A Time magazine cover in February 2013 featured a black-and-white picture of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., staring into the distance with the caption, “The Republican Savior: How Marco Rubio became the new voice of the GOP.” 

It was the kind of cover most politicians would kill for. But it made Rubio bristle.

“There is only one savior, and it is not me. #Jesus,” he posted on Twitter. 

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Rubio as secretary of state is another turning point in the senator’s rise during his quarter-century of public service, which has been marked by a defense of life and religious freedom, an aptitude for navigating complex political environments and a disarmingly open faith journey that saw him leave and return to the Catholic Church twice over. If confirmed, Rubio, who would be the nation’s first Latino secretary of state, will steer the nation through a tumultuous period in world history, one in which hot wars involving American allies and interests have broken out across the globe with another looming in the Asia Pacific.

Known as a rock-ribbed “peace through strength” conservative on foreign policy, Rubio’s aptitude for diplomacy was apparent during the highly publicized ebbs and flows in his public relationship with the president-elect. 

Following the 2016 primary, which saw the two politicians hammer one another with deeply personal attacks, they mended ways largely due to Rubio’s consistent defense of Trump during his first term. Should he be confirmed in the Senate, as he is expected to be, he will hold the most senior position in the cabinet of Trump’s second term. 

According to Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emerita of politics at the University of South Florida, Rubio’s continued ascension is due to his ability to listen to different viewpoints and articulate difficult-to-explain issues to diverse audiences. 

“When he goes before the public, he is very authoritative and convincing,” she told the Register. “And when you look at the thread running through Trump’s appointments, you see people who can speak to the news media and everyday people.”

 

An American Story

Rubio’s parents immigrated to America from Cuba in 1956, two years before Fidel Castro came to power. The Catholic family moved to Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender and his mother as a housekeeper. The family began attending the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints under the influence of one of his aunts. But Rubio, who as a child “played priest” with a makeshift chasuble and exhibited a deep interest in the faith, convinced his family to return to their Catholic roots. He received his first Communion a few years later, just before the family returned to Miami.   

He also convinced his family to enroll him in CCD, and he was eventually married in the Catholic Church in 1998, at the Church of the Little Flower in Coral Gables, Florida. 

That same year, Rubio, fresh out of law school, successfully ran for city commissioner in West Miami. The following year, Rubio won a hotly contested primary race to become the Republican nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. Having campaigned as a moderate by advocating tax cuts and early childhood education —  he was a “limited-government conservative, not a no-government conservative,” a spokesman said during his tenure in the Florida Legislature — Rubio cultivated a reputation as a solid but not a doctrinaire conservative. He was elected to four terms in this role and skyrocketed through leadership, from majority whip to majority leader to becoming Florida’s first Cuban-American House speaker.  

 

Return to His Catholic Roots

During these years of professional achievement, Rubio has said he got “lazy” and “busy” in his spiritual life and that he had neglected his spiritual duty to his family. While Rubio was concentrating on career advancement, his wife began taking their children to an evangelical church called Christ Fellowship. Rubio himself eventually attended Christ Fellowship, even going as far as to call it his “church home.” 

But in the proceeding years, he began to long for a return to his Catholic roots. He wrote of craving the literal Body and Blood of Jesus. He appreciated the preaching of the Gospel that Christ Fellowship offered, but he longed for Holy Communion, which he described at the time as “the sacramental point of contact between the Catholic and the liturgy of heaven.”

In his very last speech at the Florida State House in 2008, Rubio reflected on the relationship between his faith and government.

“God is real,” he declared. “I don’t care what courts around the country say. I don’t care what laws we pass. God is real! You can’t pass a court ruling that is going to keep God out of the building. You just can’t.”

Following a brief stint teaching undergraduate courses in politics at Florida International University, a spiritually recommitted Rubio launched a bid for the U.S. Senate to replace retiring Republican Sen. Mel Martínez. His popularity with the early Tea Party movement helped him wage a successful primary bid against moderate Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, with whom he frequently locked horns during his tenure as House speaker over climate-change legislation, which Rubio described as “European-style big-government mandates.”

During the primary battle between the two, Rubio attacked Crist for being weak on the issue of life after the latter vetoed a bill that would have required women seeking an abortion to undergo and pay for an ultrasound. 

“Not only would this commonsense measure have provided women with vital information as they make a critical decision,” Rubio said at the time, “but now Gov. Crist’s veto also clears the way for taxpayer funding of abortion in Florida.”

Crist ended up challenging Rubio as an independent in the general election, and Rubio carried the contest easily, winning 49% of the vote to Crist’s 30% and Democrat Kendrick Meek’s 20%.  

Rubio gained national notoriety almost immediately. In early 2012, a mere year after taking office, he was vetted by Mitt Romney to become his vice-presidential running mate, a role for which Rubio stated to have no desire. 

 

Foreign-Policy Player

In his first term in the Senate, Rubio distinguished himself as a major foreign-policy player, particularly as a Cuba hawk. He was a staunch defender of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, and he is credited with blocking an ambassadorial nomination for not being assertive enough toward the Castro regime. 

For MacManus, Rubio’s expertise on South America is what drove much of his popularity in Florida.

“Floridians, particularly southern Floridians, love him because he brings knowledge of a continent that has been ignored, and that’s South America,” she said. “We see in the Miami papers that the Iranians and Chinese have bought a lot of property down there. South America has been a concern to Floridians for a long time.” 

Rubio was also outspoken in his support for the 2011 military intervention in Libya that led to the killing of Muammar Gaddafi.  

 

Tussles With Trump

In 2013, Rubio joined with a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” to write a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that was cast by conservatives as an “amnesty bill.” It passed in the Senate by a large majority but was never taken up in the House. 

Rubio’s participation in the “Gang of Eight” bill, along with his declaration before a room of evangelical pastors in Iowa that he was “fully, theologically, doctrinally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church,” was thought to have impaired his chances of winning the 2016 Republican nomination for president. 

But what most remember from his primary bid was his famously low-brow political brawl with Trump. Departing from his signature optimistic oratory, Rubio went after Trump on everything from the size of his hands to the orange hue of his skin. Trump, ever comfortable in a street fight, made fun of Rubio’s propensity to sweat and conferred upon Rubio one of his infamous nicknames: “Little Marco.” 

Rubio won only Minnesota, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. He dropped out of the race after finishing second in his home state, and he later expressed that he wasn’t “entirely proud” of engaging in personal insults. 

But in the following years, Rubio emerged as one of Trump’s most consistent defenders. He praised Trump for his decision to strike Syria in response to the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack, which saw Syrian President Bashar al-Assad use chemical weapons in the nation’s civil war. He also issued support for Trump’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protected immigrants from deportation if they had arrived as children. 

Rubio voted to certify the 2020 election, but also to acquit Trump from his role in the Jan. 6 riot.

The relationship between Trump and Rubio seemed to have been entirely healed when Rubio emerged as one of the finalists to become Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Though Trump ultimately went in a different direction, Rubio emerged as a leading Trump surrogate on the campaign trail and in the media. 

 

Peace Through Strength

The selection of Rubio, who is seen as a tested and effective leader with deep foreign-policy experience, to become the nation’s top diplomat has been widely hailed.

The men share a “peace through strength” vision in which American military incursions are rare but devasting when ordered. Both have showed a willingness to arm Ukraine in its conflict with Russia to the extent it can repel invaders and no more, while promoting negotiations that allow for Russia to remain in control of the Crimea and Donbas regions. 

“We are funding a stalemate,” he recently said of the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine. “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong in standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we are funding here is a stalemate. And it needs to be brought to a conclusion.” 

 Both men have signaled strong support for Israel’s mission to dismantle Hamas. And both have identified Iran as the key threat to stability in the Middle East and emphasized the need to deter Iran from attempting to spread its influence in the region. 

“The source of conflict in the Middle East is not Israel,” Rubio told EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo Nov. 7. “It’s not the Palestinian question. It’s the Ayatollah in Iran. The Islamic Republic, the revolution, they want to be the dominant power in the region. … Iran has to be deterred.”

Rubio will need to be confirmed by a new Senate once new members are sworn in. As it stands, the Republican Party will have 53 senators, and 51 votes are needed to pass. In the event of a 50-50 tie, Vice President-elect JD Vance will cast the deciding vote.