It’s a low bar, perhaps, but no one in the Trump administration seems to be having more fun at the moment than Marco Rubio. Last weekend, he was acting as a DJ at a family wedding, headphones to his ear with head and hand pumping to the beat. Midweek, the secretary of state was at the podium in the White House briefing room, spitting rap lyrics and cracking jokes. (“Two more questions!” he said, before entertaining seven more.) And toward the end of the week, he was in Vatican City, being escorted through marble hallways by members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who has been criticized by the president and vice president.
Rubio comes across as the happy warrior, not the angry one—the one offering lighthearted jokes more than brash confrontation.
In a more normal time, he would seem like just another glad-handing politician. But consider the moment: Gas prices are rising, the GOP midterm outlook is dimming, and the war that President Trump launched against Iran continues with no tidy ending in sight. The president faces record-high disapproval ratings. Three Cabinet members have been ousted, and others worry they could be next. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is up on Capitol Hill testifying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and FBI Director Kash Patel faces questions about his alleged excessive drinking, which he denies. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is navigating the war with Iran and a closed Strait of Hormuz. Vice President Vance, despite his original reservations about that war, has been pulled in as a negotiator and defender.
But Rubio—the guy who once became a meme because of the way he sat uncomfortably on an Oval Office couch, looking exhausted with his many jobs—suddenly looks joyful and light. He seemed to be everywhere all at once this week, followed by a hum and then a buzz of: Hmm, he sure looks like he’s running in 2028. That’s the murmur that once followed Vance. Although people close to Rubio and Vance downplay any rivalry—insisting that they are close friends and ardent allies—it’s hard not to see a shadow Republican presidential primary beginning to emerge. Vance made his first trip to Iowa as vice president on Tuesday, to campaign for vulnerable midterm candidates, raise money for the party, and stoke interest in his own political future.
Toward the end of the Tuesday briefing, a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network lobbed a softball question at the country’s top diplomat: “What is your hope for America at a time such as this?” Rubio took a big swing. “It’s the hope I hope we all share. We want it to continue to be the 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,” he said.
He continued for nearly a minute in what sounded awfully like a stump speech I’d heard before—and, in fact, it was. Rubio had delivered, in portions nearly word for word, the same formula in his 2016 campaign. He said it on the campaign trail, and he said it from the debate stage. On Wednesday, Rubio’s official State Department X account released a campaign-style video, in which his lofty words played over a montage of Rubio and Trump and American flags. It even included a clip of Ronald Reagan as music from the Superman movie Man of Steel swelled. It has been viewed more than 4 million times.
Rubio is the secretary of state, but last year he also became the national security adviser. For a time, he was also the acting head of the National Archives and USAID. And this week, he was tasked with filling in for White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who had given birth a few days prior. “Another job?” the official White House X account posted to preview his briefing-room appearance as must-see TV. “Don’t miss it!”
At the podium, Rubio deadpanned and joked, bantered and riffed. He spoke in Spanish at the request of a Telemundo reporter and called on an Italian reporter he said he recognized from his tenure as a senator. He tried to work the room, lamenting that no one had a name tag on (“Back row, yellow tie!” “In the pink.” “I need to get a laser pointer!” “Right there in the white!”) He was learning, he explained; he was “winging it, guys.”
“They gave me a little map—I don’t know where I put it—of the people here. Some of you had, like, red X’s. I’m kidding. No, that’s not true.” He next tried to call on someone wearing black before multiple people butted in, prompting Rubio to marvel: “This is chaos, guys!”
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He parried questions about Iran and gas prices, trying to reframe the debate. Sure, Iran is pushing gas prices up, he argued, but imagine how little leverage the United States would have if the regime also possessed a nuclear weapon. “A nuclear-armed Iran could do whatever the hell they want with the Straits, and there’s nothing anyone would be able to do about it,” he said. (The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in March that the development of a weapon was not imminent.)
Close listeners would have detected Rubio’s use—perhaps to make the complexities of geopolitical diplomacy and threat of nuclear warfare slightly more digestible—of early-’90s rap lyrics: He said that top officials in the Iranian government were “insane in the brain” (a nod to Cypress Hill’s 1993 hit) and added that “they should check themselves before they wreck themselves” (a paraphrase of Ice Cube’s 1992 song “Check Yo Self”). Toward the end, Rubio said he would take a last question. He pointed to Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News. “Many people want to know: What is your DJ name?” she asked. “My DJ name?” he responded. “You’re not ready for my DJ name.”
About 36 hours after leaving the briefing room, Rubio was preparing to arrive at the Vatican. He was the parishioner with the pontiff, a secretary of state with the head of one of the world’s largest religions, a Florida man connecting with the guy formerly known as Robert Prevost from Chicago, the former football player with the ardent White Sox fan. Perhaps most crucial, Rubio was the conduit between a U.S. president who has become a constant critic of the pope and an American-born pope marking the one-year anniversary of his elevation. For Rubio, it was one of his highest-wire acts of diplomacy yet.
Rubio is a practicing Catholic who regularly attends Mass, but he has an eclectic religious background. For a period after moving to Las Vegas as a child, he converted to Mormonism—immersing himself in its theology, studying church literature, and joining a neighborhood-church-sponsored Cub Scout pack—but after watching a televised papal Mass during Easter Week in 1983, he switched back to Catholicism. His family has regularly attended a megachurch affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, but he has maintained his home in the Catholic Church and written about its deep influence on his life.
Rubio presents a less outspoken version of Catholicism than Vance, who in several weeks is releasing a book on his 2019 Catholic conversion. Vance last month threw an eyebrow-raising brushback pitch to the pope, who had criticized the U.S.-led war in Iran. “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said. Later, after the pope sought to defuse some of the tension, Vance said he was grateful for the pope’s remarks and that “he will be in our prayers, and I hope that we’ll be in his.”
Rubio earlier in the week downplayed the idea that he was on a special mission to smooth things over, saying: “No, I mean, it’s a trip we had planned from before, and obviously we had some stuff that happened.” The White House referred me to the State Department on questions about the president’s hope for the trip, and the roles of Rubio and Vance. “Secretary Rubio decided to go to the Vatican (as is normal for a secretary to do), and no one ‘asked’ or ‘told’ him to,” a State Department official told me, requesting not to be identified to discuss the planning of the trip. Last year Vance led a delegation, which included Rubio, to attend the pope’s inaugural Mass. Vance had also met with Pope Francis a few weeks earlier, a meeting that occurred hours before his death.
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In the lead-up to Rubio’s trip, Trump seemed to make diplomacy as hard as possible. He had called the pope “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” In an interview three days before Rubio was to arrive, Trump said that the pope had been “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.” “He thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” the president toldthe conservative-radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. The remarks were baffling to the Vatican. Outside the papal residence at Castel Gandolfo the next night, Pope Leo spoke with journalists and, reading between the diplo-speak, said Trump should stop mischaracterizing his position. He said it should be clear, through the decades, that the Church has routinely spoken out against nuclear weapons.
No tension was evident in the few images and video footage that emerged from Rubio’s two-and-a-half-hour visit inside the Vatican, where he also met with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, secretary of state of the Holy See. Rubio and Leo posed for a stiff photo: the secretary of state in a blue tie and an American flag pin, the pope in all-white vestments and a silver cross necklace. While acknowledging that the pope is “a baseball guy,” Rubio for some reason presented him with a small crystal football bearing the seal of the State Department.
“What to get someone who has everything?” Rubio asked, even though the pope, famously, gives up all material possessions. The pope presented Rubio with several gifts, including a pen made from the wood of an olive tree. “Olive being, of course,” the pope reminded him, “the plant of peace.”
By yesterday afternoon in Rome, when Rubio addressed reporters for about 20 minutes at the end of his trip, he seemed to grow more defensive about whether any progress had been made. He had updated the pope, he said, on the situation with Iran and how seriously the U.S. takes the nuclear threat. He emphasized his respect for the pope as a spiritual leader and said that, “obviously, the church has always interacted on behalf of a mission for peace and a respect for all of humanity.”
Would he recommend that the president stop criticizing the pope? “Why would I tell you what I’m going to recommend to the president?” Rubio responded. “But beyond that, the president will always speak clearly about how he feels about the U.S. and U.S. policy.”
Did he ask the pope to stop criticizing the Iran war? Rubio refused to say and then made plain that that wasn’t why he was there: “This was a trip that had been planned even before all these things had happened.”
Would there be a phone call between the pope and the president anytime soon? “Um, I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t know. I mean, it could happen.” By the end of the week, it was clear: The same could be said about a 2028 presidential run.
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