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Little Marco's Quest to Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again
As he is surely a 2028 presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio is a real threat to the better world we hope to build.
Feb 25, 2026
MAGA has been, throughout, an amorphous entity—curling, folding, dividing—as it slimed and slithered its way into this American life. Neocon MAGA is one particularly noteworthy division within, a more-than-slightly schizophrenic aberration that, if MAGA-world had any interest in maintaining conceptual coherence, would surely have long ago been run out of town.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is Neocon MAGA’s chief exemplar. In contrast to unreconstructed neocons like Lindsay Graham and John Bolton, who have tried to bootlick their way into President Donald Trump's good graces with spotty results, “Little Marco” was a neoconservative boy who has growth-spurted his way into a Neocon MAGA man.
Rubio recently gave a very buzzy speech at the Munich Security Conference on the 14 of February. This speech was received warmly by a crowd of beleaguered European leaders, threadbare from a year of belligerent rhetoric and mercenary tariff threats by the very Trump administration that Rubio is also underwritten by. In this speech, Rubio argued passionately that the West has lost its mojo. Rubio confidently slalom-skied his way through ideas and histories whose engagement he has only a mediocre competency, replete with omissions and partial truths that start to make one think he just might not be an honest broker. As his speech rounded one particular bend, his central thesis came into view: that ever since 1945, with the formation of the United Nations and what is often called the rules-based order, the West has become, despite its gloriously pearlescent past, a civilization in “terminal decline.” But with strategic solidarity (between Europe and the US), we might restore this civilization to its former greatness. That is his thesis.
There is a lot that is concerning about this speech. Rubio presented anti-colonialist uprisings as a categorically negative thing. He trumpeted dominance as the long-lost coin of the realm. He posited guilt and shame as some pathetic weakness, without any acknowledgment of the truly generative corrective that these kinds of senses can perform. He sounded the alarm about “civilizational erasure,” without buckling even a little under the weight of the cultural and racial supremacy on full display in his language and its implications. This was an expansionary speech, hoisting the sails of Make America Great Again into a full armada of Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again, with all the attendant wink-wink, nudge-nudging that sets folks like this Munich audience into full transfiguration mode, their countenance aglow.
To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement.
But one significant contradiction in his speech that warrants analysis—if not only by me, then his lovingly concerned, anti-immigrant MAGA brothers and sisters—is his profuse, unqualified celebration of relentless, centuries-long, mass migration: the mass migration of westerners to remote corners of the world. In a section of his speech, Rubio enthusiastically proclaims: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” I mean, come on. Eat your heart out, leftists (or at least the conservative caricature of leftists)! If ever there was a sentiment expressed about a world without borders, this is it.
If JD Vance is concerned about Ohio Haitians eating cats or Randi Fine is concerned that immigrants are here to get “free stuff,” Vance and Fine's vision quests and critical discourse are in pursuit of small potatoes compared with the horrors Western settlers propagated in the “new world.” To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement. Rubio enthusiastically and playfully (he got some laughs; he was working the room) detailed the many, MAGA would say, illegitimate border-crossers (illegals?!) who radically altered the fabric of life of the people who lived in these lands: Italian explorers, English settlers, German farmers, and French fur traders.
But, in a section just a little bit earlier, Rubio seemed to suggest migration is a bad thing, saying, “Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis that is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” How far can coherence stretch before it snaps? What are the material differences between one migration and this other migration?! It can not only be because now is the time of nation-states who “have a right to exist” and require hardened borders, but then was a time of exploration, expansion, and settlements—different times, different rules—because Rubio is, in a very Winkelmannian sense (J.J. Winkelmann, the German neoclassical art historian extraordinaire), imploring us to do now as our imperialist forbears did then. To do as great men of great civilizations did is the way for us to become great. If that is the logic, then what really is the difference among these migrations?
In, what was meant to be a particularly touching section of the speech, Rubio details his Sardinian and Spanish ancestry, name-dropping good old Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi and Jose and Manuela Reina, who he feels could not have fathomed (and he probably believes would have been very proud) that their direct descendant would have graduated from neocon “Little Marco” to Big Boy Marco giving his big boy speech. But that story excludes an even more critical and thoroughly American portion of the Rubio family history. The Rubios are a family of immigrants, of course. They migrated at some point from Southern Europe to Cuba; the details of what prompted that migration are perhaps lost to history. But then Marco Rubio’s parents migrated from Cuba to the US, not as refugees fleeing the Castro regime and the supposed horrors of communism as he has erroneously claimed. But rather as economic migrants seeking a more prosperous life for their family in the US, a few years before Fidel Castro started organizing in the Sierra Maestra mountains, propelled by the very same economic misery that caused the Rubios to leave a few years earlier.
While Rubio’s family moved around the US a bit when he was quite young, the South Florida Cuban migrant community was enormously culturally, politically, and spiritually (Marco received his first communion in Miami in 1984) formative. Many have speculated that his false claims of his parents being political refugees forced to leave Cuba post-revolution, which were debunked by the Washington Post in 2011, were motivated by the reality that, as a young South Floridian politician, one has far more electoral opportunities connected to such a political-victim narrative. The Post stated, “[in] Florida, being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion." Rubio has argued his narrative was not meant to deceive for political gain, but rather he was just innocently presenting “family lore.”
The reality is that in a speech like what Marco Rubio gave in Munich, there are many assumptions, biases, and contradictions harbored unexamined by this dominant neoliberal capitalist logic. A “migration for me, not for thee” doctrine is allowed to float unimpeded and unquestioned out of the mouths of low melanin-faced folks who hail from particularly choice real-estate markets (preferably Western Europe and the US) because it is underwritten by a system of logic that forgives an ethnic cleansing here, a theft of Black and brown bodies there on the grounds of the “price of doing business.” There is a straight and logical line between the enclosures of common land and the attendant immiseration of peasants and the consolidation of wealth and power among the elites in England in the 16th to 19th centuries, and the brutal colonial enclosure of the Americas in this same period. The difference is scale, not type.
An alternate logic to the domination, conquest, and hard borders of global capitalism is left internationalism. In global capitalism, goods and wealth freely pass across borders, while workers’ bodies and their class solidarities are captured and enclosed. Left internationalist logic is the inverse of global capitalist logic. Left internationalism promotes class solidarity across borders, it rejects nationalist ideologies that align workers with their exploiters, and it seeks global well-being in the face of the very kind of neo-imperialism with which Rubio’s speech is shot through. Left internationalism asks us to see the Global South as an opportunity for planetary solidarity—a real lifting of all boats—not as a region of resource riches ripe for plunder.
There was a time in our not-so-distant past when the US border was far more porous than even the laxest moments of the Biden years. This was a border over which migrant workers came and went, sometimes in the same day, sometimes for a season, to work in various opportunity regions in the US. They would do their work here and then return to their homes and families on the other side of the border. This was a remarkably open flow of bodies across borders, not because of any dominant radical-leftist theory, but because it was a practical arrangement that offered benefits to the greatest number of people. And it worked. If only Make America Great Again harkened back to instances like this, or when American communists and anarchists agitated for and won (for all of us) better working conditions and an eight-hour workday. These are times in our history when the US still had enormous problems, of course. But these were also times when we were seeing real progress, won together across cultural and racial differences in class solidarity.
In 2015, Pope Francis addressed the US Congress, saying, “Millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants.” It was reported at the time that then-Senator and candidate for president Marco Rubio became emotional from this speech, stating later that he was “moved” by the Pope’s statements. Some reported he wiped a tear from his eye. This suggests that Rubio, like all of us, holds his contradictions in his body. And sometimes, we experience an involuntary, emotionally eruptive response to our efforts to contain those contradictions inside. Rubio’s contradictions, of course, include the incongruent differences between MAGA and neoconservatism. But his emotional display may, just may, evidence contradictions inherent in his status as a self-hating child of immigrants, making his otherwise frictionless slide toward neo-imperialist par excellence perhaps a bit complicated.
As he is surely a 2028 presidential hopeful, he is a real threat to the better world we hope to build. The prayers and tears of Marco Rubio may have the potential of curtailing (or at least moderating) Little Marco’s seeming unobstructed pathway to the tyrannical monster he may one day be. But left to this administration’s current direction and the almost unprecedented amount of power Rubio has amassed as both the US secretary of state and national security adviser serving under a remarkably distractible and aimless president, MAGA may very well complete its foul transmutation into MIWIA (Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again).
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Trump Promised to Drain the Swamp—Turns Out He's Best Friends With the Swamp Monster
When given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability.
Feb 19, 2026
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: Sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.
For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”
But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.
For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.
Polls show that in summer 2025, 40% of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved—even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.
While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.
That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.
And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Epstein was a glorified drug dealer, and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.
Georgia Sen. John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters—at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult —are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.
“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.
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MAGA Is Anti-Black
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview; for them, Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized.
Feb 08, 2026
On February 5, a video was posted on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle. The racist depiction of Black people as primates dates back centuries. It is meant to represent them as ugly, savage, and unintelligent—as fundamentally incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
The post was deleted 12 hours later. The White House initially blamed an unnamed staffer for posting it. One White House adviser told reporters, “The president was not aware of that video, and was very let down by the staffer who put it out.” Apparently, they forgot that Trump himself had claimed that only he and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino have access to his social media account.
Later that day, Trump admitted that he knew about the video before its posting. He told reporters, “I looked at the beginning of [the video]. It was fine.” He then added, “Nobody knew that that was at the end. If they would have looked, they would have had the sense to take it down.” Neither the current president of the United States nor his staff is apparently capable of watching a 1-minute video before posting it.
Trump refused to apologize, insisting that he “didn’t make a mistake.”
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief.
Notably, even conservatives condemned the post (albeit meekly). Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) posted on Twitter-X that this is “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) shared Scott’s post, writing, “Tim is right. This was appalling.” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) similarly wrote: “This post was offensive. I’m glad the White House took it down.”
Democrats, by contrast, used stronger language. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.” Finally, bipartisanship has been achieved!
Despite this outcry, the White House was quick to dismiss the post as being anything newsworthy. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded that journalists “please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
MAGA and Anti-Black Racism
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief. It’s a slow day indeed if that video is the only racist thing Trump did all day.
In recent months, he has referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a sitting Black congresswoman, as “a disgusting person, a loser,” and “garbage.” Trump says that she, a US citizen, “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” To emphasize, not her country, but “our country.”
More broadly, he says that Somalis are “low IQ people” and that Somalia is “barely a nation.” It “stinks” and is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” For Trump, Somalis are savage, ugly, uncivilized, and unintelligent people—fundamentally distinct from the “nice people” from civilized societies like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Notice the direct parallels between how Trump explicitly describes Somalis on the one hand, and the underlying racist meaning behind comparing Black people to primates on the other. Trump is applying the exact same set of stereotypes in both instances.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama.
Somalia is not the only example. He refers to Haiti as a “shithole” and “hellhole.” That Haitians are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” This narrative—not only wildly racist, but demonstrably false—was amplified by several Republicans, including Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and then-Vice President-Elect JD Vance.
Trump’s racism is not an anomaly among MAGA Republicans. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller remarks, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States? If Libya keeps failing, if the Central African Republic keeps failing, if Somalia keeps failing, right? If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, […] what do we think is going to happen?" For Miller, no matter where those people go, the result will be the same: “consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” Test scores will also consistently drop: “If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket!” Like Trump, for Miller, Africans and their descendants are incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
Indirectly, Trump applies this standard to Obama too. Per Trump’s birther conspiracy theory, Obama was born in Kenya. At the same time he promoted that lie, Trump insisted that Obama allowed the US to collapse to the level of “a third world country.” Taken together, from Trump’s perspective, Obama is an African immigrant whose “destructive” policies led to the country “dying.” This is precisely what he and others in his administration allege that African immigrants always do.
A MAGA Black History Month
One might (confusedly) object that all of this is xenophobia, not anti-Black racism specifically—truly a distinction without a difference.
On February 3, Trump issued a proclamation emphasizing that “the history of black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American country.” Thus, he calls upon “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe [Black History Month] with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”
Yet, this objection overlooks a crucial detail: Trump’s proclamation is explicitly not a recognition of diversity—“This month, however, we do not celebrate our differences.” For Trump, Black History Month is not a celebration of Black people, but rather of the ability of “black American heroes” to successfully embrace and defend the “very special culture” that America and Europe inherited. Importantly, for Trump and his allies, the values, beliefs, and principles of that special culture are uniquely white.
This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
Trump is not honoring Black arts, culture, or philosophy. He is calling on us to remember Black people’s “enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice and equality.” It is those principles that freed the Western Hemisphere from “empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind.” Black patriots like Coretta Scott King, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas Sowell “fiercely defended the values set forth in the Declaration of Independence and helped to make our Republic the greatest country in the history of the world.”
For Trump, America’s “bedrock belief in equality” is inextricably tied to the nation’s Christian foundation and the belief that all are equal under God. It is that belief “that drove black American icons to help fulfill the promise of [America’s] principles.”
What Trump is expressing here is entirely consistent with the racist worldview that he and other MAGA Republicans endorse. Black values and cultures ruin societies, while white values uplift them. This is why Haiti, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Libya fail to develop, while the US thrives. If Black people succeed, it is because they have championed Christian and Enlightenment (white) principles and values. This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama. This vulnerability is why US cities like Baltimore, where more than half the residents are Black, can become “dangerous,” “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview. In every instance, their comments reflect the same underlying dichotomy: Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized. This is true whether they explicitly state it or metaphorically represent it.
It is this racism that leads Trump to blame Black Americans for violent crimes. It is this racism that leads the Trump administration to invade Minnesota. It is this “racial and national origin animus” that spurs their desire to end Temporary Protection Status for Haitians. It is this racism that makes everyone, regardless of race or citizenship status, vulnerable to the Trump administration’s Christian and ethnonationalist agenda. It is this racism that we must all resist.
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