FT: The evolution of Marco Rubio from free-trader to MAGA populist

Key topics:Marco Rubio leads massive State Department layoffs, reshaping US diplomacy sharply.Rubio shifts from pro-global aid to Trump-style isolationism and America First policies.Critics see Rubio’s pivot as political opportunism, abandoning earlier core values..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Guy Chazan in Washington.On July 11, John Dinkelman, a veteran diplomat, was informed in a terse email that he was being laid off after 37 years in the US foreign service. He was given six hours to pack up and clear out.Dinkelman was one of 246 foreign service officers and 1,107 civil service employees who were terminated this month in a bloodletting that has few precedents in the state department’s 236-year history.The purge will harm the US’s claim to global leadership, he says. “Gutting this workforce is like firing your soldiers in the middle of a war — shortsighted, destabilising and hard to recover from,” Dinkelman, who is head of AFSA, the labour union for foreign service personnel, tells the FT.What was most shocking to many observers was the identity of the man who spearheaded the dismissals — Marco Rubio, US secretary of state. Once a standard-bearer of US soft power, he is taking an axe to the government’s diplomatic arm in ways that critics say nothing in his political career to date had prepared them for.Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic senator, summed up the disappointment shared by some on Capitol Hill in May. Though he and Rubio were from different parties, he assumed they shared common values: “a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honouring the constitution at home”. That is why, he said, he had voted to confirm him in office.“I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite,” he said.Rubio’s shape-shifting encapsulates how America’s vision of its place in the world has changed under President Donald Trump. A country that was a linchpin of the postwar international order has retreated into “America First” isolationism, defined by disdain for multilateral institutions and traditional allies, and Trump’s highly transactional approach to foreign policy.From the start, Rubio moved to align the state department with Trump’s rightwing populist agenda. He dismantled the US Agency for International Development, America’s main conduit for foreign aid, eliminated or downsized whole departments that promote democracy and human rights round the world and in effect terminated the broadcaster Voice of America. On Tuesday he withdrew the US from Unesco, the UN education and culture agency, saying it advanced “divisive social and cultural causes”.The secretary of state has defended his reforms of a “bloated, bureaucratic” agency that was “more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America’s core national interests”.But many in Washington have been stunned by his actions in office and how far he seems to have strayed from the principles he once espoused.As a senator, Rubio was a fervent advocate of American overseas assistance, of Washington’s long-standing alliances and the power of US diplomacy as a force for good in the world. He would stress the need to stand up to dictators and support dissidents campaigning against authoritarian regimes.Yet he has since embraced Trump’s Maga ideology, with its isolationism, impatience with foreign aid and determination to drastically shrink the federal workforce.Critics accuse Rubio of opportunism, saying he has cynically jettisoned his core beliefs to advance his career. In this telling, Rubio’s hopes of becoming the Republican nominee for president in 2028 rest on winning over the Maga base, and harnessing the same sense of grievance that catapulted Trump into the White House in 2016 and 2024.“He’s not the first politician to sacrifice principle to political ambition,” James Nealon, a former US ambassador to Honduras, wrote in a blog post this month. “But he has certainly taken it to the next level.”But allies dismiss the idea Rubio has changed, insisting that on key issues he has been remarkably consistent. Far from abandoning his values, they say, he has championed them, influencing Trump to adopt a more hawkish posture towards countries such as China, Iran, Russia and Venezuela.“On China, Russia and Ukraine, and Iran, you see a reinvigorated American foreign policy and a reassertion of America’s role in the world,” says one friend and former aide. “And much of that is down to the high-level counsel the secretary is giving the president and the rest of the administration on a day-to-day basis.”Indeed, the man Trump derided as “little Marco” during the 2016 Republican primary is now arguably the president’s most powerful cabinet secretary. As well as secretary of state, he is also acting national security adviser, acting administrator of USAID and acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration..Read more:.Rubio declares South African envoy ‘Persona Non Grata’ over Trump remarks, escalating diplomatic feud.Rubio has also improved his standing with Maga hardliners who once considered him dangerously soft on immigration. Former foes such as Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his first term, now consider him an ally.“He will be the Kissinger of our time,” Miller said of Rubio on Fox News in May. “And I’m just proud to work alongside him.”Rubio is typical of a certain type of Republican politician that came to see globalisation and neoliberalism as a “mistake”, says Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University. “But in Rubio’s case it does seem more like political tactics than anything else,” he adds. “Over the past five years it’s almost like he’s casting about for an intellectual justification for why he’s gone full Maga.”Allies defend Rubio’s apparent ideological pivot. “The political environment is completely different to what it was in 2010, " says one aide. “You either evolve as a politician or you get voted out.” Many in Washington see Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants who was elected to the Florida House of Representatives at the tender age of 28, as a mainstream Republican who gradually tacked to the right as Trump tightened his grip over the GOP. Others see it differently.“Marco was always very conservative, as was the Florida Republican party,” says Dan Gelber, then the Democratic leader in the Florida House. “It was almost like a conservative laboratory for the rest of the country.”Rubio is far from the only one who’s somewhat altered his tone to be relevant in the Trump eraHowever, much of Rubio’s appeal was rooted not in his opposition to big government and support for lower taxes but his success at articulating the American dream — an optimistic message that was the polar opposite of the dystopian “American carnage” Trump described in his first inaugural address.“He had this instinctive understanding of the attraction and hope of America for immigrant populations, and a deep respect for our founding documents and our political institutions,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who worked for him during his 2016 presidential bid.Contemporaries were impressed by his soaring rhetoric. Gelber recalls warning the Democratic caucus that “when Marco Rubio speaks, young women swoon, old women faint and toilets flush themselves”. “He really understood how to make people feel things,” he says.In 2010 Rubio made one of the biggest gambles of his career, running against the moderate Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, for a seat in the US Senate. His campaign, he wrote in his 2012 memoir An American Son, was part of a “national battle between conservatives and moderates for the soul of the GOP”. The party, he said, had “strayed too far from [its] conservative principles” and was failing “to counter the leftward drift in Washington” under President Barack Obama. Rubio won, part of the successful “Tea Party” wave of the early 2010s.The campaign embodied the essence of his political credo, allies say. “He was an insurgent, disruptive of the status quo,” says the aide.Yet while in the Senate, Rubio embraced reliably neoconservative positions that did not diverge markedly from the GOP consensus of the time. He frequently warned of the threats Russia, China and Iran posed to US interests and advocated an open economy and free trade. He also argued that US foreign policy should uphold long-standing American values — human rights, democracy and protecting the sovereignty of US allies.“Wherever freedom and human rights spread, partners for our nation are born,” he said in 2015.Immigration reform was a key interest. He was a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group in Congress that pushed a bill that would combine better control of the US border with a path to citizenship for 11mn undocumented immigrants. It foundered on opposition from rightwingers in his own party.But he continued to show sympathy for immigrants, even undocumented ones. In An American Son, he said people coming to the US illegally “are doing exactly what we would do if we lived in a country where we couldn’t feed our families”.“If my kids went to sleep hungry every night and my country didn’t give me an opportunity to feed them, there isn’t a law, no matter how restrictive, that would prevent me from coming here,” he wrote.Rubio was horrified by Trump’s presidential run in 2015, calling him a “con artist” who had “spent a career sticking it to working Americans”. He poured scorn on his hardline proposals on immigration, saying: “We’re not going to round up and deport 12mn people.”It was after Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 that Rubio’s views began to change. He increasingly adopted talking points that seemed borrowed from the businessman-turned-politician’s playbook.“Rubio is far from the only one who’s somewhat altered his tone to be relevant in the Trump era,” says Republican pollster Ayres. “Because there’s no question that the Republican party these days is the party of Donald Trump.”In 2023, Rubio published a Maga-tinged polemic that reflected this shift in his thinking. Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity describes how neoliberal economic policies had hollowed out America’s industrial base.But “he conveniently neglected to mention that these were all things he believed in 15 years ago”, says Drezner, the Tufts professor.Rubio increasingly seemed to mimic Trump’s rhetoric. Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press in May 2024, he described uncontrolled immigration as “an invasion” that “needs to be dealt with dramatically”. It was a sharp contrast to An American Son, in which he wrote that he could not stand to hear immigrants described in “terms more appropriate to a plague of locusts than human beings”..Read more:.FT: Trump’s reluctant diplomacy: From ‘America first’ to global peacemaker.Since taking charge of the state department, he has proved a loyal executor of the president’s will. Perhaps the most significant development on his watch has been the evisceration of USAID: 83 per cent of its programmes have been terminated, 94 per cent of its staff laid off and its remaining functions absorbed into the state department.Observers were shocked. As a senator, Rubio had often praised USAID’s work, lauding its hurricane relief efforts in Latin America, its contribution to fighting polio and Ebola and the help it provided to Venezuelan refugees fleeing the regime of Nicolás Maduro.Yet in a blog post on July 1 he excoriated the agency. “Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the cold war,” he said.Rubio has insisted that the closure of USAID does not mean the US is retreating from the world. Speaking before the Senate foreign relations committee in May, he said he had visited 18 countries in 18 weeks, and seen some foreign ministers “more than I’ve seen my own children”. “That doesn’t sound like much of a withdrawal,” he added.This month, he boasted of some of the Trump administration’s foreign policy wins. It had brokered a truce between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan and a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. It had persuaded Nato members to spend 5 per cent of their GDP on defence by 2035. And it had attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities. “And it hasn’t even been six months,” he said. Yet it is obvious that the way America engages with the rest of the world is changing, sometimes in dramatic ways.During a trip to Saudi Arabia in May, Trump said that “far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins”. That was now ending, he said.Rubio has always said foreign aid must be in America’s interests. He’s always believed that the US cannot be the world’s policeman“Biden prioritised human rights above all else in our relationship with the Saudis and ended up pushing them away,” says the Rubio aide. “Marco is changing that.”But the irony is that US interventions have not stopped — it is just the ideology underpinning them that has changed. In May, after German intelligence designated the far-right Alternative for Germany an extremist organisation, Rubio expressed his outrage on X. “That’s not democracy — it’s tyranny in disguise.” Angered by the post, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on the US to “stay out” of German domestic politics.The state department under Rubio has also shut down most refugee resettlement programmes while fast-tracking asylum applications for white Afrikaner families alleging race-based persecution in South Africa — claims that have been widely discredited. “You’ve turned away from a genocide in Sudan and invented one in South Africa,” Van Hollen told Rubio in May.Democrats have expressed alarm at other recent developments at the department. Rubio has revoked the visas of non-US students who took part in campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, calling them “lunatics”. He has instructed consular officers to scrutinise the social media feeds of visa applicants to see if they pose a threat to US national security.In February he struck a controversial deal with El Salvador under which the Central American state promised to take in and incarcerate criminal illegal migrants. Human rights groups have complained that people are being removed without due process. Officials say the deal has mainly targeted members of violent criminal gangs.Meanwhile, the proliferation of roles Rubio has taken on has led to occasional scheduling hiccups. In early May, less than a week after Trump appointed him acting national security adviser, he was expected to address the diplomatic corps in Washington for the first time. More than 100 ambassadors and senior diplomats gathered for the reception. But, according to several diplomats who attended the event, he never turned up, much to their frustration.They said his deputy, Christopher Landau, tried to humour the assembled dignitaries by joking that Rubio was wearing so many hats now that he was swamped with work.Allies insist that everything Rubio is doing at the state department is consistent with the world view he has espoused for much of his career. “He’s always said foreign aid must be in America’s interests, he’s always complained about how the US was exporting and projecting liberal social policies on other countries, and he’s always believed that the US cannot be the world’s policeman,” says the former aide.But others are disappointed by his actions in office.A senior state department official terminated this month says Rubio was a man “many of us had interacted with for years and respected”. “We thought he would defend the State and ensure that seasoned, committed experts would still have a voice in policy and diplomacy,” she adds. “It turned out we were wrong.”.© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd.

FT: The evolution of Marco Rubio from free-trader to MAGA populist

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