Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential vice presidential contender, is taking heat for comparing former President Donald Trump's hush money trial to show trials in military revolutionary Cuba and posting video of one that ended in the execution of the accused.
Rubio has been vehemently criticizing Trump's conviction and deriding the judge and prosecutors. After Trump's conviction, he said the trial is similar to the show trials that took place in Cuba when the communist leader Fidel Castro took over the country.
Rubio said in an interview on Fox News that Trump's trial was "a quintessential show trial" and "what you see in communist countries." He said the Trump trial "is an effort to interfere in an election."
With the video he posted on X, Rubio wrote, "The public spectacle of political show trials has come to America."
Rubio's claims drew blowback on social media, which was first reported by The Palm Beach Post, with one commenter calling the comparison of Trump’s trial with the military tribunal after the Castro revolution "absurd."
"Comparing it to countries where folks were killed for their politics? That’s just insulting," the commenter stated.
Rubio was not alone in attacking the U.S. judicial system after Trump's conviction. So did Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who is also Cuban American. Cruz, like Rubio, is a lawyer and served as Texas solicitor general.
Rubio was born in Miami and his parents left Cuba in the 1950s, before Castro took power. Cruz was born in Canada and his Cuban-born father came to the U.S. in 1957 during the Cuban revolution.
Cruz said the guilty verdict is "the kind of thing you see in banana republics." He claimed in an interview that he is "heartbroken for the rule of law."
However, a historian of American political rhetoric and how it relates to democracy said Cruz and Rubio "ought to know better."
"What you actually see with the accusations that have been made by Trump and Rubio and Cruz is that they are in fact acting as authoritarians when they’re trying to discredit the rule of law," said Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M in College Station and the author of "Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump."
"These are intelligent people. They have law degrees," she said of Rubio and Cruz. "They have histories with authoritarian regimes in their families and they have direct personal history with Donald Trump."
Mercieca noted that Trump trial testimony revealed that the National Enquirer had fabricated a story during the 2016 presidential campaign — when Trump and Cruz were rival candidates — that suggested Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Mercieca said that Trump's, Rubio's and Cruz's assertions that the rule of law is perverted and that the justice system is being taken over by Democrats "are the kinds of things that erode trust in the political process and democracy in general."
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., who's also an analyst for NBC News, said that "people can reasonably suggest or opine that this prosecutor was politically motivated, but Mr. Trump and his attorneys have been able to avail themselves of due process, and due process will continue."
"To suggest that we don’t have due process in the U.S. is inaccurate," Curbelo said, adding that some legal experts think Trump has a decent chance to appeal the verdict.
"My grandfather was a victim of a political trial in Cuba, and it was nothing like the system in the U.S., that while imperfect is probably the fairest in the world," Curbelo said. "The more we delegitimize our institutions, the closer we will become to an authoritarian state — the less Americans trust in our elections, the closer we will become to losing our freedoms and our liberties."
