Marco Rubio’s “Biden doesn’t know what he’s doing” balloon of hot air got popped Sunday when “This Week” host Jonathan Karl told him that former President Donald Trump let a Chinese spy balloon fly over the U.S. three times during his administration and did nothing.
Karl set up the exchange with the Republican senator from Florida saying that President Biden ordered the massive balloon shot down based on the advice of the military – when it was over the ocean rather than overpopulated land. Although Rubio agreed that “shooting something out of the sky that is the size of three buses and it lands on the wrong place,” falling debris could have “hurt, harmed or killed people” on the ground, he went on to criticize Biden for not telling the American people what they were dealing with.
“If that was the case, then I think it really would have been helpful for the President of the United States to get on national television and explain to the American people, ‘This is what we’re dealing with, this is what I’m going to do about it, and this is why I haven’t done it yet,’” Rubio said. “None of that happened. And I don’t know why. I don’t know why they waited so long to tell people about this if they knew the trajectory it was on since last week.”
Karl let Rubio complete his thought and then spoke up, nonchalantly informing Rubio that what he is criticizing Biden for doing, Trump did three times during his administration.
“This happened three times under the previous president,” Karl said. “Obviously, there were no public notifications there.”
You can watch the entire exchange in the clip above.
To get you up to speed, Wednesday, defense officials in the U.S. and Canada announced that what appeared to be a surveillance balloon the size of three busses originating from China had been spotted floating in the stratosphere 31 miles above Montana and far above commercial air traffic. It was said to contain some kind of “technology bay,” meaning it had electronic equipment of some kind.
Wednesday, President Biden order it to be shot down but doing so was delayed until it was over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina to ensure no one on the ground was hurt.
