Marco Rubio, Gen. Keith Kellogg, and Mike Waltz were all widely recognized as among the most high-profile GOP interventionists on Ukraine from approximately 2022-2024. To the extent any of them expressed criticism of Biden during the first years of the war, it was to condemn Biden’s policy as insufficiently aggressive in arming Ukraine and sanctioning Russia. (See my 2022 interview with Mike Waltz.)
And now here that trio are, in September 2025, representing the United States on the world stage, threatening that President Donald J. Trump is ready to “impose costs” on Russia for its “continued aggression” — including by supplying Ukraine with unspecified new frontiers of “offensive weaponry.”
Why anyone should find this outcome surprising is a mystery. Actually, it’s not a mystery — there was a huge onslaught of propaganda during the 2024 election, particularly among the Dopey Podcaster Crew, which created the phony impression that Trump and the GOP had undergone some massive revelatory shift with respect to Ukraine policy. And that people like the erstwhile “neocon” Rubio were suddenly “based,” or whatever.
This was never true. It was all political gamesmanship in the run-up to the 2024 election, because the American public generally likes to hear anti-war messages rather than pro-war messages — especially when their direct interests are not obviously implicated in some foreign conflict.
Trump personally deployed his political capital in April 2024, as presumptive GOP nominee, to get a massive War Funding Bill passed through the Congress — working in tandem with his emissary “MAGA Mike Johnson,” as well as Senate surrogates like Lindsey Graham, Kevin Cramer, and Markwayne Mullin. I covered this at the time, but few noticed or cared.
Because it was much more exciting and satisfying to play along with the “Trump will end the war in 24 hours” angle — even though he never presented any articulable plan to actually accomplish this fantastical feat. The one concrete plan that did emerge was from Trump’s honorary DC think tank, the “America First Policy Institute,” which called for continuing to arm Ukraine in perpetuity, while demanding that Russia accept a “freeze” along the current lines of combat. This was obviously never going to result in any magical cessation of the war. I interviewed one of the drafters of that plan, Fred Fleitz, in July 2024.
The other co-author of the plan was Gen. Keith Kellogg.
The outlines of that plan were more-or-less adopted in the early phases of the Trump Administration’s diplomatic re-engagement with Russia this year. And now, according to Rubio, it’s resulted in nothing other than further “escalation.”
Trump just publicly endorsed even more maximalist war aims than Biden, declaring that Ukraine can recapture all territory seized by Russia, and he will provide the arms necessary to achieve this “victory.” He even suggested that Ukraine could rightfully seize Russian territory. While Ukraine did undertake land incursions into Russia when Biden was in office, the previous Administration was always wishy-washy as to its public stance on this strategy. (See my interview with the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. CQ Brown, in August 2024.) Trump has now blasted right past that ostensible taboo.
So it’s important to note, for historical posterity, that this was all eminently foreseeable. It was just drowned out in a tsunami of Low IQ campaign propaganda — with plenty of people in the Dumb-Dumb Podcast Circuit playing their dutiful role as partisan propaganda peddlers.
I don’t want to die in an apocalyptic firestorm under any administration. I am disappointed in the failure of peace initiatives and anxious.
Was just thinking "what's mt up to?" I feel like I manifested this one