You broke my heart, Marco.
I’m talking, of course, about Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whose transformation from eloquent and inspiring conservative to Donald Trump stan is now utterly complete.
In 2016, Rubio was the hope of conservatives looking for an optimistic, youthful (daresay Kennedyesque) contrast to Hillary Clinton. But something happened on the way to Camelot; Donald Trump, a grifter Rubio correctly identified as a “con artist,” humiliated “Little Marco,” and Rubio hasn’t been the same since.
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Examples abound, including Rubio cheering on the roadway harassment of Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign bus in Texas and Rubio voting against convicting Trump at his second impeachment trial in 2021, after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Indeed, things have only worsened since then.
But Rubio may have reached a new low this week, when he defended Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, while dismissing the indictment as “political in nature.”
Keep in mind that Rubio is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and that in 2016, Rubio cautioned that America could not give “the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual.” Also keep in mind that the classified documents Trump mishandled reportedly include information on nuclear weapons.
Fine, you might say. But hasn’t almost every Republican, in some way or another, disappointed us by bending the knee to Trump?
The difference is that I sincerely believed Rubio was a once-in-a-generation leader who could do great things.
Mind you, I’m an opinion columnist, not a straight news reporter. In this capacity, being transparent about one’s rooting interests is a virtue, not a vice. And from 2010-2016, I was utterly transparent about supporting Marco Rubio.
As far back as 2010, I was singing Rubio’s praises, even making the wildly premature argument that he should run for president in 2012. That same year, I defended Rubio from an unfair Reuters piece, which resulted in multiple retractions being issued.
In 2013, I declared him “the future of the Republican Party.” I also applauded him for having the courage to tackle immigration reform, even as I warned that the issue was politically perilous.
In 2015, I once again incorrectly predicted he would be president, this time in 2016. “Watch out, Hillary,” I declared. “Come January 2017, America won't be inaugurating its first female president. We’ll be inaugurating our first Latino commander-in-chief.” I could go on, but I’ll spare you (and me) from the rest.
In hindsight, I broke the cardinal rule of cynical, ink-stained wretches who are supposed to be in the business of afflicting the powerful, and that is to never forget that “these people are not your friends; these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories…”
My big regret isn’t that I misread the Republican electorate in 2016. When you write three columns a week, you’re going to blow some political predictions—sometimes in an overtly embarrassing fashion. What bothers me most, though, is that I was cheering on someone who was so personally flawed that—like Trump—he probably shouldn’t have access to the nuclear codes.
This only became clear to me after 2016. After being forced out of the presidential race, Rubio might have played his cards differently. Perhaps he could have found a palatable way to embrace or address the GOP’s obvious populist trend, without completely abandoning his principles. Instead, he became a Donald Trump cheerleader.
Of course, I was a cheerleader, too—just for a different politician. I should have looked past the superficial charm of Rubio’s image and rhetoric. I should have probed for indications that he was the kind of person who would abandon so many of his past beliefs, ostensibly for the sake of ambition.
This experience has made me reevaluate the way I write about politicians, and has reinforced the sense that a columnist’s default setting should be to err toward detached skepticism.
I don’t want to become too cynical, but the truth is that I have rarely regretted writing a hard-hitting, or even snarky column about an elected official. On the contrary, my biggest regrets have been the times I have been guilty of naively hyping a political figure, so to speak.
In his eponymous memoir, Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger recounted that he instructed Reagan supporters to be aggressive when trying to wrangle delegates at the 1976 Republican convention. When “an old-line Reaganite from San Mateo, called out, ‘What should our demeanor be?’” Nofziger famously quipped: “Da meaner da better.”
It’s great advice for a political insurgent—but I’ve come to learn that it’s just as apropos for a political columnist.
