Sounding off in a fiery interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, Secretary of State Marco Rubio exploded on ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, ripping into the host for not noting that America’s foreign aid cuts are coming in large part to block gangs from appropriating and profiting off of the aid.
For reference, the interview came on the morning of Tuesday, September 23, and was in the context of the Rubio-led US Agency for International Development (USAID) being shuttered by the formerly Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The ABC anchor tried insisting that the cuts were cruel, leading to Rubio’s furious response.
Beginning, Secretary of State Rubio insisted that USAID had to be shut down because it was utterly dysfunctional, saying, “We shut down U.S. aid because it was a dysfunctional organization,” Rubio began. “We moved it under the State Department. We are going to do more foreign aid than any country in the world… but we’re going to do it the right way.”
Pressing him on the matter of the consequences of cutting such aid, and doing so in quite outrageous fashion, Stephanopoulos asked, “That’s all in the future, but are you standing by that comment you’re saying that no one died because of the aid cuts are all those aid organizations?” Rubio immediately fired back, “That’s ridiculous!”
Continuing with his furious response to Stephanopoulos’s absurd and unfair question, Rubio snapped, “Well first of all, well then they died because England didn’t give enough money or Canada didn’t give more or China did. Let’s blame the other countries that don’t do any foreign aid. How about China? I mean China’s the second largest economy in the world. They don’t give money to these projects.”
Stephanopoulos kept pushing the same absurd message and ignored Rubio’s point about how America is ridiculously supposed to shoulder the entirety of the foreign aid burden, saying, “So you’re no longer disputing that the aid cuts have caused people’s lives? You’re no longer disputing that?”
Rubio snapped back, “I think anybody who tells you that somehow it’s the United States, if we cut a dollar, somehow we’re responsible for some horrific thing that’s going on in the world, it’s just not true.” He then further added that corruption and foreign gangs were hoovering up most of the supposed aid, in any case, saying, “Beyond that, I would say that in some of these places that they cite –”
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Rudely interrupting him, Stephanopoulos cut in and snapped, “Well if that dollar’s not going to feed someone or to medicine someone’s going to die, aren’t they?” Rubio told him, “One of the reasons why some of the places didn’t get the aid is not because we cut the aid. It’s because there’s a war going on and the aid never got to the people.”
Giving an example that showed the lie, Rubio said, “So in Sudan, for example, it’s not just a humanitarian catastrophe, it is a war zone. Okay, the aid is stolen, the aid is impeded, in fact they use aid as a tool against the people, and so blocking aid is a tool and an arm of war. So in some of these places, the reason why the aid isn’t getting there is it can’t be distributed.”
Giving another example that proved how Stephanopoulos was misrepresenting things, Rubio said, “Look at Haiti, one of the reasons why aid can’t distributed in Haiti, is you can send all the aid in the world you want, it gets hijacked and stolen by criminal gangs that control the country. And so they’re the ones to blame for whatever happening there, not us who provided more aid than anybody else.”
Then, as the woke host kept pushing the death toll narrative, Rubio exploded, “No one has died because the United States has cut aid. No, people have died because gangs steal the aid. People have died because the distributors of aid have not done well. People have died because other countries haven’t stepped up, but the United States has saved more lives and continues to save more lives than any other country in the world.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video