Rubio, Rubio, wherefore art thou Rubio? How Little Marco, as Donald Trump dubbed him in 2016, must be squirming. It was reported on Monday, with great confidence, that Trump had chosen Rubio as his Secretary of State, along with Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.
The news came as a relief to national security establishments across the West. There had been grave concerns in the foreign policy world that Trump would choose somebody antithetical to the interests of Nato.
The elevation of Rubio and Waltz also served as further evidence of the growing power of Florida in Trump’s America – Waltz and Rubio are both politicians from the Sunshine State.
Yesterday, Trump, who’s clearly enjoying using his Truth Social platform as the go-to resource for appointment updates, duly confirmed that he has selected Waltz, a former adviser to vice president Dick Cheney, as his national security adviser. But the ‘Truth’ about Rubio has still not landed.
Instead, last night, we had a typically eccentric hire: Trump ‘truthed’ that he would be making Pete Hegseth, a man known mostly as a fairly goofy Fox News host, his next Secretary of Defence. Hegseth ‘is a graduate of Princeton University and has a Graduate Degree from Harvard University’, said the official Trump-Vance statement, which is a way of saying Pete is not as stupid as he looks.
Hegseth is an ardent defender of Israel and that will please the more neoconservative factions making their voices heard this week in Mar-a-Lago – especially since the peacenik former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard had also been mooted for the role.
But why was Hegseth revealed ahead of Rubio? Trump has now announced most of his national security team without indicating who’ll get the biggest foreign-policy job. Is something up?
There are whispers of squabbles breaking out behind the scenes over the Secretary of State role. It seems as if Rubio had indeed got the nod on Monday, but the news upset MAGA loyalists, who are not convinced by Marco’s apparent transformation from ‘New American Century’ primacist to America Firster.
One insider suggested last night that the odds of Rubio becoming America’s next Secretary of State were dropping by the second. It’s said that Ric Grenell, one of Trump’s favourite gay men and his former director of intelligence, is leading the pushback, though Grenell fiercely denied that claim on Twitter/X last night.
Yet the longer Trump waits to make the announcement, the more such gossip spreads.
Trump has always tended to use his appointments to play different factions off against each other – and when it comes to national security he has two words in his head, in capitals: PEACE and STRENGTH. He will seek to intimidate America’s adversaries through his appointments – he picked the moustachioed war pervert John Bolton, remember, partly because he looked scary in big meetings – in order to help him be more emollient as Commander-in-Chief.
It’s possible that, having driven the more dovish parts of his inner circle barmy with his appointments so far, he’s thinking about giving them a treat by dashing Rubio’s hopes once more.
Perhaps deep down Trump still loathes Marco, who after all once questioned the size of his manhood on the campaign trail. In July, Donald led Rubio to believe that he might be destined for the vice presidency, only then to give the job to J.D. Vance. He might be about to royally shaft him again.
It’s also quite possible that Trump will confirm Rubio as his choice this morning. That’s the marvellous thing about the Donald: he always likes to keep things, as he puts it, ‘nice and complicated.’
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