The Influencers: The People Shaping Trump’s New Washington
This story is part of a series exploring the backgrounds and agendas of the players — the well known names and behind-the-scenes operators alike — who will wield power in Trump’s second term.
When the Chinese government steamrolled pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019, Sen. Marco Rubio saw it as an existential clash between freedom and tyranny — and one that demanded a response from the United States.
He advanced legislation that year to sanction officials responsible for the crackdown, reconsider Hong Kong’s trade status and block sales of tear gas and other crowd control equipment to the Hong Kong police force.
“We have to decide: Do we want to be a defender of democracy?” Rubio told me in an interview that August. “Do we want to be a defender of those principles that have made the world, in my view, safer? And do we think American democracy is safer with more democratic nations on earth?”
“Or,” he continued, “do we sort of want to just retreat within ourselves and believe that somehow, we’ll be better off with a world in which the principles that underlie who we are have eroded as a model for nations and for governance?”
At the time, President Donald Trump wasn’t too worried about those questions — or about the protesters.
“Hong Kong is a part of China,” Trump said of the protests that summer, which he described as riots. “They’ll have to deal with that themselves. They don’t need advice.”
The differences between the two men couldn’t have been more apparent.
Now, more than five years later, Trump is returning to the White House, and Rubio is up for confirmation as his next secretary of state. It’s a dream job for the Florida Republican: Rubio will have the power to shape foreign policy, support dissidents around the globe and implement the human rights sanctions he helped pass into law while serving in the Senate. But he’ll also be doing that within an “America First” framework — and on behalf of a president who often praises dictators while insulting America’s allies.
“Trump has made it very clear that he wants to destroy our alliance structure,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who serves on the Foreign Relations Committee with Rubio.
“It’s true that Sen. Rubio has held some positions that seem contrary to President-elect Trump,” Murphy told NOTUS. “But I think when you sign up for this cabinet, you’re signing up for Trump’s view of the world.”
The rest of Washington seems to be hoping otherwise. In interviews, lawmakers from both parties said they are earnestly rooting for Rubio and believe he will be an adult in the room during Trump’s second term. They sounded optimistic that he would speak up strongly in favor of democracy and human rights around the world as Trump’s secretary of state — and handle his responsibilities with competence, even if chaos reigns in the new administration.
Rubio has plenty of work cut out for him. Trump hasn’t even taken office yet, but he has already proposed annexing Canada as the 51st American state (first seemingly as a joke, and then growing more enamored with the idea in subsequent social media posts), threatened close allies with strict tariffs, said he wants to claim control of the Panama Canal and resurrected his first-term hopes of buying Greenland.
On Tuesday, Trump refused to pledge that he wouldn’t use American military forces or economic coercion to claim the Panama Canal or Greenland. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said at a press conference. “It might be that you’ll have to do something.”
Rubio will also enter office at a dangerous moment on the world stage. Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, numerous violent conflicts continue in the Middle East and the Chinese government is acting ever more belligerent in the Taiwan Strait.
He will almost certainly have an easy time being confirmed. After nearly 15 years in Congress, he still has plenty of friends, an accomplishment in an era when relationships between lawmakers have been strained to the limit.
In 2017, Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin told reporters that Rubio was “one of the great leaders in the United States Congress on human rights” and that he “speaks with moral clarity.”
Two presidential impeachments and a global pandemic later, Cardin — who was most recently the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and has now retired — is still a fan of Rubio.
“I respect him greatly,” he told NOTUS in December.
Other Democrats who spoke for this story had a hard time coming up with criticism for their Florida colleague, beyond noting that they obviously disagree on some policy questions. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said he would have selected Rubio for his own cabinet if he were president and that he’s often joked in the hallways in recent months about how astonished he was that Trump chose Ohio Sen. JD Vance for vice president instead of Rubio.
And New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker responded to the news of Rubio’s nomination with unreserved joy. “I’m just happy for him and his family,” he told NOTUS. “He has an understanding of foreign policy’s nuances and complexities.”
“Marco is my friend,” Booker said.
Republicans tripped over themselves with enthusiasm to praise him.
“He’s got a wicked sense of humor,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who spends a lot of time with Rubio and other colleagues cracking jokes in the Senate cloakroom. He’s also “one of the most articulate debaters I’ve ever seen,” Graham told NOTUS, a “really good geopolitical mind,” and he “can convey complicated concepts in an understandable way.”
GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana feels the same way. He quipped that Rubio is young among his colleagues, considering that the “average age in the United States Senate is deceased.”
But “he exercises power intelligently and maturely,” Kennedy told NOTUS.
Rubio’s more Reagan-inspired, hawkish foreign policy was on full display during the 2016 election when he ran in the GOP presidential primary against Trump. After Trump became the nominee, the senator delivered speeches pushing back on some of Trump’s foreign policy plans.
“If we are not engaged in the world, the price we pay will be much higher in the long run than the price we pay to be engaged,” Rubio said at the time.
In more recent years, Rubio has tried to strike a balance between his prior views and Trump’s more isolationist impulses, voting against a recent aid package to Ukraine because it did not address American border security. In a Senate floor speech before the vote, he said he understood why some Americans would question more aid to Ukraine because the United States faced other problems at home.
Still, he said, “We have a national interest in the outcome.”
“It’s not an unlimited national interest,” he added of the war. “It doesn’t mean we spend however much they need for however long it takes. But there is an interest.”
For Rubio, it is related to great power competition with China. “They’re hoping we’re going to get stuck in Ukraine, along with what’s happening in the Middle East, and we’re going to be drained by it and we won’t be able to focus on the Indo-Pacific,” he said of the Chinese government’s goals. “But if we do become disengaged, then what? Their hope is that they’ll go around telling people, ‘You see? We told you America is unreliable and a power in decline.’”
Trump has said he wants to quickly negotiate an end to the war, and Rubio will likely play a role in those talks. His colleagues in the Senate are glad Rubio may be in the room: He has long called Russian leader Vladimir Putin a war criminal, and in his speech about the aid package, he said he wants Ukraine to survive the war with its democracy intact.
If Rubio is confirmed, he’ll have some dynamics working in his favor. He understands the foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress and Trump. And he’s had more practice in leadership since Trump’s first term, serving as the top Republican on the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee. He’s gotten more than 40 bills passed into law — which is more than many members of Congress in this gridlocked period — and he has a reputation for doing his policy homework.
It’s a good sign, too, that even Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, whose libertarian foreign policy views differ with Rubio’s in nearly every meaningful way, told NOTUS he is a “good pick” for the role.
Rubio will still have to face questions from his Senate colleagues during his confirmation hearing, expected next week. Booker told NOTUS he’ll want to ask about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Other Democrats are likely to ask how Rubio will weigh further military aid to Israel as its war against Hamas continues in Gaza. Rubio would have a say; the State Department is required to consider whether foreign forces receiving American assistance are committing human rights abuses.
Trump’s team did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Rubio’s spokesperson also declined an interview request for this story. In a statement after Trump announced his nomination, Rubio pledged that he would “work every day to carry out” Trump’s agenda.
“We will deliver peace through strength and always put the interests of Americans and America above all else,” he wrote.
For Rubio, those interests have often been connected to human rights questions, as well as the rise of authoritarians who threaten democracy around the world. When he introduced a bill in 2017 to punish Bashar al-Assad after Syrian forces used chemical weapons against civilians, Rubio preemptively answered hypothetical questions about what the conflict has “to do with America.”
“This is who we’ve been for over two centuries: a people who care,” he said during a press conference about the bill. “It’s embedded in our founding principles, in the belief that all people have the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not all Americans. All people. And we’ve lived out those principles — often imperfectly — but we’ve lived them out more than any other nation and any other civilization and any other society in human history.”
Rubio’s evolution as a politician has meant accepting the reality that his style of serious legislating isn’t what will win out in today’s Republican Party. Trump isn’t known for making similar speeches — at least, not unless a staffer has fed one into a teleprompter for him first. But Trump is just going to get more attention (and more votes) than someone like Rubio in this era: “If I give the most thoughtful statement in history, people will ignore it,” Rubio told reporters in 2019. “Because it doesn’t get the clicks and it doesn’t get the ratings.”
Rubio has found a way to understand and explain Trump’s style of leadership — and work with it. During our conversation about Hong Kong back in 2019, Rubio had an answer ready for Trump’s lack of concern — he was seeking a trade deal with China at the time — even though Rubio wanted to see him support the protesters.
“The president is a businessman, and he’s coming at this as a businessman,” he said. “And that’s how he entered office, what he got elected to do. As a businessman, he’s a very transactional person. So I think he views foreign policy in a very transactional way.”
Trump being transactional instead of completely cemented in one way of thinking gave Rubio the opportunity to have real influence during his first term. Rubio often lobbied him on foreign policy matters, at one point becoming a kind of shadow secretary of state for Latin American policy. And he frequently pushed for stronger measures to combat aggression by the Chinese government.
Rubio may look to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as an example of threading the needle. Pompeo decried abuses against ethnic minorities in China’s northwest region of Xinjiang while he led the State Department, even as Trump himself reportedly told Chinese leader Xi Jinping that he thought imprisoning them en masse was the right thing to do.
“The second Trump administration, like the first Trump administration, will be a mix of people from different factions,” said Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist who reported a book on Trump’s first-term China policy, titled “Chaos Under Heaven.”
“Those factions are sure to clash constantly. And Trump in the first administration lorded over these factions in a Roman Colosseum-type arrangement,” Rogin told NOTUS. “He sided with different factions at different times, for different reasons, in an unpredictable way — and then often changed his position and sided with the other faction, and then changed his position again.”
Rogin expects Rubio to succeed in convincing Trump to embrace some of his hawkish ideas toward China — that issue “cuts across these factional lines in unique ways” — and that he’ll have plenty of say over day-to-day State Department operations.
But on the big questions, when Rubio will have to go make his case in the Oval Office, “all bets are off.”
In those debates, Rubio’s colleagues on Capitol Hill hope he comes out on top.
“If Trump has half a brain, he will not only listen to Sen. Rubio but respect his judgment,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-led the Congressional-Executive Commission on China with Rubio when the panel spearheaded a sweeping forced labor trade ban. “This is a guy with a lot of experience in foreign policy.”
“The more I’ve worked with him and his team, the more I’ve, frankly, appreciated his knowledge and his convictions,” McGovern told NOTUS. “I hope he continues to be who he is when he’s secretary of state.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.