U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., widely expected to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, is a tough, disciplined, hard-liner on foreign affairs who long ago shed any hints of what appeared to be an occasional moderate tendency as he and the nation have moved to the political right.
Rubio’s expected nomination, reported by multiple national news organizations citing sources connected to the presidential transition, represents the culmination of a political comeback eight years after he was politically humbled by Trump, the man who is nominating him to become the nation’s top diplomat.
Rubio is unlikely to face any difficulty being confirmed by the Senate, where he has served since 2011.
The nomination isn’t a surprise, either on substance or politics.
Rubio has concentrated on foreign affairs in the Senate, and has become an influential voice there, where he serves as vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee — and would have become chairman next year if he’d remained in the Senate as Republicans take control — and member of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Rubio is one of the so-called Gang of Eight in Congress who are regularly briefed on highly sensitive information.
During Trump’s previous presidency, Rubio sometimes served as an unofficial adviser on foreign affairs. He defended Trump’s possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the presidency.
Considered by Trump as a potential vice presidential running mate this summer, he was widely seen as a potential secretary of state after Trump instead selected U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio for the No. 2 spot. Floridians said over the summer they were hoping to see Rubio become the nation’s top diplomat.
“I think it’s a phenomenal choice,” said former state Sen. Ellyn Bogdanoff, who’s known Rubio for more than 20 years. She arrived in Tallahassee as a “red-shirt freshman” representing Broward and Palm Beach counties in the Florida House of Representatives and Rubio was the majority party leader there.
“He commands attention,” Bogdanoff said. “It was obvious to me he was going places.”
Later, when Rubio became speaker of the Florida House, Bogdanoff served as majority party whip on his leadership team.
“It’s a scary time, and when you look at it you want someone like Marco,” she added.
Rubio’s views
Rubio holds the expected, conservative views on foreign policy issues that in Florida are shared by many Democrats: intense support for Israel, opposition to the regime in Venezuela, and a passionate opposition to the communist government of Cuba that was led for years by Fidel Castro and later his brother, Raul Castro.
Part of Rubio’s intense interest in Cuba and, more broadly, freedom and opposition to communism and socialism, stem from his own personal story. Rubio, 53, was born in Miami. His parents left Cuba a few years before the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
But, Bogdanoff said, it’s more. She described Rubio as someone with a thirst for knowledge about a range of issues, and said he spent more time thinking about them as he looked beyond Florida.
“When Marco decided he wanted to be a U.S. senator, I think he moved from the issues that were specific to Florida. Obviously there’s a large Cuban population and Cuba is very important and the communist countries are very important. But I think he saw the bigger picture, the larger stage,” Bogdanoff said.
“Just having that thirst for international knowledge to understand all of the different cultures and the dynamics, maybe it was born from his roots as a Cuban, understanding what countries can do to people,” she said.
For example, Rubio has been one of the most prominent voices in the U.S. sounding the alarm about the threat posed by China.
One area in which he’s parted ways with much of the foreign policy establishment on the Republican side and with many Democrats is on Ukraine.
He was one of just 15 Republican senators who voted against a military aid package for Ukraine passed earlier this year. And instead of supporting Ukraine’s effort to push Russian invaders out of its country, he has said it needs to reach a negotiated settlement instead of trying to regain its territory.
A little over a year ago, Rubio paused during a lengthy speech at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches to reassure his audience: “I’m optimistic about America.”
Why the disclaimer? Most of the hour-plus of remarks and answers to questions was an extremely gloomy assessment of America’s challenges, both economically and in society, in a world increasingly dominated by China.
He described at length the powerful forces that are reshaping society at a rapid pace, stemming largely from decisions made after the fall of the Soviet Union, he said at the time. As policymakers thought the post-Soviet world would be better off with international economic cooperation, world economies became much more integrated.
Companies found it far cheaper to produce goods in China, resulting in a loss of good-paying jobs for American workers. Reliance on China left us “industrially vulnerable but also left us societally vulnerable,” he said at the time. And it left the U.S. without the ability to produce vital goods for itself.
Describing himself a believer in capitalism and socialism as “a disaster everywhere in the world it has been tried,” Rubio said the free market is “generally” the right outcome.
But, he said, the results of the kind of devotion to free markets and companies seeking out the most “efficient” places, such as China, to produce their goods, pose a threat, especially when things go wrong, as shown by the supply-chain problems during the COVID pandemic.
“What happens when the market outcome is not good for your country because the market outcome says the most efficient thing to do is to rely on China for 88% of the active ingredients in your medicines. That’s not good for America.”
It’s possible for a company based in the U.S., “to do exceedingly well in a way that’s bad for the United States of America,” he said. “That doesn’t make them evil.”
“Imagine the most apocalyptic thing you could imagine,” such as a pandemic and the shutdown of the global economy. He said people should consider what will matter most in a crisis: “How innovative our banking products are or your ability to produce food and feed yourself. What will matter more? China knows the answer to that.”
At the forum club address, Rubio wondered if the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks happened today, “would the reaction of the nation be the same as it was in 2001? I doubt it. I hope I’m wrong. But I doubt it. I think the reaction would immediately be, ‘Who can we blame on the other side for this having happened?’”
Comeback
While not on the scale of Trump’s political comeback that has him returning to the presidency four years after voters defeated him, becoming secretary of state is a comeback for Rubio after he was resoundingly defeated by Trump in 2016.
He has an inspiring and charismatic speaking style and can weave his story of family and hard work — his mother was a maid and his father a bartender — into a compelling narrative. Along with the soaring rhetoric, he weaves in a series of conservative policy proposals for the nation’s economy and a road map to revitalize the country without relying on notes or a teleprompter.
Still, he had a disastrous debate performance before the New Hampshire primary when he repeated the same canned lines over and over, earning him the unflattering nicknames “Rubiobot” and “Marco Roboto.”
Trump mocked Rubio as a choke artist and dubbed him “Liddle Marco.” The two descended into what may have been the campaign’s nadir when Rubio mocked Trump with an observation that Trump had small hands. Trump countered that his hands weren’t small, later saying at a debate, “He referred to my hands, if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem.”
Rubio later said mocking Trump that way was a mistake that embarrassed him, his family and his supporters.
Rubio won just three states. He dropped out the night of the Florida presidential primary after he suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of home-state voters, losing 66 of the state’s 67 counties to Trump.
After Trump emerged as the victor, the two reached a détente, which involved Rubio supporting just about everything Trump said and did as president.
After the 2016 primary defeat, he decided to run for reelection to the U.S. Senate, and won — with Trump’s endorsement.
Rubio has hit an occasional bump, such as when he was selected to deliver the Republican response to then-President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. Rubio made a clumsy reach for a bottle of water, which turned his maiden venture on the national stage into a punchline.
In 2022, he won his third term, defeating then-U.S. Sen. Val Demings, an Orlando Democrat.
He ran for reelection as an outspoken conservative.
In November 2022, Rubio reminded supporters at his election night celebration in Miami that Demings had raised more money for the campaign than he did.
“I hope the most powerful message that it sends is that no matter how much money you spend, no matter how many press conferences you give about the threat to democracy and all this other garbage, we are never going to abandon common sense. No amount of money is going to convince Americans that men can become pregnant and that America is not the greatest country in the world,” Rubio said.
Political roots
Rubio was elected to the West Miami City Commission in 1990. In 2000 he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, where he served as majority leader from 2003 to 2006 and then speaker from 2006 to 2008.
In 2010, then-Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican who later became a Democrat, was eyeing the Senate seat.
Rubio, undaunted by the prospect of taking on the man who was then the state’s top Republican and sensing a shift in voters’ mood as the tea party movement was rising, ran for his party’s nomination.
And he steadfastly rejected suggestions that he cede the contest to Crist and run instead for a lower-level office such as state attorney general.
The result: Rubio drove Crist out of the Republican Party, Crist ran as a no party affiliation candidate for Senate, and Rubio won.
Early in his Senate career, Rubio participated in a bipartisan Senate effort to craft immigration reform legislation, which politically was a miscalculation. Many in the tea party movement who’d helped him get elected said they felt betrayed. (The late Danita Kilcullen, co-founder of Tea Party Fort Lauderdale, said the result was many who supported Rubio in 2010 came to “loathe him.”) Rubio learned a political lesson and hasn’t gotten involved in such an effort since.
Instead, he’s become increasingly outspoken in expressing his conservative views as he’s been reelected twice.
In 2022, Rubio became the most prominent Florida opponent of federal legislation to safeguard the right to same-sex marriage. LGBTQ+ married couples, community leaders and political allies, including some Republicans, said the law was needed in case the U.S. Supreme Court reverses its ruling that the ability of gay and lesbian couples to marry is protected by the Constitution.
Rubio said dealing with the issue was “a stupid waste of time.”
He later added that he was going to “focus on the real problems. I’m not gonna focus on the agenda that [is] dictated by a bunch of affluent, elite liberals, and a bunch of Marxist misfits who sadly today control the agenda of the modern Democratic Party.”
The 2024 version of the Bipartisan Index, released by the Lugar Center at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, found Rubio was far more partisan last year and less likely to work cooperatively with Democrats than he once was.
Reactions
U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami-Dade County Republican and dean of the Florida congressional delegation, was among the Florida Republicans who praised the expected pick.
“There is no one better suited to carry out Trump’s vision at the State Dept. than Rubio. He is battle tested, smart and believes in America First. The response from the Cuban American community is HUGE. Thank you President Trump for this historic appointment,” Diaz-Balart said on social media.
Democrats’ views are mixed.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Broward Democrat who is her party’s longest serving member of Congress from Florida, has often had political differences with Rubio, but they’ve been more aligned on some foreign policy issues.
“Sen. Rubio shares my concern for Western Hemisphere challenges that directly impact Florida and our constituents. I’m hopeful he will continue America’s longstanding support for democracies around the globe, including Israel and Ukraine, as well as the fights for freedom and security right at our door in Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti,” Wasserman Schultz said in a statement. “I also hope he will provide the incoming president with steadfast counsel, encourage a bipartisan approach to foreign affairs, and provide a check on Trump’s autocratic impulses. We cannot protect democracy abroad if it falters at home.”
Former U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, the Democrat who lost her challenge last week to U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., offered a sarcastic critique on social media.
“Congrats @marcorubio on your appointment as US Secretary of State. I’m sure in a few weeks, after January 20, you’ll finally take down Maduro’s narco-regime and free the Cuban people from Díaz-Canel’s communist dictatorship. It’s been all talk so far — let’s see if you’re actually ready to do something about it,” Mucarsel-Powell wrote.
Susan Bucher was a prominent liberal member of the Florida House when Rubio was speaker. At the time, she said, Rubio helped get some of her legislation attached to other bills so they could become law when they otherwise wouldn’t pass because she was a Democrat.
She said the Rubio of today is “starkingly different” than the speaker she worked with years ago. “Very disappointed in him,” she said, declining to comment further.
But U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., one of Israel’s strongest allies in the Senate, said on social media that “the other team’s pick” will have different political priorities than his. “That being said, my colleague @SenMarcoRubio is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.”
Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.