Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been thrown into two top national security jobs at once as President Donald Trump presses forward with his top-to-bottom revamp of U.S. foreign policy.
Trump’s appointment of Rubio to temporarily replace Mike Waltz as national security adviser is the first major leadership shake-up of the administration, but Waltz’s removal had been rumored for weeks — ever since he created a Signal group chat and accidentally added a journalist to the conversation where top national security officials discussed an attack on Houthi rebels.
So, just over 100 days into his tenure as America’s top diplomat, Rubio now becomes just the second person to hold both positions. He follows only the late Henry Kissinger, who served as both secretary of state and national security adviser for two years under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1970s.
Rubio — a one-time Trump rival during the 2016 presidential campaign — has proven adept at aligning himself with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy positions.
Rubio leads during Trump’s massive changes.
Since being confirmed in a 99-0 Senate floor vote, Rubio has presided over a radical reorganization of the State Department. That includes the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and closing or consolidating more than 100 bureaus worldwide. He has also begun a major cull of the visa system.
He has overseen the negotiation of agreements to send immigrants criminal illegal aliens out of the country, most notably to El Salvador, in cases that are now being challenged in federal courts.
“Marco Rubio, unbelievable,” Trump said Thursday before announcing on social media that Waltz would be nominated as ambassador to the United Nations and Rubio would take over as national security adviser in the interim. “When I have a problem, I call up Marco, he gets it solved.”
Appearing Thursday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Rubio was not asked to weigh in on the president’s decision to tap him as national security adviser but did joke that he was barred from adding pope to his list of many jobs because he is married.
But as he marked the first 100 days of Trump’s latest term, Rubio applauded the president for his vision.
“I am honored by the trust President Trump placed in me, and I am proud of the work the Department of State has done over the past 100 days to implement his agenda and put the American people first,” he wrote Wednesday in a State Department Substack post.
One of Rubio’s former Florida statehouse colleagues, Dan Gelber, a Democrat, said of Rubio’s increasing responsibilities that “Marco is probably, to a certain extent, one of the more reliable Cabinet officers, if not the most reliable.”
Rubio’s dual-hatted role comes on top of him serving as acting administrator of the largely shut down USAID and as acting head of the National Archives. It puts him in a similar position to that of Steve Witkoff.
As a special envoy, Witkoff is the lead U.S. negotiator in the Iran nuclear talks and in administration peace efforts for the Israel-Hamas war and the Ukraine-Russia war.
In many ways, Rubio and Witkoff are following in the footsteps of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had multiple roles in the first administration, ranging from the Middle East to Latin America and immigration.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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