The incredible further shrinking of Little Marco

Let us dispel with the fiction that Marco Rubio knows what he’s doing. He has no idea what he’s doing:

Perhaps nothing personified the old-guard foreign policy reaction to the Friday meeting more than the image of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, sitting on the sofa next to a grinning Vance. The tableau instantly became the stuff of memes, body-language expert reactions, and Saturday Night Live cold opens. (Trump, played by James Austin Johnson, looked at Marcello Hernández playing his top diplomat and quipped: “Man, look at Rubio over there, fully dissociating.”)

While Rubio was quick to get in line in the days after the Zelenskyy showdown, the historic confrontation did indeed reveal a fault line inside the administration: Rubio is privately frustrated that Trump has effectively sidelined him. According to four prominent Republicans close to the White House, Rubio, who has been a Russia hawk and Ukraine supporter, has told people he is upset by his lack of foreign policy influence despite being, on paper at least, the administration’s top diplomat. One of the sources said they felt as though Rubio is often the last to know when foreign policy decisions are made in the White House.

According to Republicans I spoke with, Rubio’s unhappiness with Trump was brewing before Zelenskyy’s visit went sideways. Two of the sources said Rubio was caught off guard when Trump appointed nine foreign policy “envoys” with high-profile assignments such as ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Not that I had any respect for Rubio before, but how the Christ in 2025 could a recent United States senator think that he could somehow manipulate his way into influencing Trump? No matter how many times this exact scenario plays out the erstwhile Republican establishment just keeps coming back for more. Which is one clue explaining how Trump was able to clear the field so easily in 2016.