American Dreamer

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, May 07, 2026

 

There’s a lot going on, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice that the secretary of state kinda sorta declared his candidacy for president last night.

 

Take 57 seconds to watch this clip and tell me I’m wrong.

 

There’s no reason that Marco Rubio should be posting videos of himself pontificating about the greatness of America, replete with stirring orchestral swells, unless the hype about him vaulting past J.D. Vance for the 2028 Republican nomination has gone to his head.

 

One version of the clip describing his remarks as “the most articulate response I’ve ever heard to this question” was retweeted 17,000 times on X, a rare degree of virality for a politician bloviating about what George H.W. Bush once dubbed “the vision thing.” You can understand why. Republicans have spent 10 years without a leader who can speak eloquently and inspirationally about … well, anything, let alone the American dream.

 

Rubio’s comments scratched the irrepressible human itch for that vision thing. In a party whose leadership is stocked with fascists, grifters, and servile idiots, he’s the last official capable of painting a picture of America that a decent person should want to hang on their wall.

 

Even so, the whole thing sure is strange.

 

The timing is strange, for one thing, as U.S. diplomacy—which the secretary of state nominally oversees—is in shambles at the moment. The president announced a new operation to guide tankers through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday but reportedly neither he nor Rubio bothered to let America’s Gulf allies know about it in advance. When the Saudis yanked permission to use their airspace for the operation, Donald Trump was forced to suspend it less than 24 hours after it began.

 

Rubio ended up looking like a chump, having defended the operation at length to reporters at a briefing on Tuesday before the rug was yanked out from under him. He looked like a chump again when, at the same briefing, he declared Operation Epic Fury over and claimed that the mission to reopen the strait was a new and distinct conflict. But if the original war is over, that means America has failed to achieve its goals: The Khomeinists are still in charge, their nuclear “dust” is still buried beneath their enrichment sites, and their missile arsenal is in better shape than anyone would hope.

 

To make matters worse, at last check the White House was on track for a peace deal that would commit the United States to “a gradual lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iran and the gradual release of billions of dollars in Iranian funds that are frozen around the world.” Those terms resemble Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear bargain closely enough that some hawkish Trump supporters resorted to claiming that the news must be fake, as surely the president would never agree to such horrific terms.

 

The most one can say about all this for Marco Rubio, chief diplomat and alleged future president, is that he doesn’t seem very involved in the Iran war and therefore shouldn’t be blamed for its failures. But that’s a problem in its own right. Why hasn’t he been more involved? It’s nice that he can spout greeting-card sentiments about America to reporters off the cuff, but he’s supposed to be the competent one in the administration. His portfolio, U.S. foreign policy, could use a lot more competence right now.

 

For cripes’ sake, he was at the Vatican today to try to ease tensions with the pope. We can’t blame him for that crisis either, I realize, but a little more humility about the greatness of America from a top official in this administration might be in order at a moment when America is on the wrong side of the Vicar of Christ.

 

The timing of Rubio’s campaign ad isn’t the strangest thing about it, however.

 

The strangest part is the substance. “Each generation has left the next generation of Americans freer, more prosperous, safer, and that is our goal as well,” he intones at one point, saluting the supposedly inexorable progress of American life. “Each generation has done its part to bring us closer to fulfilling the vision that the Founders of this country had upon its founding.”

 

Listening to him, I wondered: Does this guy realize who he works for?

 

Liberalism and postliberalism.

 

Marco Rubio has spent 10 years struggling to reconcile his pluralistic, classically liberal view of America with Trumpism’s postliberal vision of a battle for national dominance among demographic tribes.

 

In 2018, for instance, he published an op-ed titled “Trump Is Right About Nationalism” in which he redefined “nationalism” in a suspiciously liberal-friendly way. “A true American nationalism isn’t about a national identity based on race, religion, or ethnicity,” then-Sen. Rubio 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.”

 

I don’t know what “true American nationalism” is, but I do know that it looks nothing like the kind of nationalism that Trump and MAGA practice. The essence of right-wing postliberalism is that there’s an Us and there’s a Them, and Them very much includes lots and lots of U.S. citizens. At the heart of Trumpism is the belief that some are “real Americans” and others are not, and it’s okay to hate the latter or regard them as inferior.

 

On Tuesday Rubio told reporters that he hopes America will remain a “place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity.” That too is anathema to Trumpism. The reason the president took an early interest in where Barack Obama was born, and why he makes a point of mentioning Obama’s middle name to this day when disparaging him, is to imply that America never should have been governed by a son of Africa called “Hussein.” The United States is properly governed by white Christian men, or at least by those who promise to preserve the dominance of white Christian men.

 

Rubio’s quasi-campaign ad mirrors his 2016 presidential platform—forward-looking, eager to invite nonwhites to share the American dream, committed to growing the proverbial pie for all. That platform was crushed, you may recall, by Donald Trump’s backward-looking call to purify America by building a wall at the border and banning Muslims from entering the country. Unlike Rubio, Trump’s worldview is emphatically zero-sum: He cares less about growing the pie than carving off the biggest possible piece for him and his.

 

So I don’t know what the secretary of state means when he says it’s the administration’s goal to leave “the next generation of Americans freer, more prosperous, safer.” That’s a fundamentally altruistic approach to government at odds with postliberalism’s selfish ethic of creating advantages for one’s own tribe at the expense of others.

 

At best, Trump’s government aspires to improve the lives of the next generation of real Americans. Those who are less “real” simply don’t matter as much.

 

Out of touch.

 

At heart, Rubio is making a claim that the American dream is alive and well and that the administration is committed to preserving it. That’s why his remarks went viral: The rest of the political establishment may have screwy priorities but here’s a guy who still understands that making life better for one’s children is, and will always be, voters’ biggest concern.

 

Freedom, safety, and prosperity for the next generation is good politics. But it’s a preposterous message given the facts.

 

Prosperity? Any poll will tell you that the cost of living is the biggest problem in the country. Yet Trump’s response to it was to start a trade war that made goods more expensive, to start an actual war with Iran that’s left gas pushing $5 per gallon, to cut Medicaid in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and to declare his ambition to make housing more, er, expensive. He barely even pretends to care about affordability anymore.

 

As for the national debt that the next generation will inherit, the less said, the better.

 

Freedom? Erstwhile classic liberal Marco Rubio might care about that, but the authoritarian regime he serves resents freedoms that conflict with Donald Trump’s personal and political interests. Postliberals believe in using power ruthlessly to impose one’s will on adversaries. Why the hell would they want those adversaries to have greater liberty to assert their own will by resisting?

 

Safety? The Trump administration has made things safer in some ways, such as by deporting illegal immigrants who’ve committed crimes. The Iran war might make Americans safer long-term, depending on how the Iranians move forward. But America surely isn’t safer for having stopped federal law enforcement from chasing real criminals and siccing them on nonviolent illegals instead. It isn’t safer from Trump handing out pardons to dangerous degenerates to reward their “loyalty.” It isn’t safer after demonstrating repeatedly to American partners over the past 15 months that it’s a faithless ally on whom one should never rely. It isn’t safer for having entrusted its health bureaucracy to anti-vaccine nuts.

 

But lay all of Trump’s failures aside. Marco Rubio’s words are destined to ring hollow to many because a lot of us flat-out don’t believe in the American dream anymore.

 

There’s loads of data to back that up. Next month will mark 17 years(!!) of Americans believing on balance that the country is on the wrong track. Satisfaction with how things are going in the U.S. has hovered at around 25 percent, with sporadic spikes and dips, for the past two decades. In February, optimism about life five years from now fell below 60 percent, a record low.

 

Americans have turned very dark on whether their children’s lives will be better than their own. A 2017 poll found just 37 percent thought their kids would fare better financially than they have. (By comparison, 52 percent of Russians said the same.) By 2023, after the disruption of the pandemic, 78 percent of Americans said they weren’t very confident that their children’s lives would be better than their own. A third poll taken the next year saw 74 percent fret that their kids would be worse off financially than they were.

 

The obvious response to all that is that most of it isn’t Donald Trump’s fault. Many European countries have also seen huge swells of pessimism about the future. America’s national debt was an albatross before the president took office in 2017 and would certainly still have become a crisis if he had stayed in real estate and reality shows. And the pace at which artificial intelligence is replacing human labor means Americans would be frantic about their children’s employment prospects even if the Trump administration were running like a smoothly oiled machine.

 

But the fact that the president isn’t entirely to blame for the end of the American dream doesn’t make Rubio’s comments any less glibly anachronistic. Ironically, for all his pretensions to being forward-looking, the secretary of state was quite backward-looking when he spoke on Tuesday about America’s longstanding trajectory of improving life for each generation. That trajectory was propelled by particular cultural, civic, and economic preferences—all of which, in some respects, are now being hollowed out by Rubio’s boss.

 

Which brings us to the most ridiculous thing he said in his campaign ad.

 

A post-constitutional ‘vision.’

 

I wish I had the sort of stones it takes to chirp about “bringing us closer to fulfilling the vision that the Founders of this country had upon its founding” while working for a government that undermines that vision every day.

 

As we’ve discussed here many, many times, the president’s concept of how American government should work is antithetical to the constitutional order. He doesn’t respect the separation of powers, he resents checks on his authority by other branches, and he believes he should be free to use the authority of his office to favor his friends and punish his enemies. He connived once before to overturn a national election, will likely do so again this fall, and continues to confess in half-joking form his desire to remain in office beyond the limits set by the Constitution.

 

It’s much closer to the truth to say that Trump wishes to undo the Founders’ vision for America than that he hopes to fulfill it. That’s what postliberals mean when they yammer about “knowing what time it is,” after all: Supposedly, the United States has reached a crossroads at which national survival depends on nothing less than abandoning the rule of law for Caesarism.

 

“This is the difference between Rubio and [J.D.] Vance,” political writer Richard Hanania said yesterday after watching the secretary of state wax rapturously about his vision of America. “Vance is so angry and so poisoned by New Right talking points and memes [that] he’s incapable of putting forth any message [that’s] even remotely optimistic. The idea that America is open to all to achieve things he would find offensive.” That’s true, and it’s why Rubio is a better politician—and would be a better general election candidate—than the vice president.

 

But it’s also true that Vance is far more in tune with the spirit of Trumpism than Rubio is. Defying Supreme Court rulings on the grounds that the United States is “in a late republican period,” as Vance once urged Trump to do, is not what the Founders envisioned in a president. But it is something that the postliberal chuds who populate this administration could, and eventually might, rationalize as necessary to “save America.”

 

For Rubio to gloss over all of that and blithely insist that the government he serves is committed to the Founders’ vision is an insult to his audience’s intelligence. It’s Orwellian argle-bargle designed to whitewash Trump’s revolutionary project as a continuation of the American experiment, not much different from how the then-senator whitewashed postliberal nationalism in his 2018 op-ed as just an innocent populist twist on E pluribus unum.

 

And while it’s true, as I said, that the end of the American dream is by no means all Donald Trump’s fault, it’s partly his fault.

 

In March Pew Research published a survey of 25 nations in which it asked respondents to rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good or bad. The only nation in which a majority gave thumbs down to their countrymen’s basic decency was the United States. And while the sentiment was bipartisan, it was driven mostly by the left: Some 60 percent of Democrats rated Americans as morally or ethically bad versus 46 percent of Republicans who did.

 

That’s not entirely a reaction to Trump, as progressives are forever lamenting America’s various -isms. But watching the right go completely morally numb to the president’s corruption, viciousness, and fascist ambition has obviously deepened Democrats’ pessimism about the American character. And I don’t blame them: Lord knows, it’s certainly deepened mine.

 

How can any thoughtful person take Marco Rubio’s Reaganite “shining city on the hill” shtick seriously after watching Americans elect a character like Trump twice? How does one go on merrily believing in American exceptionalism with a government that’s as buffoonish as it is malevolent and as malevolent as it is buffoonish?

 

America was a great country that’s becoming a disgraceful one, just like Marco Rubio was an eloquent conservative spokesman for the American project who’s become an “oleaginous little sycophant” lending a patina of respectability to an obnoxious postliberal criminal syndicate. Between him and Vance, I think I’d marginally prefer to have J.D. as nominee in 2028: Like Lincoln, I prefer to take my despotism pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy.