“My DJ name?” secretary of state Marco Rubio repeated at the White House press briefing on Tuesday.
“You’re not ready for my DJ name.”
Rubio was responding to a question about a video taken at a family wedding over the weekend in which he stood behind decks, holding a set of headphones before taking charge of the wedding playlist. As the administration lurches from event to extraordinary event, Rubio has emerged as the cabinet member whom Donald Trump sees as his star turn, snappily articulate and seemingly revelling in a multitasking role in which he is acting national security adviser as well as secretary of state.
On Tuesday, in a typically unorthodox stunt, it was announced Rubio would fill in for Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave, at the weekly press briefing in the James Brady room in the West Wing. Rubio appeared through the door – on time – and clearly enjoyed orchestrating the maelstrom of the briefing: “I’m just ... I’m winging it guys. They give me a little map; I don’t know where I put it ... some of you had red ‘x’s. I’m kidding, that’s not true.”
RM Block
For the White House press corps, the theatre was a break from the frequently tense exchanges with reporters deemed hostile to the administration’s aims. And the performance underlined the sense that Rubio’s star is in such rapid ascent he may yet threaten the position of JD Vance as the anointed one to run for president in 2028. His profile will dominate over the coming days as he travels to Italy, where he will meet Pope Leo in what has been interpreted as the administration’s attempt to ease the anxiety and anger over president Trump’s recent diatribes against the pontiff. It was an issue he put to rest in his chatty, rapid speaking style on Tuesday.
“It’s a trip that we’d planned from before,” Rubio said. “And obviously we had some stuff that happened. There’s a lot to talk with the Vatican. I’ll give you an example. The pope has just returned from a trip to Africa, where the church is growing very vibrantly, and we have shared concerns about religious freedom. The topic of Cuba – we gave Cuba $6 million in humanitarian aid but they won’t let us distribute it. We had to distribute it through the church. We would like to do more.”
Rubio’s chief task at the podium was to quickly channel all questions into further justification for the continuing war with Iran, even as domestic unhappiness with spiralling fuel prices intensifies and news bulletins around the world declared the tenuous ceasefire all but over.
“Leaving aside the pope, the president and I, for that matter, I think most people can’t understand why anyone would ever think it is a good idea for Iran to ever have a nuclear weapon," he said. “Look at what they are doing on the Strait [of Hormuz] right now. They are holding the whole world hostage. They have these sailors on commercial ships that are going to starve to death out there. They don’t care. They don’t care that this is melting down economies around the world. What do you think they would do if they had a nuclear weapon? They would hold the world hostage. And I think the president’s point is that how anyone cannot see that as an unacceptable outcome, an unacceptable risk, is beyond him. He is puzzled by it.”
If Trump was watching this novel briefing – and he almost certainly was – he would have approved. Rubio has emerged as one of his slickest advocates. Just as he heaped praise and rationale on the raid on Venezuela that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January, Rubio presents as a more plausible advocate for the United States’s actions against Iran than the jingoistic war secretary Pete Hegseth or vice-president Vance, who is conspicuous among Trump’s cabinet in his lack of enthusiasm for the military action.
In the long term, that position may stand to Vance. Rubio’s even-mannered, even charming defence of his president adds to the puzzle of what, exactly, he represents within the Trump administration. Over the course of a decade, he has made the move from presidential opponent derided by Trump as “Little Marco” in a humiliating 2016 election experience during which he lost 66 of the 67 counties in his home state of Florida, beating Trump only in his home district of Miami-Dade. He abandoned that presidential campaign to win re-election to the Senate, slowly reworking himself as a Trump loyalist to the point he was reportedly on the shortlist as running mate before the 2024 Republican convention.
Unlike many of Trump’s cabinet nominees, Rubio’s years in the Senate meant he sailed through on a vote of 99-0. Here was yet another iteration of the American dream; he is the son of Cuban immigrants – his father Mario a bartender, his mother Oriales a hotel maid – who came to America, legally, to better their prospects.
The charitable interpretation of Rubio’s performance is he has used his persuasiveness to at least temper some of his president’s wilder influences. The more damning view is he is a key player in an administration that has burned multiple bridges with long-standing international allies, gutted US-led international aid programmes and launched into a foolhardy war against Iran with no evident plan for what comes next.
And Tuesday’s briefing underlined the perilous nature of speaking on behalf of Trump: by evening time, the president had flatly contradicted Rubio’s afternoon assertion that “Project Freedom” – to escort commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz – was under way. It comes with the territory.
Towards the end of his moonlighting session as press secretary, Rubio was asked a fuzzy question about his hope for America. It produced Rubio’s most revealing response of the day, given the sincerity of his delivery, his unapologetic attitude towards the hardline immigration policy of this administration and his family’s fascinating back story.
[ ‘It’s a psychological war’: A family divided by Cuba’s quiet exodusOpens in new window ]
“My hope for America is what it has always been. I think it’s the hope I hope we all share,” he said.
“We want it to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything. Where you are not limited by the circumstances of your birth, the colour of your skin or by your ethnicity ... It is a place where you are able to overcome challenges and achieve your full potential. I think that should be the goal of every country, frankly. But I think in the US we are not perfect. Our history is not one of perfection, but it is still better than anyone else’s history.”
