Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been thrown into two high nationwide safety jobs directly as President Donald Trump presses ahead together with his top-to-bottom revamp of U.S. overseas coverage, upending not solely longstanding insurance policies that the previous Florida senator as soon as supported but additionally the configuration of the manager department.
Trump’s appointment of Rubio to quickly change Mike Waltz as nationwide safety adviser is the primary main management shake-up of the nascent administration, however Waltz’s removing had been rumored for weeks — ever since he created a Sign group chat and unintentionally added a journalist to the dialog the place high nationwide safety officers shared delicate army plans.
So, simply over 100 days into his tenure as America’s high diplomat, Rubio now turns into simply the second particular person to carry each positions. He follows solely the late Henry Kissinger, who served as each secretary of state and nationwide safety adviser for 2 years below Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford within the Seventies.
Rubio — a one-time Trump rival and hawkish conservative who was derided by the president as “Little Marco” in the course of the 2016 presidential marketing campaign — has confirmed adept at aligning himself with Trump’s “America First” overseas coverage positions. Rubio has largely eschewed his staunch advocacy of offering overseas assist and selling democracy abroad since taking up the State Division, repeating a chorus that each coverage or program ought to make America safer, stronger or extra affluent.
Rubio leads throughout Trump’s huge modifications
Since being confirmed in a 99-0 Senate flooring vote, Rubio has presided over a radical reorganization of the State Division. That features the dismantling of the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement and plans to chop U.S. jobs by 15% whereas closing or consolidating greater than 100 bureaus worldwide. He has additionally begun a serious cull of the visa system, revoking lots of, if not hundreds, of visas issued to overseas college students.
He has overseen the negotiation of agreements to ship immigrants accused of crimes to 3rd international locations, most notably to El Salvador, in instances that at the moment are being challenged in federal courts.
“Marco Rubio, unbelievable,” Trump said Thursday before announcing on social media that Waltz would be nominated as ambassador to the United Nations and Rubio would take over as national security adviser in the interim. “When I have a problem, I call up Marco, he gets it solved.”
That is a far cry from 2016, when Rubio and Trump had been competing for the GOP presidential nomination and Rubio warned that Trump was a risk. After Trump received, the connection remained contentious, however eight years later, Rubio was an enthusiastic Trump supporter who labored his Florida bona fides to get into the president’s inside circle.
But, even after Rubio was nominated to the highest diplomatic job, doubts remained. Many pundits recommended he would final solely a short while in workplace earlier than Trump dismissed him in the identical means he did his first-term secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who was fired by tweet in 2018 simply 18 months into the job.
But Rubio has been resilient. And as of Thursday, he oversees each the State Division and the Nationwide Safety Council, which is accountable for coordinating all government department overseas coverage features, starting from diplomatic to army and intelligence operations.
Thomas Wright, an NSC official in the course of the Biden administration who’s now a senior fellow on the Brookings Establishment, stated the nationwide safety adviser publish alone is “more than a full-time job.”
“It is just very hard to comprehend the idea that you can do this job sort of part time,” Wright stated.
He stated he watched nationwide safety adviser Jake Sullivan and his deputy work 14-15 hour days, six to seven days per week: “I think they felt that they had to do that to do the job properly.”
Rubio says little to date on his extra function
Showing Thursday night time on Fox Information Channel’s “Hannity,” Rubio was not asked to weigh in on the president’s decision to tap him as national security adviser but did joke that he was barred from including pope to his checklist of many roles as a result of he’s married.
However as he marked the primary 100 days of Trump’s newest time period, Rubio applauded the president for his imaginative and prescient.
“I am honored by the trust President Trump placed in me and I am proud of the work the Department of State has done over the past hundred days to implement his agenda and put the American people first,” he wrote Wednesday in a State Division Substack publish.
Certainly one of Rubio’s former Florida statehouse colleagues, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, stated of Rubio’s growing tasks that “Marco is probably, to a certain extent, one of the more reliable Cabinet officers, if not the most reliable.”
“And I can only believe those qualities are even more vital to his current confluence of positions and growing portfolio,” Gelber stated. “He’s not a chaos man, and I’ve at all times form of puzzled how he’s going to do in an administration the place there appears to be a lot chaos. And possibly that’s why he’s getting all these positions.”
Rubio’s dual-hatted function comes on high of him serving as performing administrator of the largely shut down USAID and as performing head of the Nationwide Archives. It places him in an identical place to that of Trump’s longtime private pal and {golfing} buddy Steve Witkoff.
As a particular envoy, Witkoff is the lead U.S. negotiator within the Iran nuclear talks and in administration peace efforts for the Israel-Hamas struggle and the Ukraine-Russia struggle.
In some ways, Rubio and Witkoff are following within the footsteps of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had a number of roles within the first administration, starting from the Center East to Latin America and immigration.
How Rubio’s expanded duties are seen on the State Division
State Division officers appeared shocked by Trump’s appointment of Rubio as performing nationwide safety adviser. Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce stated at a briefing Thursday that she realized the information from a journalist who requested her a query about Trump’s publish minutes after it appeared on social media.
Officers, nonetheless, have famous that Rubio in latest weeks has spent an more and more giant period of time on the White Home away from his posh seventh-floor State Division workplace in what is named “Mahogany Row,” a hall identified for its wooden paneling.
On the similar time, these officers, who spoke on situation of anonymity to debate the personnel shift, stated they didn’t count on Rubio’s duties as secretary of state to vary considerably. He nonetheless plans to journey on diplomatic missions overseas and sure will delegate a minimum of a few of the NSC administration to others, they stated.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
