservative commentator Mark Halperin on Air Force Two Monday, the vice president didn’t seem so confident that he would definitely obtain Trump’s endorsement.

Halperin posed two questions to Vance: first, if he planned to run for president, and second, if he would “definitely” obtain Trump’s endorsement.

“I’ll tell you Mark that I’m focused on the midterm elections and I want to get as many good Republicans elected in early November as possible,” Vance said.

“Look, I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028, I really haven’t focused on it,” he continued. “You and I have talked about that. Look, I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”

“Right away? Right at the beginning?” pressed Halperin. “In other words, the day you announce. He’d endorse you, right?”

“I don’t know, man, I haven’t talked to him about it,” Vance laughed.

“It would be kind of weird though if you said, ‘Mr. President, I’m going to run,’ and he said, ‘Let me think about it,’” Halperin said.

But Vance equivocated.

“No, it wouldn’t be weird,” Vance said. “I think I’d get his endorsement, but I also think there’s something to be said for people actually running their own race. And because the president’s endorsement is so dispositive, you could absolutely see a scenario where the president says, ‘You know what, we need to let this race play out and not preemptively prejudge the results.’”

“Sometimes media scrutiny, pressure, policy goals—” Vance continued before Halperin interjected that he “might be horrible at it.”

“I would be terrible at it,” Vance said. “So I don’t know, having never spoken to the president about this, I can’t speak to his psychology on it. But my attitude is, if I run, I think the president will endorse me. But I also haven’t talked to him about it.”