Marco Rubio, Banned in China, Trolls with Maduro Tracksuit en Route to Beijing

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has technically been banned from visiting China by its communist government, but he accompanied President Donald Trump on his trip to Beijing on Tuesday using a bureaucratic loophole created by the Chinese to let him in.

Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles to Florida who was elected to the Senate in 2011, was one of several congressional representatives banned from traveling to China in July 2020 because they spoke out against China’s brutal oppression of the Uyghur Muslims of occupied East Turkistan. The U.S. had previously sanctioned four Chinese officials for herding the Uyghurs into massive concentration camps.

Rubio was sanctioned again by China in August 2020, in retaliation for U.S. sanctions against Chinese officials involved in oppressing the people of Hong Kong. Some of the same fellow senators and representatives were named in the second round of “tit-for-tat” sanctions along with Rubio.