SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When compared to some of President-elect Trump's other cabinet picks, Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state is pretty conventional. He's a veteran politician who's served on the foreign relations and intelligence committees for over a decade, and he's been a loyal Trump backer throughout this year's campaign. Take this moment from earlier this month, not long after Trump attacked former Congresswoman Liz Cheney in graphic terms.
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DONALD TRUMP: She's a radical war hawk. Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let's see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.
DETROW: Rubio was asked about that moment by Margaret Brennan on CBS's "Face The Nation."
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MARGARET BRENNAN: Isn't it possible to make the case without using rhetoric like that?
MARCO RUBIO: But Donald Trump doesn't talk like someone who's been in Washington for 30 years. He doesn't say it the way I would've said it.
BRENNAN: Training guns on her face?
RUBIO: No, but that's not what he said. Mara, you guys know that. Come on. I mean, everybody knows exactly what he was saying.
DETROW: It went back and forth. Rubio said this...
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RUBIO: It is a point that has been made by people in both parties for decades. And that is, you're all for war, and it's easy to be for war when you're in some fancy building and you're safe and sound in Washington, D.C. Let's see how much you are for war when you yourself get deployed into combat. That's the point that he was making. That - he uses language that maybe is not what we typically hear from someone...
BRENNAN: Yeah.
RUBIO: ...That works at a think tank. Fine.
DETROW: In 2024, this is a pretty run-of-the-mill TV appearance from a Republican, but it really stands out when you compare it to another Marco Rubio appearance, this one from 2016.
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RUBIO: A Donald Trump supporter sucker punched a man the other day in an event. Donald Trump has yet to condemn him. After the man was released from jail, he said, next time, I'll kill him. He still has not condemned it.
DETROW: Back then, Rubio was running for the Republican presidential nomination against Donald Trump.
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RUBIO: When you run for president of the United States, or if you are president of the United States, you can't just take on the attitude that - I'm going to say whatever I want. You can't say whatever you want. It has real life consequences for people in this country and all over the world.
DETROW: Eight years ago when he ran against Trump, Rubio called him a con artist. He called his style of leadership dangerous. Now he is going to work for him. Washington Post national political reporter Marianne LeVine dug into how that transformation unfolded and what it says about today's Republican Party. She spoke with people who know Rubio well, also spoke with the senator himself. And she wrote about it this summer when Rubio's name was in the mix for Trump's vice presidential pick. She joins us now. Welcome.
MARIANNE LEVINE: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: Let's go back to the beginning, at least to the beginning of Marco Rubio's career in Washington. He's elected to the Senate in 2010. What kind of politician was he at that point? What was his brand? What was he focusing on?
LEVINE: So Marco Rubio back in 2010 came in through the Tea Party wave. So he was - so he came in as a pretty conservative member of the Senate. And he was really viewed as the potential future of the Republican Party. He was young. He was only 39 when he was elected to the Senate. He was Latino. And I think he was viewed as someone who was going to represent a new younger, more diverse GOP.
DETROW: And the media gravitates toward him, of course, this is early on in the Obama years, and everyone's looking for the next Obama on the Republican side. And a lot of people said, it's this guy. It's Marco Rubio. Here he is giving a big speech at the 2012 Republican Convention.
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RUBIO: I noticed the bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father who worked for many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that's not the life he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the bar in the back of the room all those years so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of a room.
DETROW: Then Rubio runs for president in 2016. I remember covering that campaign and being in the room in New Hampshire when it felt like Marco Rubio was building momentum and something was happening here. But just like so many other Republicans - well, every other Republican who ran that year, Marco Rubio runs straight into Donald Trump. Among other things, he gets a nickname.
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TRUMP: Little Marco. Little Marco.
DETROW: We were playing other clips of the 2016 campaign. I guess, let me frame the question this way - what from that clash is still relevant eight years later? What were the key things that happened in that Republican primary, especially between Marco Rubio and Donald Trump?
LEVINE: Well, I think we all remember the Little Marco nickname. Rubio also described Trump as a conman.
DETROW: Right. And here's Rubio making that attack during an interview with CBS.
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RUBIO: We're about to turn over the conservative movement to a person that has no ideas of any substance on the important issues, the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual, and the conservative movement to someone who has spent a career sticking it to working people.
LEVINE: He had to go after Trump, and I think he started to attack Trump in ways that weren't totally in line with how he had ran earlier in the campaign, obviously, trying to position himself with a positive message, trying to represent himself as, you know, a promise of generational change. And I think he kind of gets down in the mud with Trump in 2016.
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RUBIO: He's always calling me Little Marco. And I'll admit, the guy, he's taller than me. He's, like, 6'2", which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who's 5'2". Have you seen his hands? They're like this. And you know what they say about men with small hands.
DETROW: Yeah, and it's this moment where you realize that what works for Donald Trump often does not work for other Republicans - right? - especially a Republican like Marco Rubio, who's tried to take the high, sweeping, soaring high road. He's suddenly doing these personal attacks, making these hand size references, and it just falls flat.
LEVINE: Yeah, it just doesn't work. I feel like those are early indications that Trump-style politics is here to stay.
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RUBIO: I want to begin by - I haven't got a chance to speak to him yet, but I want to congratulate Donald Trump on his victory - a big victory in Florida.
DETROW: Rubio drops out of the race. And there's a moment that you pinpointed and talked to people about as kind of a changing point for Rubio. He's kind of giving a warning about Trump's style of politics, but also framing a very real trend with Republican voters, with voters in general.
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RUBIO: The easiest thing to have done in this campaign is to jump on all those anxieties I just talked about, to make people angrier, make people more frustrated. But I chose a different route, and I'm proud of that...
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RUBIO: ...Because the politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party. They're going to leave us a fractured nation.
DETROW: Why, in your reporting, was this such a key speech?
LEVINE: From talking to people who knew Rubio at the time, fundraised for him, it felt like a turning point for him, even though in the speech, he still sticks to his positive message and says he's proud of the message that he campaigned on. It's also a recognition of where things are in the country, and it's Rubio's recognition that that's where the party is headed.
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RUBIO: People are angry. They're frustrated. They're being left behind by this economy, and then they're told, look, if you're against illegal immigration, that makes you a bigot. And if you see jobs and businesses leaving to other countries, you have no right to be frustrated.
LEVINE: I think it really foreshadows his - sort of his direction in the Republican Party and the party's broader move towards a potentially more populist approach in some of their policies.
DETROW: What's the best way to frame Rubio's journey as a Trump ally in the Senate over the course of the first Trump presidency? - 'cause I feel like he went from just kind of staying away from the drama of the day to really defending Trump, going out and defending Trump against a lot of attacks, a lot of media criticism.
LEVINE: Trump and Rubio actually made up pretty fast. I mean, Rubio endorsed Trump in May of 2016. And he worked really closely with the Trump administration on Latin America policy, to the point where some people, some reporters and stories described him as a virtual secretary of state for the region. He also worked really closely with Ivanka Trump on a paid family leave initiative. And so there were efforts to work with the Trump administration pretty early on in Trump's first term, and I think the two of them made up pretty quickly.
DETROW: Yeah. Was there a moment from this past campaign that stood out to you when it comes to how Rubio has aligned himself with Trump?
LEVINE: I think there was one moment at a rally in Pennsylvania where Trump was speaking. He invites Rubio on stage.
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TRUMP: Marco Rubio - Marco, will you come up here, please?
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TRUMP: Good man, this one.
LEVINE: And Rubio tells him about Biden's remarks where he appeared to suggest that Trump supporters were, quote-unquote, "garbage."
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RUBIO: Well, I wasn't going to say anything, but I have breaking news for you, Mr. President. You may not have heard this. Just moments ago, Joe Biden stated that our supporters are garbage.
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LEVINE: And I think that really stood out to me in the sense of just showing his loyalty to Trump and also showing, you know, that he was already on the attack against the Democrats in that moment and kind of seized on that moment to inform Trump of these remarks that were going to start a whole nother news cycle.
DETROW: I guess the one area I'm really curious about, and I'm wondering what you're thinking and what you've heard from people, is that I think the big policy departure where Marco Rubio has kind of stayed in the traditional pre-Trump Republican rolled - mold has been on a lot of the big foreign policy questions - right? - like Ukraine, like when it comes to full-throated support for NATO, for things like that. Any sense of how Marco Rubio works as a secretary of state on those big questions where Trump has really tried to remake the Republican Party?
LEVINE: I think it's hard to say right now. I mean, I think that one sign of where Rubio may go and where some of his views may have evolved is earlier this year, he voted against a $95 billion foreign aid bill that delivered billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel. And this was a bill that was heavily supported by Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But Rubio voted against it. And I think that was a moment that surprised a lot of former Rubio associates. I remember talking to someone who said that Rubio in 2015 would not have voted against that aid package. And so...
DETROW: Yeah.
LEVINE: And Rubio's reasoning about that was basically that he thought the federal government wasn't doing enough on the border, which obviously, unrelated. But I think that that's kind of an early indication that he might go more in the direction of where Trump has gone on foreign policy.
DETROW: That is Washington Post national political reporter Marianne LeVine talking about Marco Rubio and his journey from Trump critic to Trump's pick for secretary of state. Thank you so much for joining us.
LEVINE: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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