An unusual thing happened at the Capitol on Monday. No, not Donald Trump giving three inaugural addresses—the first semi-normal, although he forgot to put his hand on the Bible, perhaps noticing that it wasn’t the King Trump version available for $59.99. The second devolved into a brew of American Carnage redux and the Capital Weather Gang assuring his audience that it wasn’t because he was an aging weenie that the whole shebang was moved indoors where his billionaires had better seats than governors and Cabinet members. The third could be confused with a rally and was endless.
No, the stunner in these parlous times is Marco Rubio. Yes, Little Marco. That afternoon, the Senate unanimously confirmed him to be Secretary of State, the third highest-ranking official in Washington and the fourth in the line of succession. He’d previously sailed through his confirmation hearings with hardly a furrowed brow and a 22-0 vote. Rubio’s encyclopedic knowledge of topics from Sudan to the Indo-Pacific led senators of both parties to praise him. This bravura performance happened down the hall from where Pete Hegseth was not answering questions about his payoff to a woman, not his wife, his mismanagement of several veterans organizations, and excessive drinking. The drinking he promised to stop if confirmed.
It’s a stunning comeback for Rubio, a meteor in Florida politics until he crashed and burned after a close encounter with Donald Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary. For good reasons, Rubio had a big head. The son of working-class Cuban immigrants was a Florida legislator at age 29, speaker of the Florida House at 35, and a U.S. senator at 39. He couldn’t imagine bombing because he never had. He told friends that his seat in the Senate others would kill for was tedious and that he hated living away from home. Naturally, that meant he should run for president in his first term, which meant more time away from home and the added tedium of fundraising calls.
Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid started well. With Rubio’s strong third-place finish in Iowa, he quickly moved to position himself as the candidate the GOP establishment could get behind to stop Trump. He was seen as the Reformicon, the ideas man in a Star Wars bar scene. But as Trump caught on, Rubio, elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010 as a Tea Party darling, was being cast as just another Washington pol sipping lattes with Chuck Schumer as they worked on, of all heresies, a bipartisan immigration bill. Trump branded him with nicknames that stuck and taunts that got personal, like how sweaty Little Marco got when he was nervous.
The worst losses are the ones we bring on ourselves, and Rubio’s poor imitation of Trump was a doozy. Down in the polls and the dumps, Rubio became an insult comic. He peaked with a joke about the other anatomical implications of Trump’s tiny hands. It worked to get him the coverage he couldn’t get riding up and down the state in his red, white, and blue bus, pleading, “If I win Florida, I’ll be the nominee.” However, only Trump can do Trump; the type of attention he was getting was wrong, and it was too late. Rubio lost his home state by 20 points.
There is such a thing as getting ahead by losing. If you lose your job at the bank, if your neighbor asks, you can explain you’ve decided to pursue other opportunities and change the subject to the lawn gone to weeds. If politics is the business you’ve chosen, defeats are public, and saying you’re eager to spend more time with the family is a truism that’s become a laughline. The truth is that grown men weep in exhaustion and emptiness the morning after. Whenever the late Senator John McCain was asked how he took his loss to Barack Obama in 2008, he said he slept like a baby: “I wake up every four hours and cry.”
The best speeches aren’t victory speeches but concessions: Winston Churchill, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, and Al Gore, who took a bullet for his country. On the day before the primary, Rubio took a lap back to a time when his head was normal size, and the Senate looked like the sweetest job in the world. Rubio returned to his old haunts–his high school football field, not to the roaring crowd of his youth, but a crowd so small it hardly reached the 20-yard line, the community center in West Miami, where he won his first election, was so bittersweet you could cry. “No matter where I go or where I’ll be, I’ll always be the son of this community who made my dreams possible.” He apologized in an interview for his week of desperation. “My kids were embarrassed by it. My wife didn’t like it. Honestly, I want to be a good example. I want my kids to be proud of me.”
In his formal concession the morning after, he said, “It is not God’s plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever.” This wasn’t an echo of Trump, who believes God saved him so he could be president again. It was a discovery, plaintive and tearful, a prelude to growing into the Senator who worked so well with his colleagues that they extolled him as they voted to confirm him, bipartisan kudos all around.
It’s easy to trace Rubio’s arc from 2016 to now, but not the president’s. If he never forgives, how could he nominate the guy who mocked his spray tan? When asked about Rubio’s swift confirmation, as he was signing executive orders to release cop-beaters and separate families, he went from jovial to subdued to confused. “Marco’s great. Don’t know what happened. He has some very strong ideas, Marco. Who knows what’s going to happen with him.” Probably not what Truman said when George C. Marshall was confirmed at State.That’s either his relief that he got one nominee across the finish line or panic. You’re telling me Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren voted for him? What have I done? It won’t be long until we find out.
