By Nick Catoggio
Friday, June 07, 2024
From time to time in this newsletter, we take up the
question of “cynic or convert?”
Nearly every conservative of significance within the
Republican Party has reconciled themselves to Trumpism since 2016, but the
earnestness with which they’ve done so varies. Many are careerists who
privately despise Donald Trump and what he stands for but despise the idea of
losing their political stature just a little more. They’ve pledged their fealty
because they had to, not because they wanted to. They’re cynics.
Other conservatives started out despising Trump but have
grown to idolize the man and his movement. A few might have been won over to
populist-nationalism on the ideological merits (giggle) but for most, I think,
the appeal is more primal. MAGA politics is a daily bath of authoritarian
fervor, cultural outrage, and insatiable suspicion that malicious conspiracies
are afoot in every part of society. Whatever may have motivated these
conservatives to join the cult, they’re enthusiastic converts now.
Usually, it’s pretty easy to tell one type from the
other.
Nikki Haley is an obvious cynic. Her years-long
half-hearted vacillation about whether
Trump is fit for office is clearly a ploy to try to preserve her viability
in the GOP in case the party comes to its senses someday. Contrast her with
Mike Lee, who holds a safe Senate seat and is unlikely to occupy any higher
office (hopefully!),
yet chatters manically about Trumpist priorities on social media day in and day
out. He’s a
convert, a true fanatic.
Which one is Marco Rubio?
Not long ago, I would have called the senator from
Florida a textbook example of a cynic. No one spoke more presciently in 2016
about the long-term
civic damage that would be done to right-wing politics and to America
if Republicans embraced Trumpism. And no one described Trump’s personal
unfitness for the presidency in
terms as stark. At times on the trail that year, Rubio was visibly shaken by
how easily Reagan conservatism had been co-opted by a lowbrow demagogue.
When he made peace with Trump after the primary, it was a
straightforward matter of an ambitious young Republican who knew better
choosing to protect his perch in the GOP. Pure cynicism, same as Haley.
Is it still so straightforward today?
Marco Rubio is a curious case from the “cynic or
convert?” perspective because even at this late date, I think, one can
plausibly argue the question either way. There are reasons to believe he’s
become a glassy-eyed MAGA zealot. And there are reasons to believe he remains
an opportunist red in tooth and claw, possibly even a quietly idealistic one.
But either way, no one on the American right embodies the
corruption of conservatism quite like Marco Rubio does. So much so that
his ending
up as Trump’s running mate this year feels like the only fitting
conclusion to the GOP’s descent into civic degeneracy since 2016.
***
A bit of trivia about Marco Rubio that sticks in my mind
is that he never
thanked the Tea Party in his Senate victory speech in 2010.
Oversights happen, but that was an odd one. Earlier that
year, Rubio had been touted by
the New York Times as “The First Senator from the Tea Party.”
His longshot Senate primary challenge to centrist favorite Charlie Crist was
celebrated by grassroots conservatives throughout the campaign as a populist
insurrection against the stale Republican establishment. Rubio had every reason
to spike the ball on their behalf on election night. He did not.
I don’t think it was an oversight. I think for most of
his career he was uncomfortable with populism and keen to keep it at arm’s
length. The distress he evinced in 2016 about the, shall we say, animal spirits
Trump had unleashed on the right was sincere. Marco Rubio didn’t want to burn
down “the system.”
Remember, as a young politician in Florida, he was an
ally (if not quite a mentee) of Jeb Bush. After he joined the Senate, his
biggest legislative initiative was a
bipartisan immigration reform bill. Until recently, he reliably supported
foreign interventions favored by the so-called foreign-policy “blob” in
D.C.
When he ran for president in 2016, he was the clear
favorite of the same establishment class that had championed Crist in his 2010
Senate race. More so than even Haley, who ended up endorsing him, Rubio
symbolized center-right conservatism’s potential to gain converts among blocs
like young adults and nonwhites who traditionally favored the left. He was the
future of the GOP—the “Republican
savior,” as Time magazine had dubbed him in 2013.
Then he got smoked by Trump in the primary. And, no doubt
to Rubio’s private horror, Trump did not get smoked by Hillary
Clinton in the general election. The shelf life of gonzo right-wing populism
would be extended by four years, at least.
The senator, then just 45 years old, decided to play
along with the new leader of his party rather than burn any bridges (or
retire), but his discomfort with Trump’s politics still flared
occasionally. In 2018 he published an op-ed
in defense of nationalism that resorted to blatantly misdefining the
concept so that Rubio could find something praiseworthy to say about it. “A
true American nationalism isn’t about a national identity based on race,
religion or ethnicity,” he wrote. “Instead, it is based on our identity as a
nation committed to the idea that all people are created equal, with a
God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The “true” nationalism he described there sounds
suspiciously like classical liberalism, which Marco Rubio has always preferred.
It sure doesn’t sound like Trumpist nationalism, the point of which is to
identify and subjugate various tribal “enemies within.” A movement bent on
distinguishing “real Americans” from others is, by definition, not gung ho on
the idea of a shared national identity.
But this is the sort of thing Rubio had to tell himself
to make his pacification during Trump’s presidency tolerable. He was biding his
time until 2020, when MAGA would at last lose at the polls and Republicans
would begin to tilt back toward conservatism.
Trump did lose, and Rubio remained enough of a principled
conservative after the election to resist the Republican effort to block
Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral votes. But then a funny thing
happened: Republicans … didn’t tilt back toward conservatism. They tilted
further toward Trump.
And that’s when Marco Rubio began to change.
***
The 2020 election and its aftermath taught the senator
two lessons, I think. One was that Trumpy politics wasn’t a passing fad. The
shelf life of indefensible populism had been extended again, this time
indefinitely as right-wing voters evinced no interest in reverting to
Reagan-style politics. Rubio could make peace with that or not, but there was
no longer any point to “biding his time” and waiting for Republicans to change.
The other lesson was the shifting nature of Trump’s
electoral coalition. Although he fell short against Biden, he made significant
gains with Hispanics—and Rubio took a keen interest in it. A week after
Election Day, he crowed with
excitement to reporters that “the future of the party is based on a
multiethnic, multiracial working-class coalition.” He’s continued to use
that phrase in the years since, and no wonder: If Hispanic voters are
warming up to a more populist GOP, the GOP’s most prominent Hispanic politician
will surely grow in stature and influence within his party.
It’s no coincidence that, as Trump’s polling with
Hispanics has improved
further in 2024, Rubio has become a top-tier
candidate for the vice presidency.
In short, Trump has actually done what Rubio
hypothetically would have as the Republican nominee in 2016: make inroads with
an important constituency that traditional conservatives like Mitt Romney and
John McCain struggled with. Imagine Rubio digesting that fact in early 2021
while also confronting the hard reality that populism in the GOP is here to
stay. Under that sort of psychological stress, it’s easy to see how he might
have begun to appreciate certain political virtues of Trumpism and how his cynicism
might have started to give way to an earnest conversion.
Emphasis on “might.” If Rubio is a convert to populist
policy, it’s thus far a partial conversion.
For instance, when he took the unusual step as a
Republican of siding with workers in a union drive at an Amazon facility in
early 2021, he specified that
he was doing so only because Amazon had “decided to wage culture war against
working-class values.” That’s an idiotic position on the merits—unionization
isn’t about forcing management to be less “woke”—but it was, it seems, the best
a natural conservative like him could do to talk himself into solidarity with
labor.
As another example, Rubio remains enough of a hawk to
have partnered
with Democrats last year on a bill clarifying that the president has
no power to withdraw the United States from its treaty with NATO without
approval from the Senate. The target of that legislation is obvious, and it
ain’t Joe Biden. But Rubio is also now enough of a skeptic of the Western
coalition to have voted twice this
year against further aid to Ukraine, justifying his refusal to do so on
“America First” grounds that securing the southern border should be a higher
priority.
Try to imagine pre-Trump Marco Rubio, the Republican face
of the so-called Gang of Eight in 2013, abandoning an American ally to Russian
conquest because illegal immigration needs to be solved first. And then voting against the
bipartisan immigration enforcement bill negotiated by GOP Sen. James Lankford
of Oklahoma back in February.
Cynic or convert? Are these examples of Rubio saying what
he knows he needs to say to boost his VP stock? Or has the pressure to conform
to Trumpy populism finally gotten to him?
He’s a sellout either way, of course. But to fully
appreciate just what a sellout he’s become, consider how deep into the tank
he’s gone lately to defend Trump’s most destructive illiberal impulses.
Weeks ago, he was asked on Meet the Press whether
he’d accept the results of the presidential election. For the Marco Rubio of
2016, righteously anxious about Trumpism’s corrosion of “norms,” that would
have been an easy question. For the Rubio of 2024, a populist fanatic in
earnest or a pretender angling for a spot on the national ticket, it’s a
stumper:
Last week, after Trump was convicted in Manhattan, Rubio
seized the opportunity to display his new populist bona fides in full flower.
Partly that meant stooping to the sort of undignified pugilistic hyperbole
that’s common on partisan social media …
… but much worse was how hard the senator strained
to equate the verdict against Trump with the sort of “show trial” that
one sees in communist countries.
In an op-ed
for Newsweek, Rubio described Trump as a “hostage,” implied
that a jury in a liberal jurisdiction like Manhattan couldn’t possibly have
been fair, and uncorked a long culture-war rant that ended with gripes about
“our ruling class of oligarchs and alleged experts.” Read his piece and you’ll
find it indistinguishable from something you might see at American
Greatness; a vote for any candidate other than Trump, Rubio concluded, is a
vote to “criminalize the traditional American way of life.”
There’s a lot we might say (and
have said) about Trump’s trial in New York, but one thing it wasn’t was a
“show trial.” Rubio, whose parents fled Castro’s Cuba, knows what a “show
trial” is; he knows that the defendant in one doesn’t receive due process or
appeals; and he knows what sentence is usually imposed after the inevitable
guilty verdict. That he would argue otherwise means that his cynicism has
reached the point where he’s now willing to tell any lie on Trump’s behalf or
his conversion has metastasized to the point where he truly can no longer see
the difference between a trial in America and a “show trial.”
Rubio is a picture-perfect caricature of what he feared
eight years ago that Republicans would become under Trump’s influence.
“Popularity is not leadership. It never has been,” Rubio told
an audience in 2006. “Leaders tell people what they need to
hear, not what they want to hear.” Almost 20 years later, his
ethos has become the precise opposite, rendering him a sort of ventriloquist’s
dummy—“Little Marco,”
we might call him—for the most repulsive political figure in modern American
history.
In a party overflowing with weak, disgraceful
conservative sellouts to authoritarianism, he might be the very weakest.
***
But as I said, Rubio would be the perfect running mate.
And not just because he might help win over Hispanics.
Trump’s takeover of the old GOP is like a barbarian horde
invading a kingdom and conquering it. In that circumstance, it wouldn’t be
unusual for the defeated monarchy to marry off one of its princesses to the
barbarian king in order to cement the union of their tribes going forward.
Princess Marco will be an ideal bride for King Donald,
joining the conservative future in formal partnership to the populist present.
Putting Rubio, the great establishment hope of 2016, on the ticket could
convince many reluctant Reaganites who supported Nikki Haley in this year’s
primaries that it’s worth rolling the dice on Trump one more time in November,
if only to give Princess Marco a chance of becoming President Marco.
The conservative dream of 2016 might be realized after
all! It’ll just have taken a, shall we say, circuitous route to becoming
reality.
If you’re very favorably disposed to
Marco Rubio and desperate to believe that he’s still the idealist of 2016 deep
down, you can even concoct a scenario in which he’s been secretly working on
behalf of Reaganism all along. If he ends up as VP and Trump dies in office,
partisan pressure on the right to support the new president will give Rubio
political cover to implement some traditionally conservative policies if he’s
so inclined. Under his leadership, the right might become more classically
liberal by 2028 than it is in 2024. If so, if this is all a sort of “long con”
to put Rubio in a position where he might restore sanity, his efforts to
ingratiate himself to Trump might be justified retroactively.
But I wouldn’t bet that Senator Show Trial is bluffing.
And if Trump doesn’t die in office and Rubio is counting
on parlaying the vice presidency into winning his party’s nomination in 2028, I
have news for him: It’s not going to happen. I think.
If Marco Rubio went all-in on Marjorie Taylor
Greene-style populism as Trump’s No. 2 and Trump endorsed him
in 2028, he’d admittedly have a solid shot at the nomination. But there’s
a lot of pre-Trump
Republican stink on him that would need to be scrubbed off and I’m not sure
that anything could do it. He speaks “demagogue” as a second language and true
populists can tell, as surely as one can tell by a person’s accent if they’re a
native or from somewhere else.
Marco Rubio is an immigrant in MAGA-land and the locals
don’t like immigrants.
He can prattle on forever about “a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition” but to be the people’s choice in this lousy party he’ll need to become considerably more Trumpy than he already is. More argle-bargle about “real Americans”; more hysterical attacks on institutions like the justice system; more betrayals of U.S. allies under fire like Ukraine. To fulfill his presidential dreams he will, quite simply, need to become one of the most loathsome figures in a movement that’s already top-heavy with them. I’m confident he has it in him. He’s well on his way.
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