Today is Marco Rubio’s confirmation hearing as Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State. He’s going to be confirmed easily, and he’s likely going to do a pretty good job.
Rubio has been an interesting politician to watch. He was a Tea Party upstart who won a Senate seat which was supposed to belong to the old RINO Charlie Crist, and people looked at Rubio like somebody who would be a major player on the national scene.
And that has happened, but Rubio had some evolving to do before he got there.
If you’ll recall, Rubio was part of the Gang of Eight in the Senate which proposed a massive amnesty-based immigration reform and border plan, and that really poisoned him with the populist conservative crowd that had been his greatest base of support. And when he ran for president in 2016 he had a decent showing in a crowded field, but Rubio fell away before Donald Trump and Ted Cruz ultimately ended up battling it out for the nomination. Trump stuck Rubio with the nickname “Little Marco,” and for a time he struggled to be taken seriously, even though he ultimately dropped out of the 2016 presidential race and won re-election to the Senate from Florida instead.
But he came back from the loss in the presidential primaries and changed his political spots.
Rubio’s roots were middle class or even working class. He’s never really been a country-club Republican or part of the Chamber of Commerce crowd, though his first few years in the Senate were essentially an exercise in trying on the clothes of an establishment Republican. But after he ran for president and lost, and then watched Trump ride the MAGA agenda not just to the nomination but to the White House, and then saw what the Establishment was doing to Trump, it affected him.
You could say Rubio stuck a wet finger into the wind to see which way it was blowing and that accounts for his current populist, anti-globalist stance. We don’t think that’s quite it. We think this is who he really is.
At least, it had better be, because Rubio might as well be Steve Bannon giving this speech to open his confirmation process. He talks ab0ut national sovereignty as preferable to what he calls a “liberal world order” established after World War II, and that’s absolutely mother’s milk to the populist conservative MAGA crowd.
It’s also the correct position.
There’s a great deal of discussion going on right now about whether the post-World War II, and specifically Post-Cold War, multinationalist liberal understanding of history is valid. That understanding has led to the nations of Europe essentially disparaging their own cultures, particularly in a place like Germany, and throwing open their borders to unassimilable Third World immigrants while at the same time watching their birthrates dive beneath replacement. That “liberal world order” Rubio talks about among Western social democracies is turning septic amid its cultural corruption, political enervation and economic stagnation, and it can’t hold as the dominant power on the planet without major reform.
Especially not in the face of the challenge China presents.
This clip of the speech isn’t long. It’s less than four minutes. But it captures the gist of Rubio’s message – and the essence of what a Rubio State Department would look like.
Boy, is this a fresh change our country badly needs. If Rubio is able to reconfigure State to reflect this different worldview, it will be a very significant positive alteration.
MUST WATCH: Secretary of State nominee @marcorubio slams the post Cold War liberal world order consensus of unfettered free trade and mass migration:
"This wasn't just a fantasy. We now know it was a dangerous delusion." pic.twitter.com/0Eq2OBNIOD
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) January 15, 2025