Is Everything Going According to Marco Rubio’s Plan?

0:06Hey, Dexter. Hey, Tyler. Marco Rubio is one of only two people to concurrently serve as U.S. Secretary of State and as National Security Advisor. The other is Henry Kissinger, who, depending on whom you ask, is either one of the most effective or notorious figures in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Do you think that Rubio has the chance to wield the kind of power and influence that Kissinger did? God, that's a great question. No. So I think it's a different world, but more important, I think it's just a completely different administration. So if you look at Kissinger, I mean, he was a giant.

0:44He roamed the world. He was intervening everywhere. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace in the Middle East. He opened China to the United States and to the West. He negotiated arms control with the Soviet Union. I mean, he was, you know, plenty of people loathe Henry Kissinger, but he was, that's because he did so much. Yeah, they loathe him, but they don't deny his power. Yeah, or they don't deny his accomplishments. And so you might disagree with some of those, but he's an extraordinary figure in post-war history. But he worked for, you know, two different presidents, Nixon and Ford.

1:18And I think this is just a very different, we live in a very different time now. And I think this is, look, I think this is first and foremost, this is the foreign policy of Donald J. Trump. And Marco Rubio has kind of found his much smaller place, his much smaller perch in that galaxy.

1:41That's Dexter Filkins, a staff writer at The New Yorker who recently profiled Marco Rubio. As Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Rubio now occupies a role of extraordinary power, one that places him at the center of Donald Trump's second term, which has been marked by an increasingly aggressive and unilateral approach to foreign policy. Although Rubio came into the Trump administration with well-documented views and priorities that differed from Trump's, it's unclear to what extent Rubio has influenced Trump's foreign policy goals, or molded himself according to Trump's whims, and whether it's all part of a larger pattern of political opportunism.

2:18I wanted to talk with Dexter about Rubio's influence on Trump's escalation in Venezuela and what it signals for U.S. policy in Latin America. I also wanted to talk about how Rubio made the journey from Trump critic to one of the most central figures in his second administration and what the State Department looks like, both at home and abroad, under Rubio's leadership. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

2:48So you said that Rubio has found a smaller perch in the Trump administration or I guess like the Trump galaxy. But at the same time, it does seem like he's responsible for a lot of things, or at least it's the narrative has been that he is the driving force behind a lot of things, including Maduro's capture in Venezuela and the escalation in Latin America since. So having written this profile of Rubio, do you think that's accurate, that Rubio was kind of the driving force behind that operation? Or do you think that Trump's desire to dominate the Western hemisphere and all this talk about the Don Roe doctrine, as Trump put it, is actually the main thing that we're seeing here at work?

3:31Well, I think there's a couple parts to that answer. And the first one is, I think until recently, he was a remarkably kind of bit player in the Trump game. And, I mean, right off the bat, Trump gave to his old real estate buddy, a guy named Steve Witkoff, basically all the big crises in the world. It's like, go solve these. You know, and Stephen Wyckoff, I think it's not unfair to say, doesn't know a lot about places like Ukraine or Gaza, but Trump sent him out there and said, do it. And so right off the bat, as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio was kind of deprived of what would ordinarily be kind of the big things for him.

4:14But somebody told me this is in the piece, but when he was interviewed, when Trump spoke to him about the job, he said, look, I want to do Latin America. That's what I want to do. And I think that fits. That's his passion. His parents are from Cuba. He knows the region. He's fluent in Spanish. He thinks, and this is in the piece too, he thinks countries like Venezuela and Argentina and Colombia and Brazil, these are great countries and they can be greater. And he feels that way. And so, yes, he has been the driving force in this really pretty stunning last, you know, few weeks in Venezuela. Like he is the he's the main driving force there.

4:53Just going back real quickly, when you say that Rubio said that he wanted to do Latin America, what exactly does that mean? I mean, does it mean establishing democracy across Latin America? Like, I feel like there's all this talk, especially now that we're focusing on Venezuela about, you know, getting their oil and all this stuff. And like, what are Rubio's main goals in the region? Well, this is this is I mean, this is like the$64 ,000 question. Marco Rubio has spent his entire career championing human rights and democracy and particularly in places like Latin America. And he despises Maduro or despised Maduro as the leader of Venezuela because he was a corrupt, overbearing dictator.

5:35And just as his parents are from Cuba, he hates the Cuban regime. And so suddenly, let me just back up a bit. But before the very, you know, the surprise military operation that captured Maduro, before that, Rubio was in regular, constant, almost everyday touch with the Venezuelan democratic opposition. And I think it's fair to say they fully expected to take over, you know, if such time came as Maduro was no longer there, they would move into government. So you're talking about Machado. Yes. Yeah. Marie Machado and others. And I spoke to them before I end. They're ready to go. And, you know, they've been pretty quiet since.

6:17But I think it's fair to say they're devastated by this. And like, you know, maybe events will change. But I think this gets to the heart of who is Marco Rubio. And again, he spent his entire career advocating democracy in these places. And suddenly he finds himself kind of running the government of Venezuela. But it's Maduro 2.0. It's the same people. They're the ones running the country. They're still there. And so how Marco Rubio squares that in his mind, in his soul, I don't know. But it's a tough one. It's a real tough one. I don't know how he squares it in his mind. And I also don't even really understand how it works in practice.

6:57Like, how is Rubio going to simultaneously serve as, you know, the governor of Venezuela or the viceroy of Venezuela, as The Washington Post put it, while, you know, the remnants of the Maduro regime, you know, kind of continue? Like, what is that supposed to look like and what do we know about the role that Rubio is meant to play in the next phase of America's plan for Venezuela? Well, look, I should say my overwhelming impression from my reporting is that they're kind of, you know, they're making this up as they go along. I mean, there isn't much of a plan. I think they were. It's too bad to hear that because it's like you feel that way when you're watching the news.

7:33But then you're like, you know, like Dexter is going to do this piece and report on it and figure out that there is actually a plan here, even if it's a plan that we don't necessarily agree with. But it's too bad that actually you got like an up close look at the situation. And it is just what we kind of assumed from watching from afar. Yeah, so I think it's a big improv. But what Rubio has said, and he's been pretty clear about this, is like, we're not sending troops in there. I mean, Trump has said, you know, we'll do it if we need to, but we don't want to send troops in there. We don't even really want to run the country.

8:03But what we will do is if the government that is still there, all the bad people who were there before, if they don't do exactly what we want, we're going to blockade the oil again. And we're going to, you know, we're going to starve him out. So it's basically, you know, kind of government from afar by coercion. And so if you don't do what I say, I'm going to whack you on the head with this. And that's the plan as we speak. And it's somebody said to me, and I think this is true, the trouble or the difficulty in this administration is only about six people who make decisions in the whole administration.

8:38Rubio is one of them. But he doesn't have any help. He's the national security advisor. He's the secretary of state. I mean, and I'm on the email list every morning. It's like Marco Rubio had a long conversation with the president of India. And Marco Rubio had a long conversation with the president of Germany. And it's like he's doing all this stuff and he's spinning these hats. And it's like, and you're going to govern Venezuela? And I think the answer is it's no. You know, we're going to watch this play out, but I think it's pretty difficult. You mentioned that Rubio isn't necessarily getting everything that he wants in Venezuela, given that he was, you know, a champion of Machado.

9:20And it doesn't seem like, at least for now, like, you know, the opposition is going to be kind of enabled to run the country. At least it doesn't seem like the Trump administration is going to be trying to facilitate that. But do you think that Rubio was willing to, you know, kind of put up with only getting half of what he wanted there because the whole point of this operation, or at least part of the point, was to kind of put Cuba in a bad position? I mean, just, you know, the news about Cuba was getting so much of their oil from Venezuela. That is no longer the case. I think the U.S. is now allowing Mexico to provide some oil to Cuba.

9:55But for the most part, it seems like they're trying to cut off the oil supply. And I guess I just wonder if is the long game for Rubio Cuba? And do you think that he's willing to put up with not necessarily getting everything that he wanted in Venezuela? Because Cuba is what is on his mind. And what happened in Venezuela will enable the administration to go into Cuba. Well, I think, you know, I'm not sure there is a long game. I don't think there's much of a plan. But I think the dream, the absolute dream, and you hear it, you know, if you spend one day in Miami, you'll hear this. But if they take out Maduro, Cuba's going to fall after that.

10:30And probably the lefty Nicaraguan regime will fall after that. And Cuba is, you know, Cuba economically is a complete shambles. It's a disaster. And so somebody said to me, he's quoting the piece, if Marco Rubio ends up as being the man who took down Maduro and the Cuban regime, you know, there's going to be a statue of him on every block in Miami. and you know Marco Rubio is an ambitious man and so these things are not lost on him but is he playing the long game? It's pretty long, it's a pretty long game because I think Marco Rubio has spent his entire career advocating for democracy and for human rights and he believes that Latin America is a region full of great countries and he didn't, that's why he hated Maduro he hated Maduro because of what he did to Venezuela which is a wealthy, educated country.

11:24And he didn't get what he wanted. He didn't get what he spent his entire career advocating. And that's got a, you know, he, somewhere inside Marco Rubio, he had to make a kind of a terrible compromise. So the web headline for your piece is How Marco Rubio Went From Little Marco to Trump's Foreign Policy Enabler, which is just great copy, by the way. And we're going to take a quick break, And then when we get back, I want to try and answer that question and just talk a little bit more about Rubio's rise in politics more generally, but also his road to the State Department. So this is the political scene from The New Yorker.

12:01We'll be back in just a moment.

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12:45So I want to talk a little bit about Rubio's rise, which I think is really fascinating because it wasn't that long ago that it really seemed like there was just no world in which he would really have a prominent place in the Trump ecosystem. Like I kind of thought that he was going the way of like Chris Christie or something where it's like you run for president, you don't get it. Trump hates you. The party, you know, has coalesced around Trump. And so you don't really have a position in it anymore. and that clearly has not been the way that the story has played out. So let's just start with Rubio entering national politics.

13:20Why did he get involved? I mean, what made him want to be a politician? And I guess like what made him a politician that we were all sort of watching at a relatively young age? There's a wonderful line in his memoir. He said, I've always been in a hurry to get to my future. So I think he's a very ambitious man. I think Marco Rubio wants to be president of the United States. And, you know, he came from Miami, a small town called West Miami, outside kind of main Miami. And his parents fled Cuba. I mean, they fled Cuba before Castro, but they're Cuban-Americans. And if you're a Cuban-American in Miami, that's a very particular milieu.

13:57and the hostility towards regimes like Cuba and Venezuela comes naturally to you. But Rubio is in the Senate. He had a fantastic reputation. He's a serious guy. He was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, came into the Senate in 2010. He was on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Those are really important committees. He did his work. As somebody said to me, you know, he reads. He's a voracious reader, and this is an aid. He's shaking his head saying, you know, most senators don't read. And he said, you know, but Marco Rubio reads. And so he's a, and you just have to watch him. He's great.

14:35He's like super articulate. He's really fast. He can talk about anything. And he always, it's a gift. He appears kind of deeply sincere. And so he, he's a natural, I think, to kind of, he rose right to the top and right to the front. And what school of politics did he come to represent? Like neocon, Tea Party? Well, somebody said to me in the piece, he was a neocon candidate in 2016. I don't think it's, maybe, maybe he was a neocon. I think for me, he was kind of Ronald Reagan Republican. You know, it was like anti-communism, human rights. We are the leader of the free world or leader of the West.

15:15That's what he brought to this. and then the kind of the domestic part of the Reagan agenda as well. And so what happened, and I think the quick answer to what happened to that and what happened to Marco Rubio is 2016. He went out to run for president. He, like all the other Republican candidates, got blown out by Donald J. Trump. And Trump has completely transformed the party. So if you look at, you can watch Rubio after 2016. he clearly kind of had a conversation with himself where he said, like, you can either keep being a Ronald Reagan Republican or you can, and in which case you're finished politically in the Republican Party, or you can change every position you have.

15:58And I think he chose the latter. And so you can watch it. I mean, you can watch it kind of over time. He's kind of, he just, he's changed dramatically in what he stands for and what he represents. Yeah, I mean, there's an amazing quote in your piece where you're quoting an unnamed political figure in Miami who says, the one constant in Marco Rubio's career is that he has betrayed every mentor and every principal he's ever had in order to claim power for himself. So we'll talk a little bit about how that's played out during his time at the State Department, but I'm wondering if you can give us some notable examples of this from earlier in Rubio's career.

16:37Well, here's the best example, and I think it illustrates quite a lot, because it also illustrates kind of how the country was changing, was in 2013, 2014, the Senate and Congress tried, I think for the last time, it was the last great attempt to reform the immigration system. and Rubio was helping to lead that. There was a group called the Gang of the Eight. It was eight senators. Rubio was the lone Republican Latino. It was people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham. And it looked like it was going to happen. And it was like, it was across the board reform. It was like, you know, more security at the border and legalization of people and amnesty, et cetera.

17:23And Rubio was absolutely at the forefront of that. And what happened was, pretty clear, all told me was he took a trip to New Hampshire, and he could see that the party was changing. And when I say he took a trip to New Hampshire, he was thinking about running for president, which he did a couple years later. But at the same time, the Republican Party in the United States was changing drastically and very rapidly. And so you had voices for the, you know, like Rush Limbaugh, who was saying, you know, we're being invaded by, you know, illegal aliens coming across the border and millions and millions of them.

17:55And Rubio sensed, I mean, he's incredibly astute politically. Rubio sensed the party was changing. And so the Senate, of which he was a member, passed the immigration reform. And then he backed away. And when Rubio backed away, it fell apart. The whole thing fell apart. And the Senate, Congress has not been able to pass. I think they've tried a couple times, but they haven't passed anything like that. That big grand attempt that was the last time that they made a great try at it. And it fell apart. I mean, it's like, you know, somebody in the right wing, like, doesn't like him and he's going to collapse.

18:30You know, we can't we can't have a guy like that running for president. I used to take him seriously. Wow. Let's fast forward to 2016 and Trump and Rubio's dynamic during the primary. One of the things that was interesting about your piece is, like, I just totally assumed that Trump and Rubio hated each other during that period, in part because they were throwing insults at each other, Trump calling Rubio a little Marco, and Rubio then making a joke about the size of Trump's hands and his spray tan and all this stuff. But there's this part where you talk about how behind the scenes, they were actually kind of friendly with each other and they had something of a rapport.

19:07So can you explain just what your sense is of what their relationship was actually like during that period and what it's like now, like kind of what it is that they, how they're able to get along, given that they just seem like two completely different people when you watch them on television. They do. I mean, I have to repeat the joke, the one that he said about, he said, you should sue the guy who did that to your face. But, you know, that's a really good, like, high school locker room talk, you know. And then they would go back. Apparently, they'd go backstage after debate. I remember there were like, you know, 12 people on the dais, candidates.

19:41And they would kind of talk and it was okay. So it was like all part of, It was sort of understood to be like part of the game. But at the time, you know, Rubio couldn't have been ideologically more removed from Donald Trump. And so over the past eight years, now nine years, Rubio kind of transformed himself. And so, I mean, I had this conversation when I had a conversation with somebody who was basically in the room when he was offered the job of Secretary of State. And, you know, basically it came down to like, you know, they evolved a little bit. Marco evolved a little bit. But also, you know, he saluted Trump and said, like, you're in charge.

20:20And, you know, I'm here to carry out your policy. And so that's basically what changed. I think that Rubio was forced, wasn't forced. I mean, he chose to remain viable in politics. He had to basically change almost everything that he stood for. I mean, when Trump won the election again in 2024, the sense was that he was just surrounding himself with a bunch of loyalists. And, you know, I think that gave a lot of people pause when confirming those loyalists. And it's interesting to me that Rubio, despite his increased Trumpiness, you know, he was still confirmed by the Senate 99-0 in 2024. So what do you think accounts for him having that bipartisan stamp of approval?

21:00Yeah, I mean, he had a great reputation in the Senate. Like, Marco Rubio is a serious senator. And so I think it's fair to say the senators thought, well, okay, this is a pretty volatile bunch of people. Like, there's a steady hand for foreign policy. Like, there's a serious guy. So he sailed right through. I should add, when Marco Rubio returned to the Senate to testify, it was a very different scene a few months later. Is that when he was coming back as national security advisor or are you referring to something else? Yeah. So a few months later, I think it was in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee or the Foreign Relations Committee, but Rubio testified.

21:41And the senators just absolutely went after him, particularly the Democratic ones. But it was – and there's an extraordinary exchange between him and Senator Holland, Democrat from Maryland. And he says, like, I thought we believed the same things. I thought, you know, we both believed in democracy and human rights. I thought, what happened to you? You know, and he's like, I regret voting for you. And, you know, look at the Sudan. There's a genocide there. There's a famine there. And he's like, you shut down hundreds and hundreds of kitchens there. People died because of your decisions. And Rubio was just defiant.

22:15And so Senator Van Hollen said, I regret voting for you. And Rubio said, the fact that you regret voting for me confirms that I'm doing a good job. Yeah, that is kind of an insane back and forth between the two of them. Yeah, I want to talk more about kind of like the dismantling of USAID and the other things that have happened under Rubio's watch at the State Department. But first, let's talk more about Rubio becoming national security advisor as well, which, I mean, now it feels like it's been so long since this happened. But that's because Mike Waltz, you know, sort of embarrassed himself in the whole signal gate fiasco, right, and then stepped down from that role.

22:54And so then Trump decided – I mean, what was the idea there? Just like, oh, he seems like he's doing a good job as secretary of state, so let's have him be the national security advisor too? Yeah. I mean, in theory, it's not insane. Yeah. I guess I wonder how weird this is or not weird. It's just a lot of work. But I think what's interesting, when Rubio was only Secretary of State, that's the State Department. That's the Truman Building. It's down the road from the White House. You're completely removed. And then when he became National Security Advisor, also, he moved into basically an office right off the Oval Office.

23:28So he's in the White House every day that he chooses to be. And he has Trump's ear. And that kind of, you know, that's the attraction of that job. It puts you right in the middle of the decision making. And so somebody, Eric Rubin, a former ambassador, said to me in the piece, he's not seen in the State Department. He's not really a presence in the State Department. He's in the White House. So he's not, I guess he's not spending all of his time in the State Department. But how much of what has happened in the State Department during the, you know, just like since the beginning of Trump's second term, can we kind of attribute to Rubio?

24:03Like there's a long discussion in the piece of, you know, USAID closing down and the question of whether this was a doge effort, whether this was something that Rubio was interested in. I mean, it seemed like Rubio kind of took responsibility for it at one point, but then behind closed doors, he said that he, you know, hadn't been didn't know that this was going to happen. How much of what we've seen can we attribute to his own decision-making versus other people just kind of like running amok in the government? Well, I think the short answer is he's a good soldier. I mean he does what he's told and he signed up for Trump's agenda, not his own.