Marco Rubio, Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler
As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise, Dexter Filkins reports.
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How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler
As Secretary of State, the President’s onetime foe now offers him lavish displays of public praise—and will execute his agenda in Venezuela and around the globe.
Just after midnight on January 3rd, as American commandos surged into Caracas to seize President Nicolás Maduro, large sections of the city went dark. Blackouts are common in Venezuela, but the blasts that followed confirmed the arrival of the United States military, which for weeks had kept thousands of troops poised offshore. The sky filled with helicopters—some skimming the rooftops—along with fighter jets and B-1 bombers. They had been dispatched to protect a Delta Force team heading to the Fuerte Tiuna military complex, where Maduro and his wife were hunkered down. There, the commandos undertook an operation that they had spent months practicing at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky: they shot their way past the defenses and, as the Maduros struggled to shut a heavy metal door, took them into custody. More than fifty of Maduro’s guards were killed, but the Americans left nearly untouched. President Donald Trump told Fox News afterward that it was like “watching a television show.”
At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the morning after the attack, a similar sense of gleeful unreality prevailed. Trump boasted of “an assault like people have not seen since World War Two,” and said, “We’re a respected country again . . . maybe like never before.” But his account of the motivation for the attack shifted. For years, he and his supporters have maintained, with little public evidence, that Maduro was a narco-trafficker on a global scale, bringing vast amounts of cocaine into the U.S. From the podium, Trump insisted that Maduro had “waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States,” adding that he was responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths. Though Trump spoke of America’s interest in safeguarding “the good of the Venezuelan people,” he mentioned the country’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—no fewer than twenty times. The infrastructure needed fixing, he said: “It’s, you know, blowup territory. Oil is very dangerous. It’s a very dangerous thing to take out of the ground. . . . We’re going to be replacing it, and we’re going to take a lot of money out so that we can take care of the country. Yeah.”
As Trump spoke, Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State, stood quietly behind him. When he was finally called to the microphone, Rubio began what has become a familiar routine, offering Trump the kind of adulation that is ordinarily reserved for heroes. “People need to understand that this is not a President that just talks and does letters and press conferences,” he said. “If he says he’s serious about something, he means it.” He hailed Trump as not just “a President of action” but also “a President of peace.”
Rubio proceeded to the second phase of his routine: explaining that Trump’s most flamboyant measures—in this case, the nighttime invasion of a sovereign state to capture its leader without congressional authorization—were, in fact, completely ordinary. “Nicolás Maduro was indicted in 2020 in the United States,” he said. “He is not the legitimate President of Venezuela. That’s not just us saying it. . . . He’s not recognized by the European Union, in multiple countries around the world.” Rubio pointed out that the State Department had offered a fifty-million-dollar reward for Maduro’s arrest. Trump interrupted over his shoulder. “Don’t let anybody claim it,” he said. “Nobody deserves it but us.”
As Secretary of State and also national-security adviser, Rubio is, at least in theory, the most powerful American diplomat since Henry Kissinger. But compared with Kissinger, whose crusading interventionism defined a generation of America’s global relationships, Rubio often seems like a support staffer for the President. As Trump lurches from one crisis to another, Rubio—calm, articulate, and capable of projecting a Boy Scout’s earnest charm—justifies his policies, soothes rattled allies, and puts the best face on initiatives that only a few years ago he would have denounced.
In the days after the attack on Venezuela, many observers made the inevitable comparison to Iraq, another oil-rich country where the U.S. toppled a strongman ruler, prompting a years-long quagmire. Rubio insisted in a series of appearances that the situations were not at all the same. On “Face the Nation,” he said, “A lot of people analyze everything that happens in foreign policy through the lens of what happened from 2001 through, you know, 2015 or ’16. . . . This is not the Middle East. And our mission here is very different.”
Since Trump began his second term, his “America First” foreign policy has brought about an epochal change in the country’s place in the world, as the U.S. casts off traditional commitments to pursue its immediate self-interest. The sprawling network of alliances, treaties, and foreign-assistance programs that the U.S. built at the end of the Second World War is being radically altered or simply discarded. Since January, the U.S. has cut tens of billions of dollars in humanitarian and development aid, withdrawn from such landmark agreements as the Paris climate accord, and curtailed reporting on human-rights abuses. Entire government departments have been hollowed out. In their place is a highly personalized approach, largely dependent on the whims of Trump, whose foreign policy reflects a harsher, stingier, and less forgiving country.
Rubio, at fifty-four, is the policy’s unlikely executor. Before joining the Trump Administration, he spent his career advocating for America as the leader of the world’s democracies; the son of Cuban immigrants, he was a champion of aid to impoverished countries. Some observers believe that Rubio is working to provide consistency and balance in a tumultuous Administration. “He’s doing his best to moderate Trump’s worst impulses,” a European foreign minister told me. “He understands the stakes. He’s whispering in Trump’s ear. But he has only so much influence.” Others are less charitable. They believe that Rubio is presiding over the remaking of America as a kind of rogue nation, just as an axis of authoritarian rivals, led by China, rises to challenge the world’s democracies. “Trashing our allies, gutting State and foreign aid, the tariffs—the damage is going to take years to repair, if it can ever be repaired,” Eric Rubin, a retired ambassador who headed the State Department’s diplomatic union, told me. “I hope it ruins his career.”
By most standards, Rubio occupies a privileged post: his desk in the White House is just a few steps from the Oval Office. But it is not the position that he hoped to occupy. In 2016, Rubio ran for President and lost to Trump in the primary. He now serves his former opponent—an unstable leader who regularly traduces institutions that Rubio spent his career supporting. “Ultimately, he has to be a hundred per cent loyal to the President, and when the President zigs and zags Rubio has to zig and zag, too,” a former Western diplomat told me. “He’s had to swallow a lot of shit.”
The election in 2016 is the only one that Rubio has ever lost—an anomaly in a carefully managed ascent. In 1999, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, from a largely working-class area of West Miami; though he didn’t live in the district when the seat opened up, he moved there in time to campaign. Just four years later, he announced that he would run for speaker of the House. Florida had recently imposed term limits, and many senior House members were retiring. The leadership was open, and Rubio wanted it.
Many people in Florida politics felt that the time was right for a Cuban American speaker, but Rubio faced a difficult issue. For years, public-school teachers in Florida’s cities were paid more than those in rural areas, to compensate for their higher cost of living. A powerful group of legislators, mostly from rural north Florida, wanted salaries equalized across the state. No candidate for speaker had supported the change; Gaston Cantens, a Cuban American legislator who represented Miami, had refused to do so in the previous speaker race and ended up dropping out. But Rubio was amenable. “The rural legislators got their formula, and in exchange they went with Marco,” a former senior Democrat in the legislature told me. “Cantens was a carcass on the side of the road.” Rubio won. The Florida Bulldog, a regional newspaper, later calculated that the change had cost Miami teachers nearly a billion dollars. “The one constant in Marco Rubio’s career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principle he’s ever had in order to claim power for himself,” a political figure in Miami told me.
In Florida, term limits make it harder for elected officials to acquire deep experience, and Rubio’s legislative record is relatively thin. For his first address as speaker, he placed a book titled “100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future” on every legislator’s desk. The pages were blank; Rubio said that he wanted to fill them with proposals gathered from voters. This effort resulted in a few dozen successful, though mostly marginal, pieces of legislation, including one that expanded scholarships for private-school education and another that created an advisory committee to help make the government more efficient. “Give him credit,” a lobbyist working in Florida at the time told me. “He didn’t have a lot of ideas himself. It was a clever thing to do.”
The same day that Rubio presented his idea book, he was inaugurated as speaker at the capitol. He gave a speech that summoned the experience of a young single mother, arguing that the government had a moral obligation to help her secure a better life for her child. Governor Jeb Bush, a longtime booster, sat in the front row, moved to tears. “I can’t think back on a time when I’ve ever been prouder to be a Republican, Marco,” he said afterward. He handed Rubio a golden sword, explaining that it was “the sword of a great conservative warrior”: a reference to the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who had been part of his family’s folklore since George H. W. Bush served as a diplomat in China. Rubio hung the sword in the speaker’s office. In his memoir, “An American Son,” he called Bush “the man I most admired in Florida politics.”
In the memoir, Rubio wrote about the ambition that propelled him: “All my life I’ve been in a hurry to get to my future.” He has repeatedly evinced an instinct for seizing opportunities, sometimes in ways that angered his colleagues. (He wrote that, in pursuit of the speakership, he made “a series of terrible blunders.”) In 2009, when his tenure as speaker had ended, Rubio announced that he would run for the U.S. Senate. He was thirty-seven and mostly unknown statewide.
His main opponent was Charlie Crist, who was finishing a term as governor. At one point, Crist was thirty points ahead in the polls, and Rubio considered dropping out. But Florida’s Republicans were becoming more conservative, and the right-wing movement known as the Tea Party was gathering strength. Rubio adopted its platform, vowing to repeal Obamacare, lower taxes, and shrink the government.
Crist’s record in office made him vulnerable; he had governed as a moderate and endorsed an economic-stimulus plan that Obama passed after the financial crisis of 2008. Nearly every Republican governor had willingly accepted money from the plan, but Rubio, like many Tea Party candidates, argued that it was bankrupting the country. A pro-Rubio ad showcased a moment when Crist embraced Obama at a public event, and Rubio gleefully talked about it in interviews. “Why would I hug someone I don’t know?” he asked in one, smiling broadly with feigned bewilderment. Rubio captured the Party’s nomination, then the seat in the Senate. “Marco got lucky,” a Republican lobbyist in Florida told me. “Charlie fucked himself. He governed from the left, which he could get away with, but then hugging Obama? Marco just jumped on him.”
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Rubio certainly comes off as a tragic figure -- full of potential, but empty of any real purpose other than ambition.
Like Trump, Rubio is just another self serving liar.