I can remember back to 2013, when, as a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” in the Senate, he helped to draft legislation for comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for millions of people in this country illegally. He was then styling himself as a pragmatist determined to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.

Now he rails against “amnesty.” He’s a Trump-style populist, content with a clownish part in the Republican Party’s circus.

I remember how his parents’ flight to the United States from Cuba was the supposed cornerstone of his political convictions, the prompt for a hawkish foreign policy with no tolerance for autocrats at odds with our democratic values.

But he just spent four years blowing kisses at an American president more autocratic and more contemptuous of those values than any in his lifetime.