‘Cubans Love Gold’

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

We begin with two quotes. They won’t seem related, but they are.

 

The first: “I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party…. How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?... I’ve voted Republican my entire life … [but] I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

 

The second: “Cubans love gold.”

 

Quote No. 1 comes from Tucker Carlson; quote No. 2 comes from the president.

 

Tucker’s quote speaks for itself and will be received warmly on both ends of the American right. To postliberals, isolationists, Israel obsessives, and other creatures who inhabit the GOP’s chud wing, it’s a righteous cri de coeur against the White House’s foolish war in Iran. To classical liberals, hawks, Israel supporters, and the rest of what remains of the party’s negligible conservative faction, it’s a long-overdue matter of “good riddance.”

 

The only right-wingers dismayed by the thought of a Republican Party without Lindberghians will be Donald Trump and the sort of brainless tribal partisan who doesn’t care what the GOP stands for as long as it’s winning elections and keeping Democrats out of power.

 

Around 85 percent of the Republican electorate, in other words.

 

The president’s quote is more cryptic. At first glance it sounds like the sort of casual bigotry that any very old man from Queens might randomly interject in between naps. “Somalis have low IQs. Jews have dual loyalty. Cubans love gold.”

 

But Trump wasn’t speaking randomly. According to a new book from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “Cubans love gold” was his skeptical response when a visitor to the Oval Office wondered whether the next president might remove the tacky gilded flourishes he’s added to the decor.

 

Remind me: J.D. Vance isn’t of Cuban heritage, is he?

 

Evidence continues to dribble out that the president prefers his secretary of state to his vice president as the GOP’s next nominee. Maybe he resents Vance, who opposed the war from the start, for having gotten Iran right while Trump himself got it wrong. Or maybe he noticed the poll Emerson published a few weeks ago showing the VP’s lead over Marco Rubio in a 2028 Republican primary shrinking from 52-20 in February to 36-35 in May.

 

Either way, we need to consider the possibility that the artist formerly known as “Little Marco” emerges as heir apparent over the next 18 months and becomes president in 2029. More specifically: We need to consider whether there’s any possibility that it could happen.

 

Let’s see if I can talk you—and by you, I mean myself—into believing that there is. Two things need to occur, the first of which is relatively easy and maybe probable. The second? Not so much.

 

Sidelining Vance.

 

Rubio doesn’t need to beat J.D. Vance in a Republican primary and assuredly won’t try. All he needs to do is end up on the other side of the bet Vance is making on right-wing reaction to the Iran war.

 

The vice president is gambling that bad vibes from the conflict will whet GOP appetites for a leader who’s more isolationist than Trump turned out to be. If a consensus forms among Republican voters that the fatal mistake with Iran was choosing to go to war in the first place, Vance will look wise for having opposed that decision.

 

That’s why he’s made himself the face of a diplomatic settlement with the Iranians, as I explained last week. A right-wing base that trends toward Tuckerism in the aftermath of our national embarrassment will come to appreciate Vance as an avatar of peace. He doesn’t start silly, self-defeating wars. He gets America out of them.

 

That's what a winning wager looks like for the veep. Whereas a losing wager looks like this: Republican voters decide that the fatal mistake with Iran was failing to “finish the job” by using military force to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Doves like Vance are schmucks twice over, they come to believe, having first discouraged Trump from prosecuting the war to an honorable end and later selling him on a deal that will shower billions of dollars on a terrorist regime.

 

The vice president isn’t an avatar of peace in this view; he’s an avatar of American humiliation. The United States needs a leader who isn’t afraid to use military power and who’ll prioritize victory once he chooses to do so: If that’s where GOP opinion lands when the Iran smoke clears—and given the right’s faith in “toughness” and “strength,” it’s more likely than not—then Rubio will be the obvious beneficiary.

 

Which, in a way, is unfair to Vance. After all, Rubio wasn’t gung-ho for military action in Iran either, reportedly sounding “ambivalent” in Cabinet deliberations about attacking the regime before bombing began. “He did not believe the Iranians would agree to a negotiated deal,” the Times alleged in April, “but his preference was to continue a campaign of maximum pressure rather than start a full-scale war.”

 

Even so, his reputation precedes him. Rubio was an outspoken hawk in his pre-Trump incarnation as a Reaganite, was the face of the administration’s quick-and-easy decapitation of Venezuela’s communist regime, and is clearly angling to make the right’s longtime dream of Cuba libre come true soon. He’s the slam-dunk alternative to Vance if the Republican electorate concludes that the party’s next nominee needs to be more comfortable with using force than Trump was, not less.

 

Needless to say, the worse the Iran deal looks, the more likely they are to reach that conclusion—and already, less than a week in, it looks awfully bad. Forget the instantly infamous $300 billion reconstruction fund, which (supposedly) won’t be paid out unless the United States gets everything it wants from the regime. The Iranians are already disputing up-front, baby-steps concessions that the U.S. claims were promised under the deal.

 

Yesterday, for instance, Vance announced that Iran had agreed to let United Nations nuclear inspectors visit its enrichment facilities. We did not, Iranian diplomats replied. Trump later told reporters that frozen funds that have been released to Iran in the first stage of the deal must be used to buy agricultural products from the United States. We’re under no obligation to do that, the Iranians countered.

 

In a dispute between sociopaths, it’s impossible to tell which side is lying to seem tougher than it really is to its domestic audience. What is clear, though, is that you might soon be putting Iranian oil in your tank thanks to the magic of U.S. sanctions relief under the deal.

 

The more embarrassed Republicans are by the terms of the deal, the more they’ll come to see Vance as a gullible sucker whom they dare not trust with presidential power. That’s when we’ll start to see a meaningful Rubio boomlet on the right. And the coup de grâce, of course, would be the president himself confessing his regrets about signing it, which would function as a statement of “no confidence” in his VP.

 

I was skeptical of the rumors in March about Vance wavering on running in 2028, but they’ll seem more credible if/when the Iran deal becomes a complete debacle. If the VP believes he’s unelectable in the next cycle, whether because Republicans have turned on him or because Democrats are teed up for a comeback (or both), he’s young enough that he might choose to opt out and hope that the political tides swing back in his favor in 2032.

 

In the same way that Richard Nixon wasn’t finished after losing a presidential race in 1960, perhaps J.D. Vance won’t be finished in 2028—although Nixon never had to explain why he thought sending $300 billion to the Soviets was a good idea.

 

And if Vance does bow out, Marco Rubio will instantly become a prohibitive favorite for the GOP nomination, particularly if Trump is behind him. He will, almost certainly, win the primary.

 

But how does he win the general election? That’s where Tucker Carlson’s quote comes in.

 

Uniting the right.

 

I remain convinced by what I wrote in March, that Vance is more likely to unite the right than Rubio is. It will be easier for the vice president to persuade skeptical right-wing hawks to turn out for him in a general election, I think, than it will be for the secretary of state to persuade skeptical Lindberghians to do so.

 

The sort of rank-and-file Republican partisan who defaults toward hawkishness and who might resent Vance for the Iran deal will nonetheless faithfully prioritize tribal victory over Democrats in 2028. No amount of Trump blather in 2024 about “warmongering” by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will disabuse the American right of its atavistic fear that a foreign policy led by leftists will be dangerously weak relative to whatever’s on offer from the GOP.

 

In the end, traditional hawks will convince themselves that J.D. Vance is the lesser of two isolationist evils on the presidential ballot, never mind that he championed a sellout to Iran that would have gotten him accused of being a terrorist sleeper agent if he were a member of the other party. Conservatives are a reliably cheap date on Election Day.

 

Rubio will have a harder time convincing Tuckerites that he’s the lesser evil in 2028.

 

Postliberals are less concerned with keeping Republicans in power than they are with mainstreaming postliberalism in the United States. Rubio’s nomination would be a major setback to that project. For all of his success in ingratiating himself with Trump and Trump’s inner circle, and for all of his effort in demonstrating that he’s a loyal servant of the president’s agenda, he’s conspicuously out of sync culturally with the sort of chud that dominates modern GOP activism.

 

Marco Rubio is not “based.” He doesn’t even pretend to be based. Unlike every other top-tier Trump deputy, I can’t think of a single case of him being trollishly provocative on matters involving race, sex, or religion to signal his commitment to transgressing liberal norms. The president likes him because he likes the president (or seems to) and serves loyally, but Tuckerites aren’t so easily impressed.

 

Postliberals will draw inferences from Rubio’s lack of based-ness, and I suspect their inferences will be correct. At the risk of complimenting a deeply degraded politician, President Rubio probably wouldn’t try to stage a coup to preserve Republican control of the government, wouldn’t pardon criminal degenerates just because they’re right-wing, wouldn’t assume that Ukraine is the problem actor in its war with Russia, and—importantly—wouldn’t insist that America’s relationship with Israel needs a wholesale rethink.

 

A party led by Rubio is a party in which postliberals would have considerably less influence than they would in a party led by Vance. His nomination would threaten their takeover of the GOP and his election as president might seal it. Politically, it would be a catastrophe for them.

 

And so I think postliberal ideologues like Carlson would rather see him lose. For one thing, they’ll inevitably be more aligned with the Democratic agenda on Israel in 2028 than with whatever Rubio might be proposing. Left-wing opinion has turned against the Jewish state so lopsidedly that the party’s nominee will have no choice but to take a skeptical, if not hostile, line toward Jerusalem. Even Vance won’t be able to get to the left of Democrats on the subject in the next cycle. But Rubio would be an especially hard sell as the lesser of two evils to a faction that tends to begin all discussions of evil with Israel.

 

Beyond that, it’s in their political interest for a non-chud Republican nominee to lose. The weaker the right is at the polls when postliberals are unhappy, the stronger the case becomes that the GOP can’t win unless postliberals remain in charge. That surely explains why Carlson is so eager to withhold his vote from the party: The “based” right will explain the expected bloodbath at the polls this fall as a disaster that would have been averted if only Trump hadn’t veered so far from postliberalism by doing Israel’s bidding.

 

And if that’s the postliberals’ attitude this November, it will also be their attitude in trying to engineer a Rubio defeat in 2028. That could take the form of a primary challenge, possibly from Carlson himself, with the secretary of state maneuvered into the dreaded establishment lane by a “based” demagogue of the sort Republican voters adore. But even if Rubio skates through to the general election, he might find himself the target of a far-right boycott that fall: If only the GOP hadn’t veered so far from postliberalism by nominating a Reaganite like Marco, you see, Tucker and other like-minded right-wingers would have turned out to vote.

 

Realistically, I don’t think there’s anything Rubio can do to win them over. He could try pandering to postliberals, declaring that the scales have fallen from his eyes and that he now realizes Jews are the instigators of all wars, but I doubt they’d buy it. His eleventh-hour “based” conversion would be too convenient. Besides, as I’ve said, for all his faults there are certain forms of soul-selling that Marco Rubio has refused to stoop to. It would be churlish to assume he’d stoop to this one now.

 

To neutralize the Tucker faction, he’s going to need luck.

 

Lucky breaks.

 

Three types of luck, specifically.

 

First, Rubio needs Democrats to nominate a far-left candidate in 2028 to bolster his case to postliberals (and to swing voters, of course) that he really is the lesser of two evils on the ballot. Lindberghians may have more in common on Israel with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than with Rubio, but the thought of America being governed by a young socialist Latina will offend their cultural prejudices profoundly enough to get out the chud vote for Marco, I think.

 

Two, he needs Trump and Vance to continue to discredit postliberalism by governing like nincompoops. True ideologues like Carlson won’t be moved back toward conservatism by the White House’s failures, but there are doubtless plenty of young right-wingers whose interest in “based” politics is faddish and subject to change. Many liberals dabble in radicalism as young adults before disenchantment pulls them toward the center; there’s no reason the same can’t happen to Generation Trump, with Rubio poised to benefit.

 

The whole reason he’s emerged as a favorite with Republican voters is because he sounds like he knows what he’s doing, a rarity in this administration. The worse the rest of Trump’s term goes, the more the faddish elements of postliberalism might drift toward appreciating competence, or at least the appearance of it.

 

Lastly, he needs postliberal influencers to keep shedding influence and making enemies.

 

They’ve made a bunch lately. Figures like Carlson have been taking shots from Dispatch columnists for years, but lately they’ve begun getting it from pro-Israel populists like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin too. More importantly, by opposing the war they’ve picked a fight with the president—and fighting with the president tends to do bad things to your popularity on the right, as Tucker might tell you.

 

Some of the Jacobins have even started to guillotine each other, as happens in any revolutionary movement. The more fractious and embittered the various strains of right-wing postliberalism are, the more preoccupied they become with their own internecine grudges, the less likely they’ll be to unite in opposition to a mainstream nominee like Rubio or to muster meaningful opposition at the polls against him.

 

I still wouldn’t bet on a Cuban American in the Oval Office in 2029, though. The inevitable trajectory of the president’s final two and a half years in office will leave the electorate hungry for change, and “Donald Trump’s secretary of state” isn’t very change-y. But if you’re trying to envision a Rubio administration, I’ve given you the path. All it’ll take is deep, lasting disillusionment with postliberalism in government and right-wing infotainment by a party rank-and-file that’s spent 10 years being indoctrinated into an authoritarian cult. Good luck, Marco.