Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. There comes a point in the career of every contemporary Republican politician when they will be forced to do, say, or defend something that is broadly unconscionable. This mandatory inevitable heel turn is the price of conservative political ambition in the Donald Trump era.

In exchange for the right to seek and attain national office in the party that he leads, Trump—in a curdled neofascist parody of the wedding scene from The Godfather—always eventually requires his supplicants to prove their loyalty to him by taking on his vendettas, bigotries, hatreds, and obsessions as their own. What’s more, he prefers that they do it with gusto. For many of the ghoulish lickspittles in Trump’s immediate orbit, this heel turn comes naturally.

The ever-growing MAGA contingent in Congress, most members of Trump’s clown-car Cabinet, the gleeful DOGE vandals, the crypto bros and podcast hustlers who cheer and amplify the president’s every destabilizing move: These people choose to mirror Trump because they sincerely admire Trump. He is as stupid, as petty, as venal, and as incompetent as they are, perhaps even more so—and yet he was still elected president! Twice!

His rise to power illuminates their own, lesser paths. When the truth and reconciliation commissions eventually convene to grapple with the sins and atrocities of the second Trump administration, it will not take them very long to reckon with these cruel, incompetent nincompoops. The Stephen Millers, Tom Homans, Russell Voughts, and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world do and say the things they do and say for fairly obvious reasons: They are ideologues, or bullies, or actual idiots, or some combination of all three.

A decade ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was writing quack screeds against thimerosal and dumping dead bears in Central Park. Now he’s the secretary of Health and Human Services, and all that his change in fortune required was for him to recommit to a heel turn that he had already willingly taken long ago. These people’s motivations for dismantling America are easily understood, if not easily excused; history’s judgments on them, in turn, will be easily, brutally rendered.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But what will history have to say, then, about someone like Marco Rubio, the former senator from Florida now serving as Trump’s secretary of state? During his two terms and change in the Senate, Rubio built a reputation as one of the more normal members of the GOP conference, relatively speaking. Neither a malicious nerd like Ted Cruz nor a lummox like Tommy Tuberville, Rubio is a former Jeb Bush protégé who drew (glib) Obama comparisons during his initial rise to power.

Though he was and is authentically conservative, he is not the sort who comes to Washington with the sole intention of burning it down. (Burning down Washington takes effort, and Rubio has long been described by informed observers as pretty lazy.) In an alternate timeline, one could just as easily imagine a President Mitt Romney tapping Rubio for some Cabinet position; one could not say the same thing about Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr. Advertisement In his three months as secretary of state, though, Rubio has shown himself more than willing to play the heel.

Pressed into defending Trump’s haphazard and abhorrent deportation actions, Rubio has done so with zeal, touting the U.S.’s relationship with El Salvador as “an example for security and prosperity in our hemisphere.” He has gleefully championed the administration’s power to snatch people who have green cards or are on legal student visas even while he admitted they committed no crimes. Last week, taking his cues from Trump, Rubio announced that the ongoing war in Ukraine was “not our war,” and that the U.S. might “need to move on” if a peace deal doesn’t materialize soon. Advertisement On Tuesday, claiming that a “radical political ideology” pervades the agency he now leads, Rubio revealed sweeping cuts at the State Department, including the dismantlement of the Office of the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.

In a Substack post that reads like it was written by an A.I. trained exclusively on Mark Levin transcripts, Rubio blasted the department’s now-closed Global Engagement Center, which dealt with global propaganda and disinformation, for daring to suggest in 2019 that then-President Trump was using “the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians,” among other transparently obsequious attacks. Advertisement Advertisement Rubio’s life story is an inspiring one: It shows that even someone who comes from nothing can grow up to wield great power very poorly.

When Trump nominated Rubio to lead the State Department, the choice felt like a welcome break in the parade of unqualified dipshits marching out from their moral sub-basements into Congress for their confirmation hearings. And yet, for an allegedly normal politician, Rubio has not hesitated to implement and defend Trump’s unhinged policies—and he seems to be enjoying himself doing it. The requisite Trumpist heel turn has come easily to Rubio, which in turn raises a series of questions: Is the former senator simply adapting himself to meet the needs of this vicious political moment—or has the moment revealed who Marco Rubio was all along?

Advertisement Advertisement Rubio’s life story is an inspiring one: It shows that even someone who comes from nothing can grow up to wield great power very poorly. Born in Miami in 1971 to Cuban immigrants who came to America in the final years of the Batista regime—Rubio used to say that his parents were Castro exiles until a Washington Post investigation made it pretty clear that the story was not true—Rubio moved around as a kid and grew up in modest circumstances. He did poorly in high school; briefly played football at Tarkio College in Missouri, a school that no longer exists (“I remember him suiting up for the team picture, but that is about it,” a former teammate told Salon in 2016); and returned to Florida with political ambitions, a relatable personal story, and very little sense of shame.

Advertisement Rubio enrolled in law school at the University of Miami and got busy networking. His youth, eloquence, and enthusiasm brought him a series of political mentors, whom he ran through like oxygen canisters. In an excellent Tampa Bay Times profile from 2016, one of those discarded mentors, Raul Martinez, the former Democratic mayor of Hialeah, observed that Rubio “would sell out his soul to reach his objective.” In America, you can grow up to be whatever you want to be, as long as you are willing to suck up and stab quickly.

Advertisement Advertisement Rubio’s initial objective was a seat on the West Miami City Commission, which he won in 1998. Two years later, he was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, where he served four consecutive terms and eventually became that body’s speaker. In the Florida House, Rubio did not distinguish himself as a particularly active legislator, although he did once catch a pass from Dan Marino on the House floor.

The Tampa Bay Times profile noted that the Florida Senate and the state’s then-governor considered Rubio to be “a showman with little substance.” Glowing political careers have been built on less, and Rubio’s ambitions were not limited to Tallahassee. Advertisement In 2010, two years after being termed out of the Florida House, Rubio challenged sitting governor Charlie Crist in that year’s Republican Senate primary. At this point in time, believe it or not, Florida was still a purple state; it had gone for Barack Obama in 2008 (and would again in 2012), and its other senator was an amiable Democrat and former astronaut named Bill Nelson.

Crist had already staked out the moderate lane in the 2010 Senate primary—12 years later, he would wage an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign, as a Democrat, against Ron DeSantis—which meant that, given the governor’s financial advantage and superior statewide name recognition, Rubio’s only path was to portray himself as a different kind of Republican. Advertisement Advertisement And so he decided to run as, effectively, Tea Party Obama, marrying the conservative persona he had cultivated as speaker of the Florida House with his compelling only-in-America personal narrative. It was a smart choice: Rubio tapped into the undercurrents of anger that would soon come to wholly subsume Florida politics, while also appealing to those in the Republican establishment who felt that the best way to counter Obama’s broad appeal was for the right to field its own allegedly transformative candidates, albeit ones who were stupider and less accomplished than the original model.

In September 2009, Rubio made the cover of National Review, alongside the blindingly obvious cover line “Yes, HE CAN.” Advertisement Advertisement In January 2010, the New York Times Magazine ran a long Mark Leibovich piece on the Florida Republican Senate primary under the headline “The First Senator From the Tea Party?” In the piece, Leibovich presaged the future of national G.O.P. politics: “If Rubio defeats Crist on Aug. 24, conservatives will see the victory as a signal that Republicans should not compromise to try to appeal to moderates,” he wrote. Conservatives didn’t even have to wait that long: Crist dropped out of the race in April 2010 to run as an independent, and Rubio cruised to victory in both the Republican primary and the general election.

Advertisement His time in the U.S. Senate was not particularly active or distinguished. “A lightweight senator with the worst voting record in Senate. Lazy!” was how then-candidate Donald Trump characterized Rubio in a 2015 Twitter post.

In his first term he worked with senators from both parties on an immigration reform bill, which irritated his Tea Party constituents; then he got flustered and backed away from the bill, which irritated his colleagues. When he got pantsed by Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, he contemplated returning to private life. But he eventually reversed course—”Mr.

Rubio worried about a diminished profile if he faded from national politics into a career of paid speechmaking,” the New York Times reported—and decided to run for a second Senate term. Speaking to the Tampa Bay Times in June 2016, Rubio called a potential Trump presidency “worrisome” and noted that many of Trump’s public statements “especially about women and minorities are things that I find not just offensive but unacceptable.” He promised that his presence in Washington would be a bulwark against the “excesses of a president.” Advertisement It wasn’t, of course. If Rubio’s Senate career has been a bulwark against anything, it’s been a bulwark against the prospect of Marco Rubio having to go get a real job.

He easily won a third Senate term in 2022, and there he likely would have stayed, biding his time until the 2028 presidential primaries, until Trump tapped him to head the State Department. “Secretary of State” arguably trumps “Senator” in the presidential-prospects hierarchy, which is surely one major reason why Rubio took the job. And in the job, predictably, he has worked to please his boss by asserting positions and implementing policies seemingly at odds with many of the values he espoused while in the Senate.

Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement So it goes. Rubio is a professional politician, who is good at attaining office, and I mean that in an explanatory way. Like Lindsey Graham, of whom he reminds me quite a bit, he has consistently gotten elected by attaching himself to whoever in his immediate orbit has the most electoral heat, and by saying whatever he needs to say in order to thrive in whatever political moment he finds himself in.

He has relatively few ideas of his own—as Alan Greenblatt recalled in Governing, after becoming the speaker of the Florida House, Rubio “presented his colleagues with a book called 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future. The book was blank”—and stands for little except his own survival and advancement. If the tenor of our times requires him to vanish immigrants, buddy up with Nayib Bukele, sacrifice Ukraine to the Russians, and sign his name to rage-flecked Substack articles equating the promotion of human rights with “wokeism,” then he will do it without thinking twice—just like he would’ve stood for tolerance and internationalism if the GOP had gone in a different direction in 2016.

Advertisement There is a certain cracked integrity to the hard-line Trumpist wackadoos like Russ Vought and Stephen Miller. They are running America into the ground because they seem truly to believe that destroying the government and persecuting migrants is the best way to make America great again. While they are very, very wrong about those things, they have not come to those conclusions opportunistically.

They are maniacs, perhaps, but at least they are authentic ones. Advertisement Rubio seems to believe in little except his own political career, and this cynicism is what ultimately makes him worse than the bellowing ideologues in his Republican cohort. There is little evidence to suggest that Rubio has long harbored some secret resentment of the “deep state” at the State Department, or that he actually believes that disappearing putative gang members to some ghastly Salvadoran gulag actually strengthens American prosperity and security.

There is every reason to think that he is mostly just saying these things because that’s what it takes to be secretary of state in the second Trump administration. In politics, sometimes you have to go along to get along. Advertisement But where does Marco Rubio think he’s getting along to?

Being a politician is Rubio’s job, and it is basically the only job he’s ever had. Like most people who have jobs, Rubio wants to keep his job, and to advance within it—perhaps, one day, all the way to the presidency. And yet every bit of data that can be gleaned from the last 12 years’ worth of G.O.P.

presidential primaries suggests that he’ll probably never get there. The MAGA faithful are actually pretty good at distinguishing between the true heels and the mere opportunists, and it is legitimately sort of sad to see Rubio choose to debase himself in vain pursuit of an office he will almost assuredly never hold. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement If this country collapses beyond recovery over the course of the next four years, it won’t be the fault of the true heels like Kennedy or Miller or even Trump himself.

The heels are harebrained at heart, and you cannot really expect them to be anything other than what they are. Instead, the demise of the American experiment will come down to all the political opportunists out there—the smiling coprophagic cynics like Rubio who have consistently chosen to “yes, and” the heels in order to protect their own cheap electoral ambitions. Devoid of moral courage, devoted exclusively to their own Darwinian political survival, Rubio and the rest presumably know better, even as they actively choose to do worse.

History will revile them.