“White House deploys Marco Rubio to clarify messaging about Iran conflict.” So reads the headline on the front page of the Washington Examiner’s website in the early hours of April 1, the third month of U.S. military operations against Iran, which have been taking place since Feb. 28.
That prominence was overtaken as it was announced that Donald Trump would address the nation on the war on Wednesday night. But it’s still worth noting, and could turn out to be more significant as the end of the second Trump term comes into view.
Rubio’s video making the case for the Iran offensive is only two minutes long, straight-to-camera, with a dark background relieved only by the red and white stripes of the flag. Succinctly, he made a case for military action now.
“Under no circumstances,” Rubio said, “can a country run by radical Shia clerics with an apocalyptic vision of the future ever possess nuclear weapons, and under no circumstances can they be allowed to hide and protect that program and their ambitions behind a shield of missiles and drones that no one can do anything about.”
At greater length but in a similar fashion, he made the same case that day in a television interview on Al Jazeera, in terms pitched to its audience not just in the United States but also in the Gulf.
Only one other person before has held the offices of secretary of state and national security adviser: Henry Kissinger, from 1973 to 1975. In that capacity, Kissinger conducted high-level diplomacy in the Middle East and left no distance in his public statements between his views and those of the president he served, although behind the scenes, as later revealed, there were differences.
Similarly, Rubio obviously speaks carefully to leave no distance between his statements and those of the president he serves, to whom he refers in respectful terms. But he’s able to do this and to appeal to others, including inveterate Trump haters, all at the same time.
That was apparent in his Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference where, as I noted in this space six weeks ago, he earned standing applause from his predominantly European audience even as he repeated, diplomatically phrased, the same criticisms of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe” voiced numerous times by Donald Trump and at the same conference a year before, to a very different reaction, by Vice President JD Vance.
UNCERTAINTY REMAINS, AFTER 19 DAYS OF WAR IN IRAN
Simultaneously pleasing antagonistic audiences is a rare political talent, not often seen in a nation where most who climb to high elective office do so as candidates of definitionally adversarial political parties.
Some presidents have had a charm and sense of humor that extended their appeals across partisan lines. Some have done so in rallying voters to respond to attacks on America. Trump, perhaps recognizing that this is not a gift to which he owes his rise to the presidency, makes little visible effort at this.
There are many differences between the two men who were secretary of state and national security adviser. Henry Kissinger was a dazzling scholar who impressed everyone at Harvard. Rubio first went to college on a football scholarship, then earned degrees from the University of Florida and the University of Miami Law School. Kissinger, in his prime, dated movie stars. Rubio is a longtime family man.
Once in America, Kissinger always lived in the Northeast Corridor — Manhattan, Cambridge, and Washington. Rubio in semitropical Miami and raffish Las Vegas. Kissinger never ran for public office. Rubio was elected to the West Miami Council at 27, to the term-limited Florida legislature at 29 (winning a primary runoff by 64 votes), and got his colleagues to elect him as speaker six years later.
But the biggest political difference is that Kissinger, born a citizen of Weimar Germany, was ineligible to run for president. Rubio not only ran for president in 2016, but might conceivably have won in the absence of Trump’s candidacy and the millions spent against him by backers of his former mentor, Jeb Bush.
And Rubio might conceivably run and win in 2028, though he says he will support Vance, and Vance says that Rubio is “my closest friend in the administration.” There are obviously some differences between them on foreign policy: Rubio plainly favors the Iran attacks. Vance seems dubious.
Despite speculation that MAGA opposes Trump on Iran, Rubio, in his two ostensibly nonpolitical jobs, has obviously made a favorable impression on the public. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Grapevine, Texas, last weekend, Vance once again won the straw poll for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. But his 53% was down from 61% last year, while Rubio zoomed up from 3% in 2025 to 35 % this year.
CPAC, abounding these days with MAGA-loving young men, has not always been a reliable guide to wider opinion. But national pollsters, which began 2028 polling two weeks after the 2024 election, cast a wider net. In 17 polls conducted over the first full year since Trump’s inauguration, Rubio averaged 9 %, behind not only Vance’s 46% but also behind his fellow Floridian, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who averaged 10%.
WHERE IS THE ARC OF JUSTICE HEADED?
In seven polls taken since Rubio’s Munich speech, Vance was unchanged, averaging 45%, and so was DeSantis, who averaged 8%. But Rubio did significantly better, averaging 16%. That’s not the jump he saw at CPAC, but it’s also pretty clear evidence that Rubio is making some impression on a public that usually pays little attention to secretaries of state or national security advisers.
Of course, there’s lots of time before 2028, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the Strait of Hormuz over the next week. And, as this is written, I don’t know what Trump is going to say to the people on Wednesday night.
But I do feel sure that Rubio, who showed impressive raw political talent in his rise to one of Florida’s U.S. Senate seats in the first decade of this century and who made a serious presidential run in the second decade, has now shown impressive skills as a national leader in the third decade. Is there more ahead in the fourth?