Marco Rubio is dreaming of a kinder, gentler MAGA

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been having a moment — the kind that makes people wonder if he might be a candidate for president sooner than later. On Tuesday, he took over press secretary duties while Karoline Leavitt was on maternity leave and fielded questions for more than 45 minutes, happily trading rap lyrics with reporters along the way. On Wednesday, his staff clipped one of his exchanges into a campaign-style video over soaring music. On Thursday, he met Pope Leo in the Vatican, exchanging gifts and kind words even though the president and vice president have feuded with the world’s most prominent religious leader. More broadly, his popularity among the MAGA faithful is rising, it seems, as President Donald Trump’s presumed successor, Vice President JD Vance, sees his fall (at least a bit). The betting markets are suddenly bullish on Rubio as a potential 2028 nominee. - Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in the spotlight recently. - His star has been rising, aided in part by a viral clip of an answer he gave to a journalist in which he calls back to his 2016-era presidential platform. - The clip features Trump prominently, and raises the question: Is this what a post-Trump, Rubio-led MAGA could look like? It’s not surprising he’d get a moment in the sun; secretaries of state are often among the more popular and attention-getting Cabinet members historically. He wouldn’t be the first to see their stock rise while memes spread about their hard work around the globe. He’s been careful not to make too much of it, tamping down presidential speculation. But the way Rubio has gone about his role also raises some pressing questions about the party’s long-term future. It’s starting to look like he might want a say in mapping out what a post-Trump GOP world looks like, one that perhaps steers away from a harsher, more nationalistic version of the MAGA party. Whether that’s possible 10 years into the Trump era is an open question. One particular answer during his press conference stood out in this regard. In response to a softball about his “hope for America,” Rubio articulated a vision of the American dream that seemed to paper over the last decade of Trump-era politics and felt like a time jump back to his 2016 presidential campaign. “My hope for America is what it’s always been,” he said. “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, but frankly, it’s a place where you are able to overcome challenges and achieve your full potential.” This was no rehashing of anti-woke/DEI diatribes, of pseudo-white nationalist demands about speaking English and tracing ancestry, or any of the familiar doom-and-gloom lines you might hear in a classic MAGA speech or from Trump’s familiar cast of characters. Instead, it sounded something like the pre-Trump GOP, of a time when Rubio argued the Republican Party could usher in “a new American century,” centered around active world involvement, free markets, and younger leadership. It’s that old Reaganesque ideal, championed by candidates of both parties, of America as an idea: a nation united by principles of liberty, equality, and opportunity. And he always rooted these appeals to greatness in his own family’s immigrant heritage. Rubio’s staff, it seems, noticed how well this answer was received, and clipped a minute-long video of it for both the secretary’s official and personal social media accounts. Its most notable feature: It overlaid his remarks with images of Trump. In doing so, the clip wasn’t just a preview of what a Rubio 2028 campaign might look like, but also a crystal-ball picture of how he might try to merge Trump’s MAGA aesthetics with a pre-Trump message, and then sell it as the party’s logical next step. Let’s put aside the question of whether Rubio, who has insisted he’s not running and is reportedly close to Vance, might have a chance in a primary against the vice president. The minute-long clip is one of the best signals we’ve had as to Rubio’s vision of conservatism, a question that’s not easy to answer 10 years into his transformation from principled Trump critic to irrepleaceable ally. And it raises the possibility that the battle to define MAGA in 2028 and beyond may be more varied and competitive than it seems right now. Instead of the “carnage” and destruction that Trump campaigned on, he revived an old GOP version of American exceptionalism and of what the American dream is: The US — we’re not perfect. Our history is not one of perfection, but it’s still better than anybody else’s history. And ours is a story of perpetual improvement. Each generation has left the next generation of Americans freer, more prosperous, safer, and that is our goal as well. But it is a unique and exceptional country, and as we come upon this 250-year anniversary I think we have a lot to learn and be proud of in our history. It is one of perpetual and continuous improvement where each generation has done its part to bring us closer to fulfilling the vision that the founders of this country had upon its founding. “This was the healthy vision that I supported Marco Rubio on in 2016,” longtime California GOP adviser Mike Madrid, and a prominent Trump critic, told me. “This was the positive, aspirational big-tent Republican that I supported. He not only failed miserably; he capitulated and stuck a knife in that by becoming a Trumper. So to see him trying to resuscitate it is fascinating.” And this message stands in contrast to the vision frequently advanced by Vance and his post-liberal wing of the GOP. In Vance’s telling, America isn’t an idea: It’s “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” as he said at the Republican National Convention in 2024. His corner of the party tends to take a more pessimistic view of legal immigration as well as illegal immigration; advocates celebrate “heritage Americans” with deep family roots as the nation’s foundational story, rather than the “melting pot” of aspiring immigrants each new generation has incorporated. That distinction also reflects a difference between Rubio and the other folks in Trump’s sphere: His ability to be seen as an “adult in the room,” not as tarnished as his peers are with the Trump administration’s messiest policies (even as he oversees foreign policy during an unpopular war), not as “online” as everyone else, and more decent and measured in how he conducts his work. Vance is better known for both his “attack dog” role and nonstop posting (though he reportedly gave up social media for Lent this year). “He understands that the loudest voices on social media operate on a very different set of incentives than the country itself does. Their work is engagement; his is governing,” Giancarlo Sopo, a Florida-based Republican strategist, told me. “You get that kind of trust by speaking to the country as it actually is, a large, pluralistic society made up overwhelmingly of decent people who want their kids to have a better life than they did. That is the country he addressed, and that is why his words resonated the way they did.” That, at least, is also what some Republican voters are starting to communicate to pollsters and researchers: He’s a “real statesman” one Floridian told GOP consultant Sarah Longwell last month, while a Biden-Trump voter called him “genuine.” Though it’s still early (maybe too early) we may be seeing the next stage of the life cycle of MAGA and Rubio’s parallel evolutions: from the GOP’s brief attempt to pivot to openness and inclusion after their 2012 collapse, to Rubio’s eventual loss and conversion to Trumpism in 2016, to his rise to Trump’s good graces in 2024 to a MAGA-lite platform in 2028. Madrid and Sopo agree that anything is possible — Trump showed that — but disagreed on whether Rubio could create a gentler MAGA while reviving the…