Rubio defends Trump's NATO comments with an old line: “He doesn't talk like a traditional politician.”

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, on Sunday pushed aside comments from former President Donald J. Trump suggesting he might not defend NATO allies and would encourage Russia to “do whatever they want.”

Mr. Trump made the comments at a rally in South Carolina on Saturday, but did not make clear that while there was a dispute over some European countries meeting spending commitments on their own militaries, there were no debts owed to the alliance.

Mr. Rubio, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested in an interview on CNN's “State of the Union” that Mr. Trump was simply describing how he had “used leverage to get people to step up to the plate ', repeating a phrase that Republicans have used for years to dismiss Trump's statements about his intentions: “He doesn't talk like a traditional politician.”

Mr. Rubio also shrugged off Mr. Trump's mocking comments about Nikki Haley's husband, who is broadcast in Djibouti, and suggested that nothing Mr. Trump said could shake his support for the former president.

“One of the things I'm no longer going to do is respond to every comment Donald Trump makes and say, 'Do you still support him?'” he said. “I do. And I support him because Joe Biden is a disaster.”

In the interview, Mr. Rubio also denounced bipartisan border security legislation that includes provisions that Republicans have long pushed for but that Mr. Trump has spoken out against. He not only said that this did not go far enough, but also that this was not the case. even improve the status quo. “It's no better than nothing,” Mr. Rubio said after the host, Jake Tapper, played a clip from the president of the border agents union — which has supported Mr. Trump and pilloried President Biden's border policies – in which he said the bill was “a step in the right direction.”

Mr. Rubio focused on a provision that would allow asylum officials to immediately grant asylum to people who showed great need, though the bill would raise the bar for asylum claims generally and close the border as the number of migrants that border officials encountered would be average. more than 5,000 per week.

“They want to turn a bunch of illegal immigrants into citizens, voters, in the hope that those people will then turn around and vote for them in future elections, grateful because they will know who let them in,” he said.