The evolution of Marco Rubio

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0:25He wants to be a part of the Trump world, and he wants to send the message, it seems from my point of view at least, to the MAGA base that he is one of them. The political odyssey of Marco Rubio. It's Wednesday, May 27th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:55Today on the show, every story about the Republican Party is a story about Trump. Today, we're looking at some of the latest developments in the president's love-hate relationship with his fellow Republicans. Some Republican congressmen are bucking Trump on his plan to compensate people he says were unfairly treated by the Biden administration. But does it really mean anything coming from the same people who shielded Trump from responsibility for the January 6th riot and then helped him get back into office. We'll get to that story in a few minutes. But first, another prominent Republican whose opinion of Trump has changed over the years, Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State.

1:38He's also acting National Security Advisor. For a while, he was head of USAID and acting National Archivist. That's a lot of Trump administration cred for a guy who 10 years ago was calling Trump a con man. But Rubio's about face on the president and his family's colorful biography tell us a lot about the direction of the Republican Party and about the politician who might be angling to succeed Trump in the White House. Manuel Roig Franzia wrote a book in 2012 called The Rise of Marco Rubio, and he stopped by this week for this conversation with Indira Lakshman on. So Manuel, you dug into Rubio's life story and you've followed his career since before he ran for president in 2016.

2:24A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine Rubio being such a close advisor to Trump and being so trusted by him. From all accounts, let's hear what Rubio had to say then about then-candidate Trump on CBS News in 2016. Donald Trump has portrayed himself now consistently as fighting for the working people, And he has a record of sticking it to working people for 35 years. Rubio also called Trump a con artist, while the president derided him as Lil Marco and robot Rubio. That's very different from how Rubio talks about the president today or how Trump speaks about Rubio. Here's Rubio earlier this year after the administration captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

3:07People need to understand that this is not a president that just talks and does letters and press conferences. And, you know, if he says he's serious about something, he means it. Okay, Manuel, Rubio has traveled light years from his rejection of Trump to his full-throated embrace of him now. That's not unlike many mainstream Republicans in Congress. But what does it tell you about Rubio? Well, Marco Rubio is someone who has always wanted to latch on to somebody more powerful than him who could help him get to the next place on the ladder, right? So in Florida, as he was kind of rising up, it was Jeb Bush, this older figure establishment.

3:48And it's no surprise to me that he would put himself in a position of really being a rah-rah guy, almost the role of a campaign surrogate, for lack of a better word, for the president. Hmm. So it sounds like you're saying he's not really a true believer in MAGA, that it's just politically expedient for him? I think political expediency is part of it, but I also just think that he very much likes to feel a sense of belonging, belonging to some other larger movement, some other larger ideological base. And it's something that has manifested itself throughout his career, both professionally and personally.

4:32Well, you actually write about his personal life and his own life story in your biography of him, and you write that Rubio always has wanted to be accepted and that as a child he even became a Mormon briefly. Tell us what happened and how it fits into the larger theme of Marco Rubio trying to adapt to his surroundings and be accepted. Yeah, it's so interesting. He grew up as a little kid in Miami, surrounded by Catholics, very into the Catholic Church. And his family, they were immigrants from Cuba. And his father was really struggling to make a living in Miami and saw an opportunity to go to Las Vegas.

5:16And in Las Vegas, he had an aunt who was a Mormon. And they lived in a house where there were Mormon boys next door. And little Marco immediately wanted to be a part of that and became an extremely enthusiastic Mormon as a little guy. including taking the family to see the studio where the Osmond show was being filmed, and most importantly, getting baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Did the rest of his family become Mormons too, or did he go back to being a Catholic when they moved back to Florida? Well, his mother did also join the church, and the things didn't work out so great from a work perspective in Las Vegas.

6:10They moved back to Miami and all was forgotten, back to being Catholic. All right. Well, you write that Rubio and his family have direct experience with issues that fly in the face of many of Trump's priorities. For instance, the president wants to end birthright citizenship, but isn't it true that Rubio himself was a beneficiary of birthright citizenship? He became a citizen because he was born in the U.S., even though his parents were not U.S. citizens at the time. Yeah, that's absolutely true. His parents came to the United States in 1956. They were regular immigrants from Cuba, and he was born in 1971.

6:46They were legal residents, but they were not citizens. And what's interesting about that is that Marco has been a big defender of birthright citizenship when it pertains to his own potential to be president in the United States. He even has filed court papers in a lawsuit that was filed questioning his eligibility. Fast forward to Donald Trump becoming president and issuing executive order about birthright citizenship, and Margot has become a big defender of that. Before, big defender of birthright citizenship. Now, on the MAGA line, on the Trump line, a skeptic and opponent. Right. Okay. What about the president's deportation push?

7:34I mean, Rubio is a face of the administration that has had the biggest deportation push in American history, and yet Rubio's grandfather was ordered deported decades ago. Yeah, this is a grandfather who was from Cuba and came to the United States legally. And like a lot of Cubans, after the revolution, saw the possibility that things would improve in Cuba, and he went back to Cuba. And he decided that things weren't as he had hoped they would be and tried to come back to the United States. And that was a very fateful choice because he was detained at the Miami airport. And he was eventually ordered deported from the United States by an immigration judge.

8:26It's an incredibly common scenario for immigrants who are coming into the United States and have visa violations for staying out of the United States too long without renewing their visa. And Marco's grandfather was a person who was fingered by the government for that exact kind of visa violation that now thousands and thousands of people are being ordered deported for. All right. Well, Rubio was a longtime senator from Florida and a vocal supporter when he was in Congress of American soft power and American foreign aid. And he warned that if the U.S. withdrew from the world, it would lead to totalitarianism or something else.

9:09Here he is in 2017 speaking on Capitol Hill. The other alternative to America is nothing. It is a vacuum. And that vacuum leads to instability and that instability will lead to violence and that violence will lead to war. And that will ultimately come back and impact us, whether we want it to or not. All right. So a pretty full-throated defense there of American support and involvement in the world, including aid. Fast forward to today, he's serving in an administration touting America First policies. Trump shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. And Trump's administration has focused on what critics would call wars of choice, rather than the soft power that Rubio had advocated.

9:53Why did Rubio reverse himself on things that seemed so important to him? He wants to be a part of the Trump world, and he wants to send the message, it seems from my point of view at least, to the MAGA base that he is one of them. And he has very deftly and shrewdly ingratiated himself with Donald Trump and become a part of the MAGA world. And that is a shock to a lot of people who expected him, particularly on issues like the U.S. Agency for International Development, which he has presided over the demolition of. It's almost unfathomable to people who had followed him during his career in the Senate.

10:35Well, it's still early to be talking about the 2028 Republican primary, But a poll from earlier this month showed Rubio leading Vice President J.D. Vance in a hypothetical matchup for the presidential candidate. Nearly every other survey we could find from earlier this year or last year had Vance in the lead. Earlier this month at a Rose Garden event, Trump conducted his own impromptu poll of supporters. Who likes J.D. Vance? Who likes Marco Rubio? All right. Sounds like a good ticket, J.D. That was a perfect ticket. So how well positioned do you think Rubio is to run for president? Oh, I think he's playing it perfectly.

11:22He's managed to be a big defender of Donald Trump, but not necessarily be associated too closely with some of the quagmires that the administration has gotten into in both Iran and in Ukraine and the situation in Israel and Gaza. He's managed to be the person who is the communicator to the media, pumping up Trump with flattery and also spin, but at the same time not really get hegged with any of the failures. And I would say this. Marco will be 57 years old in 2028. He'll be 61 in 2032. He'll be 77 in 2048. I think he's playing the long game, and I would not expect him to be stepping off the scene no matter what happens after the end of this Trump administration.

12:23People have been telling him he could be president since he was in his 20s, and I think he believes it. Journalist Manuel Roig-Francia is the author of The Rise of Marco Rubio. Manuel, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be with you, Indira.

12:44Coming up next, another Republican politician who's learned to love Trump, despite some occasional grumblings. As Mitch McConnell's time in the Senate comes to a close, one historian says voters should be clear-eyed about his record on January 6th. Robin Young has that conversation in just a minute.

13:08Well, some Republicans have defied President Trump's demands for a new White House ballroom or his$1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund. But our next guest says at least one critic doesn't pass the smell test. Julian Zelizer, it's here. He's a Princeton University scholar who has long helped us look at the news through an historic prism. And today it's recent history that we're going to look back at. Julian, welcome back. Thanks. It's nice to be with you. So your recent sub-stick is titled Senator McConnell's Hypocrisy about January 6th. This is after President Trump's Attorney General Todd Blanche proposed that$1.776 billion fund purporting to be for people who feel the law has been weaponized against them.

13:53Now, Jan 6th, insurrectionists are already filing. Mitch McConnell, former Senate Majority Leader, got all huffy. He said, so the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops. Utterly stupid, morally wrong. Take your pick. You say what? Well, Senator McConnell was instrumental along with Senate Republicans in protecting President Trump, including during the second impeachment, where McConnell had the power and used it to delay the proceedings. and then to argue that the Senate, after having delayed the proceedings, couldn't convict a former president.

14:33And in 2024, McConnell backed President Trump to run again. And so he is part of a Republican coalition that has protected the president, been a firewall for the president despite January 6th. And to remind people, he also, along with many Republicans who fled for their lives on Jan 6, initially expressed outrage, called it disgraceful, said Jan 6 was provoked by the president and others. But then, as you say, pivoted, delayed the impeachment hearings until it was too late and then said he couldn't convict a former president. Look, Mitch McConnell, we'll remind ourselves, also blocked President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016.

15:18He said it was too early in an election year to have that. But then in 2020, he fast-tracked President Trump's nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. This is just weeks before a presidential election. So his critics would say he's long been capable of the kind of hypocrisy that sounds like you're talking about. But what if this time he really is having some sort of change of heart and he really means it that this what people are calling a slush fund that would pay insurrectionists is appalling? Well, I think if you're bothered, as many people are by January 6th, it's better to have a former Republican leader and still a prominent Republican standing against the slush fund and standing against this kind of payment and that vote matters.

16:09But still, more broadly, you want some sense of reckoning from the party about what's happened, what they've done, and the implications of continuing to this day to protect a president from their own party when he does things that destabilize the democracy. So unless he does that, unless you see more people in the party do that, this is obviously a good step. But it doesn't leave the bigger issue addressed and you'll have more problems recur. You suggest a Jewish practice of apology. Yeah. Well, in reading your sub-stact, I was realizing how much has changed since Mitch McConnell was so powerful.

16:51Now, if you ask most Americans who's the Senate majority leader, I don't think most would know. It's John Thune of South Dakota, by the way. But maybe that's because Donald Trump really is de facto Senate majority leader. And I'm wondering if, you know, McConnell has maybe not only potentially wrecked his own reputation, at least with historians like you, who you are saying he's being hypocritical, but also destroyed the job he once held, you know, the majority leader. I think that's right. I mean, I think there's two things that have happened. One is President Trump has expanded his reach as a party leader.

17:30I think he's actually stronger now than he was in the first term in controlling, threatening, and intimidating his own party and rallying votes as we have now seen against his opponents. But secondly, what Senator McConnell did, and many Republicans have done, was give away the power of the institution in a quest for party power. And so the implications of that are you reach 2026 and leadership positions in the Senate and the House are not what they once were because the president has become so dominant. So he actually, through his power, eroded some of the standing of that very office. Yeah, well, and just in a minute we have, if there is some sort of mea culpa, not in a punitive way, but to help people like you believe, what form would that take?

18:24It's votes. And in Congress, it's all about math and votes. And the more votes you see where the party stands up to some of the behavior that has been so troubling and concerning, then you start to believe that the reckoning has happened. And until the votes are there, it's rhetoric, not action. Okay. Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer. As we said, he took us way back to 2021 on this one. But how easy it is to forget, right, Julian? What someone said then and what they're saying now. Julian, thank you so much. Thank you.

19:09We're going to take one more short break, and we'll be right back.

19:18We don't have to look back to the Capitol riot in 2021, or to the first Trump election in 2016 for examples of the president's sway over Republican politics. Just this week, primary elections in Texas saw Trump endorsed Ken Paxton win big over incumbent Senator John Cornyn. political scientist Alvaro Corral at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley said, in some ways, it's the end of an era. Well, it's actually really hard to understate the sort of monumental shift, I think, that occurred in Texas politics last night. And by that, I mean that, you know, the sort of end at the moment of John Cornyn's over four decade career, over 20 years in the Senate, I think brings really an end to what we think of like classic quintessential Bush Republicans in the state of Texas.

20:11You look around and you see who his fellow Republicans are these days, his fellow Senator Ted Cruz, of course, Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and of course, the victor last night, Ken Paxton. These are all, you know, representatives of the sort of Tea Party and Trump wave of the Republican Party that has swept through Texas politics in the last decade. And, you know, John Cornyn was that last holdout. And so I think that this really sort of turns the page, we would say, in Texas politics on the Republican side. There's more to that conversation, including what trends in data about Latino voters in Texas might mean for the race, and how the Democratic nominee for that Senate seat, James Tallarico, might fare against Paxton.

20:57You can listen to that whole thing right now at hereandnow.org. You'll find lots more conversations at hereandnow.org, like our interview with a former anti-vaccine influencer who now helps others get back to the vax. She says people who tried to convince her went about it the wrong way. They would just mock me and say, well, you hate your child. You want to see babies die. And all I was thinking at the time was, okay, but if I vaccinate my baby, she'll die tonight. Also, constitutional sheriffs claim to be able to pick the amendments they think are worth enforcing. So the 14th, the 19th, they are left out of the constitutional sheriff canon.

21:41Why that point of view could have big implications for the midterm elections. All that right now at hereandnow.org. But that's it for the show today. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jill Ryan, Jenna Griffiths, and Lynn Mennegan. Our editors were Todd Munt, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Andre Peralta and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening.

22:19We'll be back with you tomorrow.