When Marco Rubio and Donald Trump first encountered each other as rivals in the 2016 Republican primary, the contrasts could not have been starker. Trump denounced George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as a disaster, while Rubio defended it with difficulty; the two naturally traded insults. After Rubio’s nomination as Secretary of State in 2024, speculation abounded that he would be a mere placeholder, perhaps serving no longer than his predecessor from Trump’s first term, Rex Tillerson. But the US military raid on 3 January that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife ensures that Rubio will leave a greater mark on the second Trump presidency.

The former Florida senator is, of course, backed by electorally powerful Right-wing Latin American diasporas, including Cuban-American exiles like his own family. This coalition’s influence in creating the conditions for the operation, after months of sabre-rattling in the Caribbean, also testifies to the ideological malleability of the nominally anti-war MAGA movement. But kidnapping Maduro makes complete sense when viewed as an expression of the GOP’s coalitional dynamics.

The Venezuela strike is also unsurprising when considering the mercurial personality of the US President, who has once again been swayed by the potential for image-making over the promise of moral consistency. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Trump was motivated to give the go-ahead for the raid by Maduro’s dancing at rallies, which he saw as mockery. If arresting a foreign dictator makes Trump look good, then why not do it? Rubio’s talent is precisely in working with and through this media-first mindset: he enacts a hawkish agenda while maintaining an understated public style which doesn’t take the spotlight or gratification away from the Commander-in-Chief. As a result, he has so far avoided the mistakes made by other Trump-aligned figures who got too big for their boots.

And so it appears that the neoconservatives, once threatened with oblivion by the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, have found a way to ride the MAGA movement and advance other items on their wish list. That list includes moves on Venezuela’s ally Cuba, as well as Iran. The administration’s rhetoric on either annexing or attacking Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Colombia clearly doesn’t bother traditional neocons. Indeed, the image of Rubio ally Lindsey Graham standing next to Trump yesterday on Air Force One, reinforcing each other’s bellicose words, attests to this cohabitation.

Yet it is worth remembering that MAGA prefers the spectacle of war to the actual substance, thus placing limits on the neoconservative project under Trump 2.0. The Maduro raid was exactly the kind of high-visibility, low-stakes, cut-and-run type operation that Trump favours and which he also executed in last year’s Iran bombing. In other words, it may look like regime change, but it hasn’t actually shifted the overall composition of power in Caracas.

Now, Venezuela is Rubio’s problem. He has the impossible task of managing sky-high expectations around rebuilding infrastructure, extracting oil, and “running” the country in line with US interests, but without having any real governing structures in place. Under threat of further escalation, Venezuela’s new leader has pledged to cooperate. But the moment this improvised playbook starts to show cracks — for example through acts of sabotage or corruption which infringe on deals with US oil firms — Rubio will take the blame as the fall guy. It’s a role he’s already playing. The Secretary looked flustered on the Sunday news shows as he struggled to explain what happens next. If things go south, with Venezuelan tankers already defying a US naval blockade, he could meet the same fate as the Boltons and Bannons who were discarded when they were no longer useful.

As to who could replace him, Trump would likely opt for someone like Ric Grenell, who almost got the job at the end of 2024. Unlike Rubio, Grenell is a genuine MAGA man, a brash ex-ambassador and bomb thrower, albeit only in the rhetorical sense. The irony is that for all their claims to seriousness and the pieties of statesmanship, old-line neocons like Rubio have always been the actual bomb throwers, pushing for escalation as the default response to the world’s problems. MAGA’s mistake is in giving the hawks the benefit of the doubt and, in the process, becoming too much like them.

---

Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Senior Editor at American Affairs.

1TrueCuencoism

---