Marco Rubio's Dual Personality How Long Can It Last?
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How Long Can Marco Rubio Keep This Up?
Mr. Roig-Franzia was Miami bureau chief for The Washington Post and is the author of a biography of Mr. Rubio.
New York Times
Nine days before Christmas in 1987, federal drug agents descended on a modest one-acre property in West Miami. Their target was a drug dealer named Orlando Cicilia, whom they arrested and charged with selling and distributing millions of dollars of Colombian cocaine. The raid against Mr. Cicilia and his associates would prove to be one of the biggest drug busts in Florida history. In retrospect, it was notable for one other fact: Mr. Cicilia was Marco Rubio’s brother-in-law.
Some of Mr. Rubio’s most vivid early experiences took place in the house where Mr. Cicilia was arrested. Mr. Rubio’s “fondest childhood memory” was of a Christmas Eve party where Mr. Cicilia roasted a pig in a pit covered with palm fronds in the yard of the house, according to Mr. Rubio’s memoir. Later, when Mr. Rubio wanted to buy season tickets to Miami Dolphins games, he earned money by washing his brother-in-law’s and sister’s dogs in the yard. He even lived in the house briefly while his parents were moving across the country.
Mr. Rubio has come a long way in the four decades since, rising to the role of global vanquisher of drug cartels and America First enforcer as President Trump’s secretary of state. Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Rubio to “run” Venezuela after the military operation to seize dictator NicolĂ¡s Maduro and bring him to the United States on drug trafficking charges in January. Mr. Rubio has said little over the years about his brother-in-law’s arrest, beyond noting the shock and heartbreak it caused his family.
The contrast between Mr. Rubio’s childhood relationship with a man who was later convicted of drug dealing and his current globe-trotting role might seem like one of those random biographical quirks that are more common in fiction than in real life. Yet understanding Mr. Rubio has always required reconciling such conflicting storylines. As a Florida legislator, he communed with migrant laborers and backed tuition discounts for children of undocumented immigrants, then became an immigration hard-liner when he ran for the United States Senate, then morphed again into a bipartisan immigration reformer in Congress.
The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio’s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary of the president’s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president’s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere. Having lambasted President Barack Obama’s 2015 deal to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, Mr. Rubio is now among the loudest supporters of a similar agreement that Mr. Trump hopes will end the war there.
Mr. Rubio’s gymnastics have made him an increasingly successful ally of the president and increasingly puzzling to those who thought he’d be a moderating, less MAGA-ish force within Trump 2.0. Yet his shape-shifting is not a new phenomenon; it is a defining characteristic. A close look at Mr. Rubio reveals one consistent truth about him: Marco Rubio has always found a way to belong.
In his Venezuela ascendancy and through his navigation of the failures of the Iran war, he has managed to deepen his relationship with Mr. Trump and cement his membership-in-good-standing in the political movement the president created. He has seemed just fine with going on television to defend Trump’s war of choice in Iran, when others, including his main rival to be Trump’s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, occupy more prominent public roles in negotiations to end the conflict. As when he was playing high school football, Mr. Rubio seems delighted to be on the team, even if he’s not a star player.
That’s not to say Mr. Rubio won’t get his chances for glory. Mr. Trump frequently mentions him as the man who will bring Cuba into line with the president’s goal of regional domination. As the Iran war lumbers to an inconclusive end, that hemispheric goal is returning to Mr. Trump’s attention. On May 20, the Justice Department indicted the country’s former president, RaĂºl Castro, and a Trump-imposed oil blockade has triggered an economic crisis on the island. Mr. Rubio, for his part, has offered the country $100 million in aid via the Catholic Church or independent charities.
At some point, it seems as if Mr. Rubio’s pileup of contradictions will have to catch up with him. Yet over the two decades I have observed him, including writing a 2015 biography, Mr. Rubio’s paradoxes haven’t been a liability. If anything, they’ve been an asset, at least from a political perspective. Few are better at reading the American room. Which means Americans have a real interest in Mr. Rubio’s serial metamorphoses, not just because he is currently both secretary of state and national security adviser, but because he clearly still harbors ambitions of becoming president himself one day.
Born in Miami in 1971, Mr. Rubio spent hours at the side of his beloved grandfather, Pedro VĂctor GarcĂa, listening to the family’s stories. In many ways, they were familiar tales of an immigrant family new to America. Mr. GarcĂa had come to the United States in 1956 from Cuba in search of a better life. In 1962, after an extended stay abroad, an American immigration judge ruled that Mr. GarcĂa had relinquished his legal resident status. The judge ordered Mr. GarcĂa deported, according to a recording of the proceeding. The order was issued shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis threw relations between the countries into chaos, however, and Mr. GarcĂa ended up staying in the U.S. for good.
In the ensuing years, the American dream did not come easily to the Rubio family. Mr. Rubio’s father, who had arrived in the United States in 1956 before the start of the Cuban revolution, struggled to earn a living, tending bar and managing a residential building near Miami’s airport. They did find community in religion. The Rubios belonged to a neighborhood Catholic church in Coral Gate, west of Little Havana. The young Mr. Rubio delighted in dressing up like a priest after Mass. “I had a habit as a child of playacting scenes from experiences that had made an impression on me,” Mr. Rubio wrote in his memoir.
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| Marco Rubio’s official portrait as Florida’s House speaker hangs in Tallahassee.Credit...Phil Coale/Associated Press |
In 1979, when he was 8, the family left behind a Miami roiling with drug-cartel violence and moved to Las Vegas, where an aunt of his would factor heavily into his life. The aunt was Mormon. So were the neighbor boys next door. He wanted to be Mormon, too. To entertain himself and his family, he would lip-sync the songs of the Mormon television stars, Donny and Marie Osmond. Soon enough, he and his mother were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The conversion was short-lived: in 1984, the family moved back to Florida and by the time Mr. Rubio was in high school, his family had followed him back to Catholicism.
They embraced the intense and ever-present anti-Castro, Cuban exile atmosphere of Miami. That would become an abiding hallmark of Mr. Rubio’s political identity. Ascending from his days as a 20-something member of a suburban Miami city commission to become the first Cuban American speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio was propelled in part by the power of a story he recounted about his family. He told the Cuban Americans among the audiences for his speeches that he was one of them — a son of exiles whose parents were forced to leave Cuba by Fidel Castro.
It was a story that turned out to be inaccurate. While researching my biography of Mr. Rubio, I came upon documents that proved his parents and older brother had arrived in the United States before the Cuban revolution began — nearly three years before Castro took power, around the same time as Mr. Rubio’s grandfather. In fact, his grandfather had returned to Cuba after Castro’s ascent and taken a menial transportation job in the government.
When I wrote an article about the discrepancy for The Washington Post, where I was a reporter at the time, Mr. Rubio said he had relied on the oral history of his family and that was what his parents had told him. He denied purposefully telling an inaccurate story for political gain. He said his parents should be considered exiles because they’d wanted to return to Cuba, but couldn’t. It was a fair point, even if it didn’t exactly clean up the story he’d been telling.
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Soon enough, Mr. Rubio would face uglier challenges to his family’s history. When Mr. Rubio was a Republican vice-presidential contender in 2012, a theory began circulating that he was not a “natural-born citizen.” The argument went that his parents, though they were legally in the United States, were not U.S. citizens when he was born and that he would therefore not be eligible to become president someday.
Marco Rubio was on the short list of running mates for the G.O.P. presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012 and appeared with him at a campaign event in Philadelphia that spring.Credit...Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
It was a bogus attack — because he was born in the United States, Mr. Rubio has been a lifelong citizen. But in 2016, while running for president, the storyline resurfaced in a court case. As The New York Times’s Adam Liptak reported last year, Mr. Rubio felt compelled to file papers in which he made a full-throated defense of birthright citizenship.
As one of the first acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued an executive order greatly expanding the categories of people born in the United States who would not be eligible for birthright citizenship. The order has been stalled by court challenges, and in arguments before the Supreme Court in April, Mr. Trump’s case seemed headed for defeat. Whatever the result, Mr. Rubio and his family would not be affected. Mr. Rubio has embraced Trump’s move.
Despite all the contradictions, Mr. Rubio has cemented his membership in Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement. He has flipped from ardent support for Ukraine to an inclination to make concessions to the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He has abandoned his longtime support for the work of U.S.A.I.D. and is now instead presiding over its death.
Some of Mr. Rubio’s changes cut particularly close to home. His hard line on punishment for drug offenders contrasts with the leniency he once showed his former drug dealer brother-in-law, according to documents I unearthed with my then-Washington Post colleague, Scott Higham. When he was the majority whip of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio used his official stationery to recommend to the Florida Division of Real Estate that Mr. Cicilia, who had recently been released from prison, should be granted a real estate license. The recommendation letter didn’t mention his personal relationship to Cicilia. (At the time, Rubio dismissed suggestions that he did anything unethical.)
Lets Play Cards Trump as Usual only Has The Joker But thinks if he hides it will become an Ace. Lately His Administration is been asking for Zelensky help, you the one with no cards.
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Mr. Rubio is one of the few politicians who have survived crossing swords with Mr. Trump — so far. Mr. Trump won’t be president forever, and Mr. Rubio’s relationship with him and the movement he created is something the secretary of state will never be able to hide. Together they have embarked on building a world order that will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo: a go-it-alone, interventionist America that takes what it wants. From Venezuela to Iran, and now Cuba, Mr. Rubio is along for Mr. Trump’s disruptive ride. What if it all goes wrong?
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine speaks during the contentious Feb. 28, 2025, Oval Office meeting with President Trump, Marco Rubio and other cabinet members.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Getty
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I can imagine Mr. Rubio nimbly rising from the ashes, just as he did when Mr. Trump humiliated him in his home state of Florida by trouncing him in the 2016 presidential primary. I have no doubt Mr. Rubio is simultaneously relishing and feeling conflicted when he is, once again, trying on a new persona — a Trumpian MAGA role that he might one day need to abandon. The now-famous photographs of him on the Oval Office sofa watching Mr. Trump berate Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky have become memes for good reason, capturing both his tough-guy frown and his discomfort as he shrinks into the pillows.
Yet it says a lot about Mr. Rubio’s skills that in the small group of shape-shifting survivors close to Trump, the secretary of state is emerging as a top contender in the race to succeed him. This new iteration of Mr. Rubio is angrier and more sullen than the often-sunny politician who became the charming and precocious darling of the Republican Party in the 2010s. His tone has become strident; his words, more biting. For now, at least, he’s sending a clear message to the MAGA world that he is one of them — and would be a fitting heir.
Manuel Roig-Franzia is the author of “The Rise of Marco Rubio,” and a former Washington Post bureau chief in Miami and Latin America.
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