Looks like Rubio is jockeying to be Trump secretary of state
More than 7,000 miles and eons of history separate West Miami, the little city that launched Marco Rubio’s political career, from Tehran.
But some of the rhetorical language the Florida senator uses in his passionate defense of the president’s controversial strike on Iran is homegrown.
“Anyone who walks out and says they aren’t convinced action against Soleimani was justified is either never going to be convinced or just oppose everything Trump does,” he tweeted Wednesday after leaving a briefing by national security officials that he described as “compelling” on the killing of General Qassem Soleimani.
Rightly so, Americans are questioning whether the assassination of Soleimani was a wise and necessary action — or a diversion from impeachment.
But no room for doubters in Rubioland.
If you’re not with us, you’re empowering the enemy (which is not only the Iranian regime, but the Democrats, too).
No room for nuance.
It’s only acceptable to discuss an issue within the boundaries that leadership establishes — and Rubio is setting them.
The tactic to quash dissent before it has a chance to blossom rings familiar in his hometown. It’s as old as Cuban exile (and its counterpart across the Florida Straits, the Cuban government). There are camps and you belong to one or the other.
In its modern incarnation, this political philosophy manifests itself as fervent support for President Donald Trump, and anyone deviating from that is a commie-loving socialist. Affinity of political thought — as well as Trump’s convenient embrace of hatred for the Cuban regime, although he tried to do business with it — is the reason Cuban Americans like Rubio are the only Hispanic group to support the president in large numbers (50% is the estimate).
Trump, who ordered the strike from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, has delivered on Cuba sanctions that have all but ended President Barack Obama’s rapprochement, which Rubio deplored, often denouncing that Obama had kept Cuban Americans in Congress in the dark.
Now, Rubio works for Trump and Trump works for Rubio, further restricting air travel to Cuba on Friday by canceling charter flights to nine airports on the island.
It’s a match made in heaven.
Both are darlings of evangelicals and hard-line Cuban-Americans.
Two days after ordering the strike, Trump came south to West Kendall for a campaign rally and bragged about killing Iran’s top general before a cheering crowd at the mega evangelical church El Rey Jesus. He said he had killed in the name of peace and declared himself the greatest friend Christians ever had in the White House.
Despite growing doubts — particularly after the briefing in which officials insisted Soleimani was plotting “imminent attacks” against the United States but gave vague evidence — Rubio has stuck to his position on the Iran deadly drone strike with daily dedication.
On the Senate floor, on news shows, in interviews with reporters who flocked to him, and in a string of passionate tweets, accentuated by ominous quotes from the Bible, Rubio gave no evidence, either, but spoke like a foreign-relations czar.
He also castigated the media — American journalists risking their lives to cover Iran on the ground — for “propagandizing” the Soleimani funeral.
Before the assassination, Rubio had been equally devoted to defending the president on impeachment and blocking it from going anywhere in the Senate.
All this, with plenty of energy to chime in on Venezuela’s dual parliamentary elections and China’s human rights abuses at a time in which Trump policy appears ineffective on both fronts.
Which begs the question: Is Marco Rubio gunning to be secretary of state in a second Trump term? It sure looks like it.
He commands the administration’s Cuba and Venezuela policy, and at this crucial moment for Trump, he’s the hawk who draws audiences in the hundreds of thousands of Americans to his words. One thing is clear.
The political bromance between Marco Rubio and Donald Trump — a relationship of convenience risen from the ashes of their high-profile brawl for the 2016 presidential nomination — has entered a new chapter.
The commitment is real. There could be an engagement ring for Rubio down the line: the secretary of state post in Trump’s second term.