Hours after Twitter announced its decision to permanently suspend President Donald Trump’s account on its platform, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) suggested that actions taken by “a small & unelected group” to silence and erase the President “will only stoke new grievances.”
Even those who oppose Trump should see the danger of having a small & unelected group with the power to silence & erase anyone.
And their actions will only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 9, 2021
On Friday, Twitter had cited concerns over “further incitement of violence” as the reason for its decision to suspend Trump’s account.
The GOP lawmaker had also separately told Fox News in an interview on Thursday that invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office as which has been put forward by a number of lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) would be “such a waste of time.”
Prior to the Saturday morning comments that appeared to admonish Twitter’s decision, Rubio had tweeted a video on Friday night condemning “mob violence of the kind that you see in third world countries” which occurred earlier this week during an attack by pro-Trump insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol as Congress met for a joint session to reaffirm Joe Biden’s electoral victory that left five people dead.
In the Friday evening video, Rubio wouldn’t acknowledge how his own failure to disavow election fraud claims as false fueled Trump supporters who laid siege on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, simply saying that the President’s supporters had been “lied to.”
Instead he declared without evidence that “99 percent” of the Trump supporters who came to Washington weren’t part of the violent mob. The Florida lawmaker referred to Democrats in the video as “hypocrites” and blamed press coverage of racial justice demonstrations following death of George Floyd last summer for pushing more Americans into the arms of conspiracy theorists and violence.
“We can’t destroy ourselves,” Rubio pleaded in the message in an apparent call to members of his party to reflect on its recent political losses. “It wasn’t long ago that we controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House. And, four years later, we’ve lost all three.”
While in one breath Rubio said the events should “sicken” all Americans, he later appeared to offer some sympathy to perpetrators of the violence by accusing Democrats of a “double standard” for what constitutes protest.
The Florida congressman declared that rather than efforts by lawmakers to advance falsehood many times over following the election, it was instead the “blatant bias” of the press that had spurred so many Americans to seek “political shelter in divisive political movements and in conspiracy theories that offer them the promise of fighting back against it.”
