Marco Rubio has been having a moment — the kind that has people wondering if he might be a presidential candidate sooner rather than later.
On Tuesday, he took over the duties of press secretary while Karoline Leavitt was on maternity leave and took questions for more than 45 minutes, happily exchanging rap verses with reporters along the way. On Wednesday, his staff reduced one of his exchanges to a campaign style video on the rising music. On Thursday, he met Pope Leo in the Vatican, exchanging gifts and kind words though the president and vice president they have clashed with the famous religious leader in the world.
More broadly, its popularity among A MAGA loyalist is ridingapparently, as the presumptive successor to President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, sees him to fall (at at least a little) The gambling markets they are suddenly interested in Rubio as a possible 2028 nominee.
- Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in the spotlight lately.
- His star has been rising, helped in part by a video of his response to a reporter in which he revisits his 2016 presidential platform.
- The clip focuses heavily on Trump, and it begs the question: What? This is what a Trump-led, Rubio-led MAGA might look like?
No wonder he would get time in the sun; secretaries of state are often among the most popular and interesting members of history. He wouldn’t be the first to see them rising stock time memes spread about their hard work around the world. He has been careful not to make too much of it, tread down presidential rumors.
But way Rubio’s continued role also raises several questions about the party’s long-term future. It’s starting to look like he might want to have a say in the map of what the post-Trump GOP world looks like, which is perhaps diverging from a more radical, more nationalistic version of the MAGA party. Whether that is possible 10 years into the Trump era is an open question.
One specific answer during his press conference stood out in this regard. Responding to a softball about his “hope for America,” Rubio described a vision of the American dream that seemed to be printed in the last decade of Trump-era politics and felt like it was time to return to his 2016 presidential campaign.
“My hope for America is the way it’s always been,” he said. “We want it to continue to be a place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the state of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your race, but frankly, it’s a place where you can overcome challenges and reach your full potential.”
This wasn’t a reference to anti-woke/DEI letters, pseudo-white nationalist claims about speaking English and tracing ancestry, or any of the familiar doom-and-gloom lines you might hear in a typical MAGA speech or from familiar Trump characters.
Instead, it looked like the pre-Trump GOP, when Rubio argued that the Republican Party could establish “America’s new century,” rooted in active global engagement, free markets, and young leadership.” It is the old Reaganesque ideal, championed by candidates of both parties, of America as an idea: a nation united by the principles of freedom, equality, and opportunity. And he always emphasized these appeals to the greatness of his own family’s immigrant heritage.
Rubio’s staff, apparently, noticed how well this response was received, and captured a minute-long video of it for the secretary’s official and personal social media accounts. Its most notable feature: It covered his words with images of Trump.
In doing so, the clip was not only a preview of what Rubio’s 2028 campaign might look like, but also a mirror image of how he might try to merge Trump’s MAGA aesthetic with a pre-Trump message, and then sell it as the party’s next move.
Let’s put aside the question of whether Rubio, who has insisted he won’t run and is reportedly close to Vance, can find a place in the primary against the vice president.
The minute-long clip is one of the best signs we’ve had about Rubio’s vision of conservatism, a question that’s not easy to answer 10 years into his transition. Trump’s biggest critic to an unpleasant partner. And it raises the possibility that the battle to define MAGA in 2028 and beyond could be even more varied and competitive than it seems right now.
Instead of the “murder” and destruction that Trump campaigned on, he resurrected the GOP’s old version of what American privilege and the American dream is all about.
America – we are not perfect. Our history is not perfect, but it is still better than anyone else’s history. And ours is a story of constant improvement. Each generation has left the next generation of Americans freer, more successful, safer, and that is our goal as well.
But it is a unique and special country, and as we approach this 250th anniversary I think we have much to learn and be proud of in our history. It is one of the permanent and sustainable improvements where each generation has done its duty to move us closer to fulfilling the vision that the founders of this country had at the time of its founding.
“This was a great vision that I supported Marco Rubio in 2016,” longtime California GOP consultant Mike Madrid, and a prominent Trump critic, told me. “This is the big tent Republican candidate that I supported. Not only did he fail; he gave in and took a stab at being a Trumper. So to see him try to get it back is interesting.”
And this message stands in contrast to the vision that Vance has often expressed with his post-liberal wing of the GOP. In Vance’s words, America is not an idea: It is “a group of people with a common history and a common future. In short, it is a nation,” as he put it. at the RNC in 2024. His corner of the party tends to take a more pessimistic view of both legal and illegal immigration; lawyers celebrate”American heritage” with deep family roots as the foundational story of the nation, rather than the “melting pot” of would-be immigrants that each new generation has embodied.
The difference also shows the difference between Rubio and other people in Trump’s field: His ability to be seen as “the man in the room,” not like his colleagues with the bad policies of the Trump administration (even if he manages foreign policy during an unpopular war), he is not “online” like everyone else, and more respect and his work is measured by how he does it. Vance is best known for both of his wives “attack dog” role. and published incessantly (although he was reported he gave up social media for Lent this year)
“He understands that the loudest voices on social media have different motivations than the country itself. Their job is to engage; his is to rule,” Giancarlo Sopo, a Florida-based Republican strategist, told me. “You are trusted in that way by speaking to the country as it is, a large society, with many people with many honorable people who want their children to have a better life than them. That is the country he addressed, and that is why his words resonated as they did.”
That, at least, is what some Republican voters are starting from to communicate with voters and pollsters: He is one “real politician” Floridian he told it GOP consultant Sarah Longwell last month, when a Biden-Trump voter called her “honest.”
Although it is still early (perhaps too earlier) we may be seeing the next stage of MAGA’s life cycle and Rubio’s parallel evolution: from the GOP’s brief attempt to reverse transparency and inclusion after their 2012 collapse, to Rubio’s loss and conversion to Trumpism in 2016, to his rise to Trump’s good graces in the MAGA2024 to 2024 platform.
Madrid and Sopo agree that anything is possible – Trump showed it – but disagreed on whether Rubio can create a gentleman MAGA while reviving these old ideas.
“What he’s going to try to do is say this is what Trumpism has been about,” Madrid told me. “Trump is famous in that ad. He’s trying to bring back the narrative of how it used to be. He’s trying to put on a mask of longing for grievances. He’s trying to put on an image of a forward-thinking, shining-on-the-hill city on top of a pile of hate and division.”
Sopo thinks it looks more possible. While Vance is a member of a dedicated right-wing intellectual movement, Trump’s own agenda has much looser ideological foundations, making future iterations of MAGA logically correct. If you squinted hard enough, you could mix up Trump’s inconsistent statements — his 2016 call for “big beautiful door” in his border wall for legal immigrants, his business-friendly soft place for some migrant workers, wives good words from time to time for DREAMers — and we argue that Rubio’s voice is the next iteration.
“Conservatism was never meant to be ideological,” Sopo said. “Edmund Burke would recognize his own vision in what Sec. Rubio described yesterday. It is the best and truest form of conservatism.”
Latino voters may be even more important to Republicans in 2028
Rubio’s rise in 2016 was fueled in part by the then-popular argument that Republicans needed a focus on welcoming Latino voters and immigrant communities of all kinds. But Trump’s victory with white working-class voters in 2016, and then his big gains with Latino voters in 2024, while running on “mass deportations,” seemed to end that conversation.
Now, Latino and Asian voters seem to be leave the party in abundance againin elections and real-world elections, which could suddenly put Rubio in the spotlight. A mild MAGA could still attract parts of the country that are more persuasive, angered by Trump’s distortion of his 2024 promises, such as immigration and inflation, and there is a possibility of switching between parties, as Latino and young voters, Sopo and Madrid said, in part because it will sound new to them after the Trump-Biden years.
“A lot of the GOP’s recent success with Hispanic voters has come among English-dominant Hispanics,” Sopo told me. “More Hispanic voters are the next frontier.” And to that point, Rubio can speak to them in Spanish, explain this vision, and integrate his heritage into it.
“It also brings serious thought to the issues that Hispanic families care about the most: work, family, and the freedom to build a stable life,” he added. “That combination is rare in American politics right now.”
This trinity appears to be the same in a hypothetical general election. But ultimately it may depend on what GOP voters want, Madrid told me. They had a chance to elect Rubio in 2016 and rejected him outright, due to his toying with immigration reform that he has long abandoned. The party has moved further away from its message since then, and nomination arguments have become rarer since Trump’s 2016 run proved this thinking wrong.
“Did the Republican party just go ahead and everybody ignore it?” Madrid said. “It’s a very unique way of talking to a base that couldn’t care less about ‘.a shining city on a hill‘ again or about making it America. It’s about isolation and self-preservation. It is not about expanding Jeffersonian values and demonstrating peace through force. It is about the medieval understanding of what raw power is.
