Matt K. Lewis: I’m a Never Trump Conservative Who Used to Love Marco Rubio. Should I Still Believe in Him?

Marco Rubio’s stock has been rising recently, and it’s pretty clear the secretary of state is a leading 2028 presidential candidate. That may sound like good news for Never Trump conservatives like me. But actually, it poses something of an existential headache.

I voted for Rubio in the 2016 Republican primary. And I seem to recall having written one of those embarrassingly premature “Marco Rubio for president” columns, circa 2010, for the now-defunct Politics Daily.

I’ve also been an ardent critic of Donald Trump from day one. So the possibility that this sad detour in American politics could end with a President Rubio offers, at least on the surface, a tiny bit of hope. (Seriously, we live in a world where a Candace Owens nomination is not an absurd possibility.)

But then, there’s the uncomfortable part.

Being a Never Trump conservative has always involved two facets. One is ideological: an abiding support for mainstream conservative policy. The other is moral: an opposition to a vulgar, incompetent and chaotic authoritarian who lacks the character and temperament to be president.

Rubio once seemed to satisfy both commitments. Today, however, he is one of Trump’s top deputies, with all the baggage that entails. The image of Rubio sinking into that couch while Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is permanently etched in my brain.

It’s really a catch-22: Any Republican who remained opposed to Trump has already been purged, which means the only viable Republicans have, to varying degrees, been tainted.

Democratic readers are probably shouting, “Exactly! That’s why you should vote blue, no matter who.”

In 2026, that seems reasonable. But what about 2028, after Trump is (presumably) no longer on the ballot?

Recent trends (the rise of democratic socialists, for example) suggest the Democratic Party isn’t a viable permanent home for mainstream conservatives who opposed Trump on principle.

(And, by the way, Democrats, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent years, it’s that, once someone wins a major party nomination, they have a reasonable chance of becoming president. So you, too, have an interest in the least crazy Republican candidate emerging from the primaries.)

At this point, you might be thinking that I’m doing an awful lot of work to justify voting for a Republican president again, someday. And you’d be right. But this isn’t just about me. If Rubio rediscovers his commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law and Reaganite optimism, millions of politically homeless conservatives will be eager to believe him.

To fully understand why Rubio poses such a temptation, you have to understand why he originally enthralled us.

For a while, Rubio looked like a generational talent who could take Ronald Reagan’s sunny conservatism — which included a belief, as Jeb Bush memorably put it, in “the right to rise” — update it for the 21st century and sell it to a country that had stopped buying the old Reagan brand a long time ago.

He was articulate, optimistic and young. And he was Hispanic.

This wasn’t just identity politics. The ability to speak fluent Spanish opens the door to persuading voters whom Republicans have spent the better part of two decades finding creative ways to alienate.

Even today, some Democrats worry about the threat posed by Rubio’s appeal. “If Marco Rubio is the nominee for president,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) recently warned, “we are in trouble.”

Still, it’s hard to get past Rubio’s complicity in Trump’s administration — and the lack of clarity surrounding his motives. Is he still the fundamentally compassionate conservative who believes in the American dream but calculated he could do more good by occasionally nudging Trump in the right direction? Has he transformed into a genuine populist nationalist? Or is he simply a chameleon? Is there even a “real” Rubio?

I don’t know the answer, but I do think it matters.

If Rubio is an amoral Machiavellian, he might prove more dangerous than Trump, precisely because he’s more competent — and has had more time to observe the testing of America’s institutional guardrails.

If he has transformed into a populist nationalist, then he would compete in the same lane as Vance and Tucker Carlson — perhaps explaining to voters why his worldview evolved during the Trump era, and how he might offer a kinder, gentler version of this philosophy.

But the best-case scenario, from my standpoint, is that Rubio has been playing the long game. He did what he had to do to stay viable and will now govern like a decent, honorable, center-right leader.

Perhaps that sounds naive. Or maybe all of this sounds overly theoretical, like the kind of meta conversation nerds have in dorm rooms at 2 a.m. Regardless, these are the very questions Never Trump conservatives will have to wrestle with if Rubio runs.

And if Rubio somehow emerges as the GOP nominee, then concerns about whoever the Democrats nominate — including if it’s a left winger like, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — will have to compete with questions about his trustworthiness.

The campaign itself will offer clues. Once he’s a candidate, it will be easier to discern — from speeches and interviews — which Rubio is running. But as long as Trump’s on the scene, every Republican hopeful will be compelled to tell certain lies (the 2020 election was stolen, etc.). This means every utterance will demand interpretation. Did Rubio really mean that, or was he just posturing for Trump?

Then again, if a presidential candidate is willing to placate Trump to get elected, can we trust him to govern independently once he is in the White House?

Of course, Trump’s support is likely dispositive. If he decides Vance — or Donald Trump Jr. — is the preferred heir, then all my hand-wringing about Rubio becomes moot.

But if Rubio is the nominee, a great many of us are going to discover that the hardest choices aren’t between obvious good and evil. They’re between, on the one hand, nostalgia and hope and, on the other, the nagging suspicion that everything has changed since Trump came down the escalator — including, perhaps, the person writing this column.

Matt K. Lewis is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.