The exchange seemed to crystallize a master-servant relationship in a single instant.
Early in January, in a White House gathering with oil executives invited to discuss investment in Venezuela after the US overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, its strongman president, Macro Rubio discreetly passed a note to Donald Trump.
The message was meant to be private. But to Rubio’s obvious discomfiture, the president acknowledged it publicly and divulged its contents to the assorted gathering, to be captured on live television.
“Marco just gave me a note,” Trump announced. “Go back to Chevron. They want to discuss something.”
Rubio at first appeared horrified before forcing a frozen smile, as Trump patted him condescendingly.
The secretary of state’s indignity came less than 48 hours after Trump described Rubio, 54, and the vice-president, JD Vance, as “kids” in an interview with the New York Times, disclosing that he bought each man four new pairs of shoes to replace their “shitty” footwear.
The two episodes were all the more striking after what was widely seen as a high water mark in Rubio’s standing in Trump world – his success in persuading Trump to take military action against Venezuela, a stark departure from the president’s earlier promise to his Maga base to avoid foreign wars.
It is a far cry from 10 years ago, when Rubio and Trump went head-to-head to capture the Republican presidential nomination – all while espousing starkly contrasting outlooks.
Rubio – then a senator from Florida – campaigned strongly on his foreign policy credentials, gleaned as a member of the Senate’s foreign relations committee. His views were neoconservative hawkish orthodoxy – characterized by fierce opposition to President Vladimir Putin of Russia while supporting free trade and a globalized economy, and championing human rights.
He summarized his worldview in a 2015 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2015. He vowed to “support the spread of economic and political freedom by reinforcing our alliances, resisting efforts by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbors, maintaining a robust commitment to transparent and effective foreign assistance programs, and advance the rights of the vulnerable, including women and religious minorities who are so often persecuted”.
Fast forward to today and Rubio’s outlook has undergone a sea change that has transformed him into a vocal exponent of Trump’s America First foreign policy – even while retaining elements of the interventionist neoconservative philosophy that previously defined him. His altered approach has allowed him to carve out an influential role in an administration that some observers said he would struggle to survive in.
Daniel Drezner, an international politics professor at Tufts University, said Rubio had confounded speculation that he would be the first member of Trump’s cabinet to depart. Far from being fired, Rubio has gained in strength – acquiring the additional post of national security adviser in April following the ousting of Mike Waltz, who had inadvertently invited a journalist on to a supposedly classified Signal chat to discuss military strikes against Yemeni Houthis.
“He has clearly made a political calculation that he is better bending to the winds of Maga than sticking to whatever previous principles he’s held,” said Drezner. “The whole idea of promoting the rule of law, the idea of promoting democracy and human rights – he’s basically turned his back on all of that. Now, if you asked me what Marco Rubio’s core foreign policy principles are, the only answer I could legitimately give you is he’s a hawk on Latin America.”
Rubio’s compromises include diluting his once staunch support for Ukraine and criticism of Putin, and abandoning USAID, the government overseas development body whose dismantlement by Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” he acquiesced in, despite having previously praised it.
On Putin, Rubio was once an unambiguous hardliner, writing in 2015 that the Russian leader “wants nothing less than the recognition of Russia as a geopolitical force” and calling for the US to “confront [his] assault on international security”.
He still explicitly supported arming Ukraine after Moscow’s 2022 invasion, even while growing close to Trump’s camp as the former president sought to recapture the White House.
Yet as Trump has consistently sided with Putin in attempts to end the near four-year war, the secretary of state has been forced to navigate an awkward path. He has been excluded from the immediate negotiations involving Moscow and Kyiv, which Trump has put in the hands of his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and has likewise been marginalized from negotiations in the Middle East involving Gaza and Iran, areas historically considered the preserve of the secretary of state.
Indeed, veteran state department watchers says Rubio’s relationship to the department has been akin to that of an absentee landlord.
“He is invisible at the state department. I’ve heard that over and over again,” said Eric Rubin, a retired US ambassador who interacted with Rubio repeatedly when he was a senator.
“He’s spending most of his time at the White House with Trump being national security adviser. He only comes to state for official visits and ceremonies, and he has no role in running the department whatsoever. Most people, myself included, expected him to be more of an advocate for foreign policy engagement. They expected him to be a little better than the rest of the Trump administration – and he hasn’t been.”
Instead, from having once vocally championed immigration, Rubio – the son of immigrants who left Cuba before the country’s takeover by Fidel Castro’s communist forces in 1959 – has refashioned himself into one of the most vigorous enforcers of Trump’s fixation with restricting immigration.
In a departure from his previous human rights advocacy, Rubio struck a deal with El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele to accept more than 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members and accommodate them at a notorious detention facility known as Cecot, where many of the men, denying the accusations of gang membership, said they were tortured.
Rubio has embraced Trump’s restrictive immigration agenda in other ways, cancelling the visas of thousands of people he deemed to be a threat to the US, sometimes based on their social media postings or articles in student publications. This week, the state department announced it was indefinitely suspending immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries – including Cuba.
“All of these visa xenophobic decisions are being made at the White House, not in the state department,” said Rubin. Someone could say Marco Rubio probably doesn’t want to be banning immigrant visas, given his family history – his wife’s parents were immigrants too – but I don’t know what he thinks.”
Yet it is Rubio’s changed tune on Trump himself that most eloquently attests to the extent of his volte-face.
In 2016, after Trump disparaged him as “little Marco” when the pair clashed heatedly in a televised debate, Rubio – in terms that have an ironic resonance a decade on – likened his opponent to a “third world strongman”.
“No matter what happens in this election, for years to come there are many people on the right in the media and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well,” Rubio told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The clip is still regularly posted on social media by critics as evidence that he has renounced his principles.
Having fallen into the “trap” himself, the secretary of state now regularly praises Trump as a “president of peace” and “president of action” whose contribution surpasses his predecessors.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who worked on Rubio’s successful 2010 Senate campaign and his failed presidential campaign, said his former client faced a choice of adapting or becoming politically extinct.
“Republican elected officials in the Trump era have two choices. They can accommodate themselves to the new leader of their party, or they can leave office,” he said. “Marco has accommodated himself to the new leadership, and has succeeded as a result.”
He has done so, Ayres insists, without compromising his basic beliefs.
“He has always believed that the world is a better and safer place when America plays a leading role, which is one reason why he’s been so active in this effort to take out Maduro,” he said. “He has believed for at least 10 years that Maduro was a cancer on Venezuela society and needed to go.”
Ernesto Castañeda, the director of Latin American studies at American University, agreed that Rubio’s career had been defined by one unifying theme – determination to topple the communist government of Cuba, which for years has been sustained by subsidized oil from Venezuela but is now highly vulnerable after Maduro’s ouster.
“He has always been – and I think this is the right word – obsessed with Cuba and bringing down the regime there,” Castañeda said. “That explains his worldview. That’s how he got elected many times in Florida, and now he’s espousing that policy in the White House.”
That obsession – fueled by the anti-communist sentiments of the Cuban exile community in Florida – has occasionally landed him in trouble. In 2011, he was forced to correct his own false statements, repeated on his Senate biography website, that his parents had fled Cuba after Castro’s takeover, when they had in fact left in 1956, three years before he seized power.
But it had also underpinned his successful effort to persuade Trump to finally act against Maduro, Castañeda argued.
Now the contrast between Rubio’s inflexible stubbornness on his ancestral homeland and biddable willingness to serve an erstwhile political foe may be about to pay dividends.
This week Trump vowed to force Venezuela to cut off Cuba’s oil lifeline in an effort to bring the regime to its knees.
The threat came after he suggested that Rubio might soon have a new job to add to his bulging portfolio – as president of Cuba. “Sounds good to me,” the president wrote, in response to a post jokingly suggesting the idea.
But, according to close Rubio observers, the presidency he really has his sights on is that of the US – for which he is reported to be playing a long game.
“What I observe is that Rubio is very careful to not get crossways with Trump, and I can only ascribe it to ambition,” said Rubin.
“I’ve heard from people who’ve been at events with him that his plan seems to be not to run for president next time [in 2028], but instead to let maybe JD Vance run on the assumption that Vance is not a good candidate and that the Democrats will take the White House. That’s anecdotal but it makes sense. Rubio is young enough that he could run in seven years.”
