“Little Marco” goes big MAGA — with his eyes on the White House

Most of America first took notice of Marco Rubio when he gave one of the most-cringe prime-time performances of all time, the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. No one who watched is likely to forget Rubio’s awkward stare as he furtively reached for a water bottle, cementing his reputation as the thirstiest man in the U.S. Senate. It’s a testament to his limitless ambition that he came back from that and is now one of the most powerful people in the world.

Rubio rode into national politics on the Tea Party wave in 2010, after having served for a decade in Florida state politics, rising to become majority leader and ultimately speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Although he was a staunch conservative from the beginning, Rubio showed early on an aptitude for sensing which way the wind was blowing. Over the years he held both moderate and conservative positions on most issues. For instance, at first he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and then, a few years later, decided it was true. He was once one of the Republican Party’s most vocial advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and even sponsored the DREAM Act. Now he energetically supports Donald Trump on the most draconian deportation program in American history. He broke with the GOP on more than one occasion when it came to budget battles, at times striking a pose as populist defender of the little guy, but overall he was a standard-issue right-wing conservative on taxes and spending.

With the exception of the ill-fated “Gang of Eight” attempt to overhaul immigration policy, Rubio has never been much associated with domestic politics. His focus has always been on national security and foreign policy. He was an unreconstructed hawk in the Senate, supporting the war in Iraq and taking a hard line on Iran. But he’s often used the language of human rights in condemning China, Turkey and Venezuela for crimes against minority populations or suppression of dissent.

And in what looks in retrospect like one of Rubio’s most independent moves, as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., he led a three-year investigation that found clear evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, exactly as Robert Mueller’s investigation had established. Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that the current secretary of state personally validated its findings. (You have to wonder if anyone has ever explained that to Trump; logically, it should have been a deal breaker.)

Then again, Trump also overlooked the fact that as an opposing GOP presidential candidate in 2016, Rubio once said, “He’s like 6’2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″… You know what they say about men with small hands.” That line got back to Trump, creating an infamous primary debate moment when Trump insisted on national TV, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” For a man who carries around grudges like precious offspring, it’s odd that Trump has apparently decided to overlook all that, but Rubio worked hard to abase himself and get into the inner circle.

The political establishment, including many Democrats, were relieved when Rubio was chosen for the State Department job, reassured that a supposedly serious fellow with Senate credentials would keep Trump foreign policy from going off the rails. The hope was that Rubio might stop the president from doing something silly, like bailing out of NATO or invading Greenland. Little did they know that Rubio had happily made a deal with the devil and now seems to relish the idea of ripping up the world order in Trump’s image.

They certainly couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly Rubio would join in the deportation crusade by targeting foreign students for visa violations, as well as for unauthorized opinions about Israel and Charlie Kirk. Considering his years of support for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it came a something of a shock when Rubio cavalierly endorsed the administration’s shutdown of vital medical and food programs, which is likely to mean sickness and death for millions. He even agreed to betray informants under U.S. protection to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in exchange for an agreement to lock up purported Venezuelan gang members in El Salvador’s gruesome gulag.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Rubio was one of the first to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, calling him a killer and suggesting that he was suffering from some kind of mental decline. But it didn’t take long for Rubio to change his tune, voting against military aid early on and adopting the Trump line that a negotiated settlement was the only way out. In the Senate, Rubio backed Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinian civilians, although at one point he voted against more military aid, saying the U.S. needed more money for border enforcement. As secretary of state, Rubio has mostly taken a back seat on those big issues to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and, more recently, to freelance adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. But that has just given him time to pursue his own special interests.

When Trump tapped Rubio as acting national security adviser after a clash with the more establishment oriented Mike Waltz — since banished to Siberia, aka the United Nations — Rubio got some runway to move on his own priorities in Latin America. Coming as he does from the anti-Castro Cuban-American community of South Florida, Rubio has a strong strain of anti-left ideology which has made him especially obsessed with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist authoritarian president.

According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal, the extrajudicial killings, CIA covert actions and pending war plans against Venezuela are all being driven by Rubio. After some back-and-forth between him and special envoy Richard Grenell, along with oil companies who’d welcome a deal to exploit Venezuela’s enormous reserves, Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller have carried the day with a full-fledged plan to pressure and perhaps depose the Venezuelan leader. Other countries in the region are expected to take notice.

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As a former White House official told The New Yorker, “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you… if you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.” And that signal isn’t just directed at other countries. The same official pointed out that this has a domestic dimension as well, by reinforcing the idea that Latino gang members and drug cartels, are enemies of America. “This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities,” the official said. “You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”

Marco Rubio almost certainly intends to run for president in 2028 and sees his service in that cause as the best way to fulfill his own agenda and expand both his power and his political profile. He’s certainly not the only person in the Trump administration with that idea, but he stands out in that many observers still view him as an “adult in the room” with establishment credibility. That’s entirely wrong. He’s a fully paid-up MAGA fanatic now, and no one should think otherwise.