Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the first 100 days of Trump’s administration was the quiet emergence of former Florida Senator Marco Rubio as the most powerful White House official in charge of the intertwined roles of Secretary of State and national security advisor, since the legendary Henry Kissinger held both jobs at the same time between 1973 and 1975, more than fifty years ago. Kissinger implemented the foreign policy of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford during the difficult Vietnam War era and helped Nixon to implement such brilliant Cold War strategy moves as the unexpected opening of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and communist China.
But unlike Kissinger, Rubio has accumulated unprecedented power and authority in the Trump administration by quietly demonstrating both his competence and unselfish willingness to defend and implement Trump’s often poorly defined and fast-changing policies. As a result, Trump has learned that he can trust Rubio, who was once his leading Republican political opponent, to handle the most difficult of troubleshooting assignments without complaint and a minimum of controversy.
Rubio received his latest Trump administration title last week, due to the self-inflicted mistakes which undermined the credibility of Trump’s original second-term national security advisor, former Florida GOP Congressman Michael Waltz, who has been shunted off to the high profile but largely powerless role of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Trump’s replacement of Waltz with Rubio as his national security advisor happened so suddenly that it came as a surprise to Rubio’s spokeswoman at the State Department, Tammy Bruce, who only learned about it from a reporter who read the announcement to her from Trump’s social media account during a televised State Department news conference.
RUBIO HAS PICKED UP THE PIECES OF USAID
This was not the first time that Rubio stepped in to clean up a political mess and quiet the controversies created by other members of the extended Trump administration. When Elon Musk and his DOGE auditors exposed the wasteful and outrageous federal spending project of the liberal-dominated, semi-independent United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and persuaded President Trump to cut the funding of most of its grants and fire most of its staff, the thankless job of picking up the pieces of the agency’s largely discredited agenda and continuing the most necessary of its remaining programs and services fell to Rubio. Characteristically, he accepted the assignment without complaint and promptly set about the difficult task of integrating the remnants of USAID into the bureaucracy-bound State Department organization that Rubio was streamlining at the same time.
In taking over as acting administrator of USAID, Rubio demonstrated his rare ability to competently assume significant new Trump administration responsibilities without prejudice to his essential role as Secretary of State, by efficiently delegating his authority and supervising the operation of several other government agencies. That also includes Rubio’s role as Chief Archivist of the National Archives and Records Administration, after Trump fired the previous archivist, Colleen Shogan, because her department had criminalized a civil dispute over Trump’s retention of certain classified government documents after the end of his first term as president.
Trump has come to view Rubio as his administration’s chief troubleshooter. As the president mentioned last week in the White House Rose Garden, “When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved.”
According to a New York Times analysis, Rubio’s four essential government roles also reflect the high level of confidence that he enjoys with Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who managed Donald Trump’s successful 2024 presidential campaign and astounding political comeback. Wiles, who, like Rubio, is a veteran Florida Republican political operative, is also largely responsible for the relatively smooth operations and continuity of the Trump White House, especially when compared to the tumultuous first hundred days of Trump’s first term in 2017.
The Times analysis also points out that two other current Trump administration officials, F.B.I. director Kash Patel, and Army secretary Daniel Driscoll, have also each served briefly as interim heads of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of the Department of Justice without giving up their permanent federal assignments.
RUBIO HAS BECOME ONE OF TRUMP’S BEST “TEAM” PLAYERS
To the surprise of many longtime Trump observers, since joining his administration, Rubio has vigorously defended some of Trump’s most controversial policies and learned how to work well with others who have Trump’s trust and friendship. That includes Trump’s longtime friend and golfing partner, Steve Witkoff, a foreign policy novice who, as special envoy, has taken over the responsibility from Rubio for conducting U.S. negotiations to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
As they like to say of bright children in pre-1A classes, in the halls of power in the Trump White House, Rubio has “learned to play well with others.”
Some of Rubio’s more liberal admirers have expressed their disappointment that, in the process of demonstrating his support for President Trump, he has lost their respect by turning himself “into a doormat” and abandoning his own more moderate longtime political positions.
“He has fundamentally converted his own foreign policy views in order to serve,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked as a Middle East expert for both Republican and Democratic Secretaries of State.
But Rubio’s supporters counter that his growing power and influence over Trump administration policy are a tribute to his political skills. Rubio remains effective because he has largely avoided many of the pitfalls of internal administration politics and the kind of turf disputes that have sullied the reputations of other senior Trump advisors, such as the feud between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Rubio’s position of high trust in Trump’s current administration would have been very difficult to foresee almost a decade ago, when he was representing the last gasps of the badly compromised GOP establishment against the ultimately successful challenge of Trump’s insurgent candidacy.
RUBIO’S TRANSFORMATION FROM OPPONENT TO TRUMP SUPPORTER
In early 2016, as the last Republican candidate standing between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination, Rubio was the frequent target of Trump’s biting ridicule. At campaign events, Trump referred to Rubio derisively as “Li’l Marco,” and Rubio tried to fight back in kind, calling him a “con artist” and “wholly unprepared to be president of the United States.” Rubio’s presidential campaign sputtered and came to an embarrassing end in the Florida primary, which he lost to Trump by an almost 2-1 margin (45.7%-27%). Defeated and diminished in political stature, Rubio reconsidered his political options. Reluctantly, Rubio decided it was preferable to endorse Donald Trump after he won the GOP nomination, rather than Hillary Clinton, and dutifully campaigned on his behalf.
Rubio then ran for and won a second term in the Senate, spending the next four years supporting Trump’s program and presidency while expertly advising the president on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, based on his own experiences as a son of Cuban immigrants representing the large anti-Castro Cuban-American community in South Florida. After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Rubio defended Trump’s right to challenge the result over “potential irregularities” in the election. However, while Rubio eventually voted to certify the election’s results, he voted to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial regarding his role in the January 6 riot by his supporters at the Capitol building.
During the Biden presidency, Rubio was one of the most outspoken voices in the Senate, warning of the danger to America from communist China, and in support of U.S. aid to Ukraine after it was invaded by Russia. He also served as the Ranking GOP Member of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, and Ranking GOP Member of the Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.
RUBIO’S UNANIMOUS SENATE CONFIRMATION AS SECRETARY OF STATE
When Trump won the presidency in 2024, Rubio was, by far, the most loyal and qualified candidate in his circle of advisors for the post of Secretary of State. Rubio had also won the respect of his Democrat colleagues in the Senate, who made him the only Trump cabinet nominee to be confirmed unanimously, by a vote of 99-0. But the same qualities that made Rubio universally popular with the Washington establishment seemed to make it likely that he would not last very long, given his differences with some of Trump’s favorite White House and MAGA advisors.
But Rubio surprised his friends and foes alike by convincing Trump to trust him, and by selflessly serving as an effective advocate for the president’s policies, even when they differed from his own while he was in the Senate, and before that, when Rubio was the Republican Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives at the age of 35.
Rubio’s longtime GOP Senate colleague, Senator James Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Politico, “He [Rubio] took this job knowing exactly what he was getting into. When you take a job like this, you are no longer a free agent like you are when you’re a United States senator. … When you take the job, you commit to make happen what your boss wants to happen, and he [Rubio] has real ability to do that.”
RUBIO MADE DEEP CUTS AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT INSTEAD OF MUSK
For example, while Trump called upon Elon Musk to cut the wasteful spending and corruption out of the other departments and agencies of the federal government, Rubio was able to convince President Trump that as a longtime student of foreign policy, he could do a much better job of streamlining and eliminating the waste in the State Department without compromising its performance than Elon Musk and his DOGE team could. As a result, last month, Rubio announced the first major reorganization of the State Department in decades, including the elimination of 132 of the department’s duplicative or unnecessary offices.
Not only is he eliminating wasteful spending at the State Department, but Rubio is also redistributing their employees to embassies and consulates around the world, in an effort to balance their more pragmatic geopolitical functions and their more ideological agenda of promoting the American values of respect for human rights and democracy.
ENDING STATE DEPARTMENT FUNDING FOR ANTI-ISRAEL NGOS
In addition, according to an op-ed column by Jonathan Tobin, the editor in chief of the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), Rubio’s re-organization of the State Department will also put an end to U.S. government support for antisemitic non-governmental “human rights” organizations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which “have conducted a multifaceted campaign involving support for boycotts [of Israel] across the board, smearing it as an ‘apartheid’ state, and promoting its isolation and prosecution on the international stage.”
Tobin adds that since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, “this bogus ‘human rights’ lobby has stepped up its efforts to delegitimize Israel’s efforts to defend itself and acted as tacit advocates for Hamas in falsely depicting the war in Gaza and against other Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen as acts of ‘genocide.’”
Secretary of State Rubio is also well aware of this problem. In a recent government Substack post, he wrote that for the past few decades, the State Department has operated several “rogue” bureaus that, “provided a fertile environment for activists to redefine ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy,’ to conform to the [antisemitic] ideology of the same so-called ‘progressives’ who have captured control of academia.”
RUBIO GETTING RID OF THE ANTI-ISRAEL CABAL IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT
As a result, Tobin adds, these “rogue” bureaucratic ideologues have “made a significant sector of the federal establishment into bastions of hostility to Israel.” They continued to fund American foreign aid projects that were indirectly financing anti-Israel terrorism, and, in one case documented by a report in the City Journal, USAID was directing American taxpayer dollars to Hamas.
According to Tobin, Rubio’s re-organization plan “involves a massive shift that he hopes will end the radical power base inside the State Department by stripping it of its autonomy and putting it inside existing regional bureaus, where it won’t be free to undermine Trump’s pro-Israel policy or fund groups working to promote policies and ideas antithetical to U.S. interests.”
Trump and Rubio have decided to put an end to these left-wing elements in the State Department, which have long been part of what is called “the administrative state,” an unelected and unaccountable fourth branch of the U.S. government dedicated to pursuing left-wing policies that no one voted for.
Tobin concludes that if Trump and Rubio succeed in “taking an axe to [this] portion of the State Department bureaucracy run by radicals, [it would be] a victory for friends of Israel and American interests, and a clear defeat for their opponents who operate under the false flag of ‘human rights’ advocacy.”
Rubio noted in his own Substack post that these same “progressive” federal bureaucrats have also “funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to international organizations and NGOs that facilitated mass migration around the world, including the invasion on our southern border [with Mexico].”
In an interview with veteran Free Press journalist Bari Weiss, Rubio explained his process for re-organizing the State Department logically and persuasively He said his goal was “promoting stability [and] organizational streamlining that allows us to further foreign policy in a way that balances all of the things we have to take into consideration … and we can deliver it [more] efficiently and quickly.”
In addition to saving taxpayer money, Rubio also claimed that he was simplifying the State Department’s policy approval process by eliminating all the excess offices that slow it down.
RUBIO PROMOTING TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY INSTEAD OF HIS OWN
Rubio explained from the very beginning that, as Trump’s Secretary of State, he would be committed to implementing the president’s vision of American foreign policy, not his own. In his first speech to State Department employees, Rubio said, “In our republic, the voters decide the course of our nation, both domestically and abroad, and they have elected Donald J. Trump as our president when it comes to foreign policy on a very clear mission. That mission is to ensure that our foreign policy is centered on one thing, and that is the advancement of our national interest.”
As a result, Rubio has now publicly endorsed Trump’s view that Ukraine must become more willing to compromise on its demands for a complete Russian withdrawal from its occupied territories to improve the chances for an extended ceasefire.
In a recent interview with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, Rubio began by reminding the audience that Ukraine was not Trump’s war. “This is a war that started under Joe Biden. For three years it went on. They made no effort to … bring it to a conclusion. And it’s a war that has no military solution. In essence, Putin can’t take all of Ukraine; Ukraine can’t push the Russians all the way back to where they were in 2014 [when the Russians first invaded and then annexed Crimea].
“And so the question here is,” Rubio continued, “who is the only leader in the world that can talk to both sides and hopefully bring them to a deal? That’s President Trump, and that’s what he’s tried to do. For a hundred days he has [made] efforts to bring about peace, to end the killing, to end to end the destruction.”
PEACE IN UKRAINE MAY BE OUT OF REACH FOR NOW
“And so the President has tried. Look,” Rubio claimed, “we’ve gotten closer. For the first time, we can kind of see what it would take for Ukraine to stop. We can see what it would take for the Russians to stop. The problem is those two positions are still a little [too] far apart …
“We’re not going to give up on [trying to make peace in Ukraine],” Rubio continued, “but there does come a point where the President has to decide how much more time at the highest levels of our government do you dedicate [to] it … when we’ve got so many — I would argue even more important — issues going on around the world, [such as] what’s happening with China [and] Iran’s nuclear ambition.”
Rubio says that while the U.S. needs to respond more effectively to the growing challenge to its leadership from Communist China, it also needs to adjust its policies in a way that recognizes the reality of China’s growing power.
RECOGNIZING THE NEED TO END U.S. DEPENDANCE ON CHINA
At the same time, Rubio said in his interview with Hannity, when he was asked about the looming tariff war between the U.S. and China, “the trade imbalance and the unfairness that exists between the Chinese and the United States is … more than unsustainable … It’s geopolitically dangerous. It needed to be confronted, and we can’t wait any longer to do it.
“We’ve allowed this to go on for 25 years and it cannot continue, or we’re going to wind up living in a world in which we depend on China for everything critical to our security and to our prosperity, and that’s not a world that we intend to leave for our children and grandchildren.”
When Hannity then asked Rubio whether China is “the number one defense priority that America faces?” Rubio answered, “I think China is the number one challenge on every front that I can imagine — geopolitically, national security, economically, industrially.”
Rubio also said, “The Chinese have done what we would have done if we were the leaders of China … The previous leaders in this country and around the world allowed them to cheat and steal and get these unfair advantages, and they took them. Why wouldn’t they? But now it’s got to be fixed …
“China is undertaking the fastest, most expansive peacetime military buildup in the history of the world … Meanwhile, the United States has lagged behind for a variety of different reasons.”
He then cited as an example the fact that the United States doesn’t have a shipbuilding industry anymore that can build the ships the U.S. Navy needs to keep up with China.
TIME TO REVERSE U.S. DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
“It’s not just that we’re not spending the money on it,” Rubio explained. “It’s [because] we can’t do it because we allowed the nation to be deindustrialized… especially since 1991 with both free trade agreements and the cheating that we allowed when we permitted China to [enter] the World Trade Organization.”
He also said that the problem of the de-industrialization of the U.S. economy goes far beyond the fact that we have lost the capability to build ships. “Boeing struggles to build planes … We depend on China for 88 percent of all the active ingredients in the pharmaceuticals that we rely on …
“You can go down issue after issue,” the secretary of state continued, “and you can see that it’s not just that we’re not spending money on it; it’s that we can’t do it because the industries that would produce it domestically are long gone. They were outsourced … primarily to China. That’s dangerous, [and] it cannot continue.”
When Rubio was asked more generally by Hannity whether he thought that the U.S. “is now in a kind of managed decline,” he responded: “I think the road we were on under Joe Biden and previous administrations before that put us on a road to decline. What President Trump is doing now is addressing the causes of it.”
Rubio then explained that during the post-Cold War era, American leaders believed that “free trade is important above everything else. We’ve now recognized that there are industries critical to [our] country and its national security and national interests that you have to be able to have domestically, [that] you can’t rely on foreign sources for, and that’s why we’re addressing that in the trade space [with President Trump’s tariff strategy].”
MAKING U.S. FOREIGN POLICY MORE FLEXIBLE
Rubio has also promised that on his watch as Secretary of State, American foreign policy will become more flexible and vary depending on the national interest of the United States in different parts of the world. “[Because of] geopolitical reality,” Rubio said, “we are going to have to have partnerships and alliances with countries whose system of government maybe is not like ours, whose view on religious tolerance, for example, may not be like ours. And we may not like that … but we still have to have relations with these countries because it serves a geopolitical purpose …
“[For example] the national interest of the United States in the Middle East is preventing groups that would attack us here in the homeland from taking root. The national interest of the United States in Central America is different. It’s migration, it’s drugs …
“So we have to have foreign policies in different parts of the world that are different,” Rubio insisted. “And we have to have the regions and the embassies run it, not some office in Washington that … applies the same standard all across the board. That’s just not realistic foreign policy in today’s world …”
HOW THE U.S. ROLE IN THE WORLD HAS CHANGED OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS
“If you go back 20 years, we were a unipolar power, and we were often called in to do things because nobody else could or would. We don’t live in that world anymore.”
Rubio believes that the United States must now “prioritize the use of our national power. There are some issues in the world that matter more than others from our national interest perspective. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about some terrible humanitarian crisis somewhere on the planet, but we can’t put that ahead of some critical long-term challenge to the national interest of the United States,” such as the serious challenge to U.S. leadership from a “near-peer adversary in China.”
