WASHINGTON — Of all of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, none have as easy a path to confirmation as Marco Rubio. Such was obvious in the first moments of Rubio’s confirmation hearing Tuesday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s top Democrat, ranking member Jeanne Shaheen, noted that Rubio already had her support. Rubio had yet to offer his opening statement.
Other Democratic senators followed suit. Cory Booker noted Trump made “a great decision” in choosing Rubio as Secretary of State. Tammy Duckworth praised his character and his integrity. Tim Kaine called him “extremely well prepared.”
“Agree or disagree with the points he makes,” Kaine, of Virginia, said, “he is not having to thumb through a binder to figure out how to respond to a particular question.”
Kaine’s point was potent: For nearly five hours, Rubio spoke about U.S. foreign policy almost completely without assistance. He had a pile of typed notes on the table before him, but he referenced them on just a few occasions. Instead, he pontificated on any range of issues his former Foreign Relations Committee colleagues asked about: on the growing threat of China, both economically and military; worries about Taiwan; the challenge of terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah; strategic partnerships with central Asian nations; the future of NATO; partnerships with Western Hemisphere allies; the opportunity of a growing African population; the need for the war on Ukraine to end; and on and on.
Through it all, Rubio exhibited poise. He made it look easy. The senators seemed genuinely interested in and respectful of Rubio’s perspectives on different foreign policy points, rather than interested in testing his grasp of them. Even after a series of interruptions from demonstrators — three protesters were forcefully dragged from their chairs within the hearing’s first half-hour — Rubio seemed undeterred. (”I get bilingual protesters,” Rubio quipped after one demonstrator, in Spanish, yelled that the U.S. should end its involvement in Venezuela and Nicaragua.)
Rubio’s true challenge now comes in calibrating his foreign policy vision with Trump’s.
At a base level, Rubio’s perception of the U.S.’ role abroad and its responsibilities at home are squarely in line with Trump’s America First ideology. What Rubio enunciated Tuesday is, at its core, quintessentially an effort to put America first: “Every dollar we spend,” Rubio said, “every program we fund, every policy we pursue, must be justified by the answer to one of three questions: Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America prosperous?”
Trump’s electoral victory, Rubio reasoned, suggested that most Americans want the same. “President Trump returns to office with an unmistakable mandate from the voters,” he said. “They want a strong America.”
On that, Rubio and Trump seem to agree. But Rubio — long one of the Senate’s true neoconservatives, a foreign policy hawk — has never seemed to fully adopt the president-elect’s foreign policy agenda. The chasm between the two was wide enough that some Trump allies, when Rubio was announced as the State nominee, lamented he was just “not that MAGA.”
On Tuesday, Rubio spent much of his time attempting to contextualize Trump’s stances within the language of more traditional conservative foreign policy. “Placing our core national interest above all else is not isolationism,” he explained, so much as it is a realization that our country’s wealth has never been unlimited or our power infinite.
But there were some bridges he was not willing to cross. The senators never asked him for specific places in which he disagrees with Trump; they didn’t have to. On China, Rubio was unsparing, labeling it the “biggest threat” to American prosperity.
“I’ve been strongly worded in my views of China,” Rubio quipped. “They’ve said mean things about me, too. I’m not sure they’re fans of mine.”
On NATO, Rubio repeatedly called it a “very important alliance.” He suggested NATO members should pay their fair share and be “capable” of defending themselves, but nowhere in his comments was a suggestion that the U.S. might leave the alliance, as Trump has suggested.
On Ukraine, he did not praise Russian leader Vladimir Putin, but instead made it clear Russia was in the wrong: “Now, what Vladimir Putin’s done is unacceptable, there’s no doubt about it.” But he simultaneously acknowledged Ukraine may need to cede territory in order to end the war.
Rubio’s deviations from the MAGA talking points were few, but they were significant. He does not harbor the same infatuation with dictators that Trump seems to possess. He plans to stand with America’s allies. And on the active foreign conflict that America has most directly aided — Ukraine’s defense against Russia — Rubio seems to squarely place the blame at Putin’s feet.
His Democratic colleagues will not agree on every point, nor will every Republican. But they seem to agree with him on enough. “I think it’s expected he’ll get wide bipartisan support,” Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, said. “I’d be surprised if there weren’t a couple on the Democratic side that did support him.”
The challenge for Rubio, then, is keeping the support of his new boss.