Is Marco Rubio playing Trump?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, from little Marco to the Viceroy of Venezuela.

0:18We're only a fortnight into 2026. And yet Donald Trump has aggressively provoked one global crisis after another. And there's been one man by his side through all of it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Step one is the stabilization of the country. We don't want it descending into chaos. He's been deeply involved in the U.S. attack against Venezuela.

0:42Front and center in negotiations over Greenland. Does the U.S. intend to buy Greenland? Can you clarify your comments to lawmakers this week? Well, that's always been the president's intent from the very beginning. He said it very early on. And now, promising support to the protesters in Iran.

1:02Once a fierce critic of all things Trump, Marco Rubio is now one of the president's closest allies. And, on paper at least, the most powerful American diplomat since Henry Kissinger. He's a serious player in Trump's White House. There's been reporting around this. There was the Vanity Fair profile around the world that J.D. Vance kind of joked to the photographer, you know, I'll pay you if you make me look better than the other cabinet secretaries. and I'll pay you twice as much if you make me look better than Marco Rubio because they're seen as sort of rival potential heirs to Trumpism and to the MAGA universe.

1:43But how far will he go? Can he go for the president? And where might this gamble take him? From The Guardian, I'm Noshina Kgal. Today in Focus, Marco Rubio. the man leading the most radical US foreign policy shift in decades.

2:08Long Gambino, you're a political correspondent for The Guardian US based in Los Angeles. Now, Trump's second term has been anything but plain sailing, but 2026 in particular has got off to a wild start. And one of the people we've seen front and centre throughout all of this is Marco Rubio. Lauren, how influential has he been to those developments behind the scenes? Oh, incredibly. I mean, he's the driving force. I don't think Trump would have gone in and captured Nicolas Maduro with US forces if it hadn't been for Marco Rubio pushing him behind the scenes. Going all the way back to Hugo Chavez, he has wanted regime change in Venezuela, and that has been part of his political identity and his political beliefs for more than a decade.

2:52And so no one has become more influential, I think, to the president on foreign policy than Marco Rubio. I mean, I think everyone knows I'm pretty involved on politics in this hemisphere. Obviously, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor are very involved in all these elements. How would you describe his position in Trump's inner circle and his relationship with the president? Unexpectedly, extremely influential and important. I say unexpectedly because he's certainly considered more of an establishment figure. He has good relationships with a lot of more conventional Republicans.

3:22He is someone who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate unanimously, meaning all Democrats said, OK, we are fine with Marco Rubio being the secretary of state because everybody else Trump is nominating is so problematic and controversial. But he's also made his way and figured out how to sort of carve out his own space in the MAGA world. Marco Rubio, unbelievable. Unbelievable, Marco. When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets this solved. Have you met Rubio personally? And if so, what was he like? I covered Congress for several years in DC, so I would see him on the Hill. We'd be waiting outside the Foreign Policy Committee hearings to grab him because he was, you know, at the time, relatively chatty and would be willing to talk to reporters about the latest foreign policy issue.

4:07Obviously, even then, his passion was Venezuela, Latin American politics. When Obama normalized relations with Cuba during his second term, Marco Rubio was a really aggressive opponent of that. In the eyes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, his former Secretary of State, the Cuban people are suffering because not enough American tourists to visit that country. When in truth, the Cuban people are suffering because they live under a tyrannical dictatorship. And did he have much of a presence? You know, some people walk into a room and it's like they're being naturally lit by star power. I think there was this aura around him those early years when everyone was looking for like the Republican answer to Barack Obama, there was this sort of aura, like, could he be the next one?

4:53And so that makes everyone gravitate towards him and like celebrity power or something. If there's any sense that someone might be on the rise, then, you know, Washington flocks. And I don't think there's very strong words to describe him on a personal level. He could play a politician in a movie. Wow. So he's quite blank. He can kind of project what one wants to think of Marco Rubio and he could be many different versions of Michael Rubio, which is what we've seen over his career, I guess. He's very savvy and he's someone who's very good at appearing morally resolute on an issue, but actually to get where he's gotten, he's had to be pretty elastic and maybe swallow a lot that he doesn't like in order to achieve his own ends.

5:41so let's understand those ends because rubio is the child of cuban immigrants he is the highest serving elected official of latin heritage in american history and he has made no secret as you've said of his desire to just rid latin america of its leftists what do we know about how his early life has influenced his politics. So his parents' story is core to his political origin story. You see, I'm one generation removed from a very different life. My mother was one of seven sisters born to very humble parents who struggled every day. My father had it even tougher. His mother died when he was only six years old.

6:21And the day after her funeral, he went to work selling coffee in the streets of Havana with his father. And as best I can tell, he worked from then on for 70 years. They came to America with virtually nothing. No English, no money, no friends. Only the strong determination to provide their children all the opportunities they never had. He called his parents Cuban exiles and led you to believe that they had fled when Fidel Castro came to power. In fact, they were well on their way to permanent residency in the United States by the time Fidel Castro came to power. They came, you know, like so many immigrants to the United States for economic prosperity.

6:55and they worked. His father was a bartender. His mother was a hotel maid. They had obviously low wage jobs, but they worked hard. They barely spoke English. He describes his upbringing, you know, speaking only Spanish at home and English in school, which would have been common for probably many of his fellow classmates at the time in Southern Florida. But that is essentially the Barack Obama origin story. There was a lot of power in it, sort of rags to riches immigrant story at the time when he was really coming onto the national scene. There's a real sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps work ethic to Rubio.

7:31Like, if he can make it, everyone else can. And there's a social conservatism that runs through his family, his politics, his position. How much of that was informed by where he grew up? It was hugely influential. You couldn't grow up in South Florida at the time and not be steeped anti-communist politics. Obviously, the exile community is extremely insulated. And the time is certainly, you know, people who had fled Cuba because of Fidel Castro. And that made them extremely, extremely wary of left-wing governments across the region, and certainly including in the US. The refugees waiting to leave are terrified that Castro might close the door at any moment, and they're prepared to take almost suicidal risks to get away.

8:14And that actually made Cuban Americans, a very specific population among Latino American voters, because, you know, they often voted conservatively and were a core voting bloc of the Republican Party. And so Marco Rubio grows up in Miami, a bit in Las Vegas, but his roots are really in South Florida and Republican politics. It's a great pleasure for me to be with a group of Americans who have demonstrated how much can be accomplished when people are free. Many of you arrived in this country with little more than the shirts. He quite clearly came from humble beginnings, but did he have another career before politics?

8:49And how did he enter that arena? Rubio started out in politics pretty early, right after he finished law school. His wife was actually a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader. He got involved in local Miami politics and then worked his way up through the state legislature. He was a speaker and a leader of the Republican Party. So it's actually a very traditional, you know, work your way up, start local, climb the greasy pole of politics. Hi, I'm Marco Rubio. And today I'm announcing that in 2010, I will be a candidate for the United States Senate. I want to take a moment to tell you a little bit about myself and a little bit about why.

9:27So he won election to the Senate in 2010. It was actually a surprise victory for him. He beat the sitting governor who was a Republican turned independent. So it was a big victory that sort of launched him onto the national stage just at a time when Republicans were starting to look around for the next bench of new leaders. Welcome, U.S. Senator and my friend, Marco Rubio. He did burst onto the national scene as part of this Tea Party wave, which was this very conservative anti-government backlash to Barack Obama. Let's start this is to remind ourselves when you hear those guys, I don't know what they're screaming, but they can't do that in China.

10:13And it reminds us of how blessed and privileged we are to be Americans. And he sort of was able to parlay himself like part of this sort of outsider grassroots movement, you know, along with figures like Ted Cruz. But actually, in Florida politics, people like no, he's, you know, he's been in politics for years. He's, you know, one of the establishment. He worked with Democrats. He's in good standing with the local Republican Party. He's no renegade rabble rouser. So he has the political skill to be quite fluent in different pockets of the Republican Party. What did he accomplish in that role as senator?

10:46I think he was best known early on for his work with the Gang of Eight, a group of Democratic and Republican senators who were trying to push bipartisan immigration reform. And that legislation would have included a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. But we're dealing with this not because we legally have to, but because, number one, it is in our national interest as a nation. It is not good for this country to have millions of people living in shadows. And number two, we're dealing with this issue because this is who we are. We are the most compassionate nation on earth.

11:17We are the people that have... Extraordinary to think of now, given that he is one of the major faces of the Trump administration, which is carrying out an aggressive crackdown on undocumented immigrants and legal immigrants in this country. And so it's interesting that that was what he really threw his political capital behind, and it failed. And so he quickly pivoted and tried to move away from the issue. And then, you know, for the rest of his career, focused on foreign policy. He joins the Foreign Policy Committee and the Intelligence Committee. He was a real Russia hawk, a China hawk. What's happening is quite straightforward.

11:49Vladimir Putin is going into the Middle East and saying, I know you know that America under Barack Obama is unreliable. You can't count on them. You can count on us. And we're going to show you how firm and resolute we are. We take action. We don't just talk. And he really carved himself out as extremely conservative on foreign policy. I mean, I think it's fair to say that he wasn't necessarily known as a political heavyweight. And yet he did enter the presidential race in 2016. So let's introduce the candidates for tonight's Republican presidential debate. Senator Marco Rubio. Mr. Donald Trump.

12:26Obviously, he failed. Lauren, what happened? Well, he kind of ran, interestingly, as like a new generation, like a young gun conservative, what you think of as like boilerplate conservative policies, but with like a young, inspiring, much more savvy face to it. And it was just just steamrolled by Donald Trump. It was so shocking to the party. In retrospect, like they thought he had figured out this magic formula that would make the party much more multicultural and have much more sway with women voters. And it fell flat. Gosh, what a fork in the road that would have been. Yeah, he seemed to be on the path towards the White House.

13:02And then comes this brash New York businessman just calling him little Marco. And Trump's attacks really got to him. He took those very personally. Don't worry about it, little Marco, I will. All right, well, let's hear big, big Donald. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it, little Marco. Gentlemen, gentlemen. You ought to chill up. There was this moment on the debate stage where Marco Rubio, mocked Trump for having little hands. And the op-eds that came from that was like, it's the end of the Republican party and politics have just gone into the garbage. He's always calling me little Marco.

13:36And I'll admit, the guy he's taller than me, he's like six two, which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who's five two. Have you seen his hands? And you know what they say about men with small hands?

13:50You can't trust them. You can't trust them. That was a moment in time that we all thought, wow, things are changing. Fast forward, he loses, obviously, pretty badly, but he almost immediately begins to work on the Trump administration. You know, you would think that he would be on the outs, but actually, Trump has a way of sometimes allowing some of his former rivals to come back in. And so early 2017, he was just hammering with the White House about Venezuela, pushing for the U.S. to try to dislodge Maduro by recognizing the opposition. And they did actually go as far as to recognize the opposition leader as the rightful president of Venezuela.

14:28Maduro is an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant who brutalizes his people. But Maduro's grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken. So he really brought the U.S. deeply into Venezuela politics from his perch in the Senate just by lobbying the Trump administration during his first term. So he's quite a savvy operator. Absolutely. He's been laying the groundwork for a long time.

15:02So Ruby has gone from being Trump's rival on the campaign trail to one of the most powerful men in the White House right now, appointed Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. How do you think he's pulled that off? I think he's good at code switching. I mean, he ultimately is an immigrant kid, right, who could, you know, switch seamlessly from Spanish to English. He can work with Democrats when he needed to. He could be the face of the Tea Party when he needed to. He could be this sort of, like, young gun conservative Republican establishment figure when he needed to, and he could tread in MAGA waters when he needed to.

15:35There's obviously skepticism because MAGA demands purity. So there's always been skepticism of Marco Rubio, but I think ultimately he's made at work. I mean, a lot of Trump's followers take their cues from Trump. And so if Trump trusts him, he gets some sort of goodwill, I think, from that. We've had some real dummies and some real brilliant, great ones. I think Marco, if we keep going like this, he's going to go down as the greatest secretary of state in the history of our country. So Marco, thank you very much. Thank you very much. He's certainly taken advantage of the fact that he is always in Trump's ear on the largest array of issues.

16:14He's just by his side for so much of it. I think the fact that Trump is so interested in drug trafficking and, you know, it had been reported that he just really wanted to blow up boats and Marco Rubio was able to try to put some sort of logical plan behind that. You know, there are so many legal questions, of course, if your real interest is stopping drug trafficking, then why aren't you focused on Colombia or Mexico? Major plot holes, as we might call it. plot holes, that's exactly it. But Marco Rubio is kind of the answer, right? Like he's like, oh, well, you know, Venezuela here and, and you're going to see this play out in Maduro's trial, you know, they're going to try to say that he was running this drug trafficking ring.

16:54And so I think you're seeing how he's able to just sort of pair Trump's interests with his own. I don't know the limits of that, though, because to get to this point, Marco Rubio's had to look away as Trump praises Putin, pressures Ukraine to accept, you know, the peace deal, like he's had to look away for a lot of his, you know, what we thought were his core convictions on foreign policy. And that could put the entire NATO alliance at risk. You know, how far is he willing to go on Trump's behalf? And I think those are going to be the real pressure points. Trump likes to throw blame at people.

17:25So if things go sideways, you know, he could be on the hook as well. All that said, along with J.D. Vance, who we should mention has been notably sidelined in recent weeks, Marco Rubio, along with Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller, all who we've done episodes on, they are defined as Trump's inner circle. And I just wonder if you think they actually present a united front, or are there splits in vision about what the party should be and about MAGA or about Trumpism itself? They're all different operators, for sure. Pete Hexeth is really a showman, and Marco Rubio can but that's not his natural state.

18:08Stephen Miller is far more extreme than I think Marco Rubio is comfortable with. I think personally, Marco Rubio is trying to steer clear. He feels much safer on foreign policy than domestic policy, where the immigration operation is taking on extreme and very dangerous new tactics. J.D. Vance is much more comfortable and I think much more representative of the America First strain, for sure. Do you think Rubio really is on board, though with the Maga mission? It's hard to know. I think there are elements of it that he does deeply agree with because there are elements that are rooted in right-wing politics, which he is and has always been a part of.

18:48But I think if tomorrow you were to see a resurgence from the old-school neocon wing of the party, you would see Rubio shift towards that. A good old-fashioned pivot. The old-fashioned pivot.

19:07He's achieved his long-term political aim of regime change in Venezuela without a single loss of American life. He's now been dubbed the viceroy of Venezuela. What on earth does that mean? And what will it look like for Rubio, do you think? Many analysts have just questioned, how have they not come up with a day-after plan? Clearly, Trump just points to Rubio and is like, hey, he's going to help run it. What that means in practice, we actually don't really know. But what Trump has said is that he's had many wonderful conversations with Maduro's replacement, Delcio Rodriguez. Apparently, according to Trump, Rodriguez is happy to work with the US and Rubio sort of leading those conversations.

19:49They're honestly leading a lot on his Spanish language ability to call up these leaders across the region. Trump has invited the president of Colombia after threatening that country to Washington. So we expect Rubio to be involved there. And Rubio has in interviews laid out these phases where obviously the first part of the phase has to do entirely with oil because he is representing Donald Trump's interests. We're working very cooperatively with the interim authorities there to provide a market for the sale of the wealth of Venezuela in such a way that benefits the people, both of the United States, but also the people of Venezuela.

20:26And as a reminder to everyone, the president announced since just two days ago, every penny, everything they buy with the money that they're making from the world now, Mr. President, will be bought from America. But he has slipped in that later on down the road, the U.S. wants to be involved in national reconciliation, allowing the release of the opposition forces. He hasn't totally given up on this hope. But I mean, it is telling that we talk about regime change, but actually Maduro's government is still running Venezuela currently. it isn't the opposition leader. And I think if Marco Rubio were president, there would have been a much stronger push to depose the whole government.

21:00Oh, really? Oh, I absolutely think so. Yes. I think the US operation to take Maduro and bring him back to the US ultimately left no Americans dead. So it was seen as an unmitigated success for the US and he is seen as the face of that. So right now, you know, I think he's riding really high in terms of his popularity. But so much could still happen. Venezuela could erupt in violence, it could be further destabilized, that could spur another migration crisis. That was one of the core reasons Trump took an interest in Venezuela in the first place was the migration to the US and the millions of Venezuelans fleeing.

21:34And so if something like that were to happen, I think it would be much harder. And if we take them for their word, it's not just about Venezuela, is it? Because Trump has since It's been on a tirade about Mexico, Colombia, Cuba. And Rubio has added fuel to that fire. Cuba is a disaster. It's run by incompetent, senile men. It has no economy. It's in total collapse. And by the way, you know, all of the guards that help protect Maduro, this is well known, their whole spy agency, all that were full of Cubans. Yeah, look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I'd be concerned at least a little bit.

22:05Lauren, how serious is Rubio about this threat to Cuba? And just how big a deal would it be? It would be a huge deal, but I think that's the ultimate goal. He is hoping that by opening up Venezuelan oil, by removing Maduro, and by exerting extraordinary pressure on the replacement government, that it will ultimately cripple Cuba. And without U.S. intervention, political change will come to Cuba. Obviously, Cuba's withstood a lot and a lot of pressure from the U.S. over many, many decades. So perhaps wishful thinking. But yes, I think Marco Rubio is hoping Cuba falls next.