President-elect Donald Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as his nominee for secretary of state on Wednesday, setting up a onetime critic who evolved into one of the president-elect’s fiercest defenders to become the nation’s top diplomat.
The conservative lawmaker is a noted hawk on China, Cuba and Iran, and was a finalist to be Trump’s running mate this summer.
Rubio, the vice-ranking Republican member of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a senior member of the Committee on Foreign Relations, has years of foreign policy experience.
He has built a name for himself as a proponent of a more hardline approach to U.S. foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Cuba.
The 53-year-old senator from Florida would be the first Latino U.S. diplomat. Hispanic voters, who have historically swung Democrat, made up a key voting bloc this cycle that helped secure Trump’s victory, a gain that the president-elect could further fortify by putting a Cuban American in one of the top positions of the Trump administration.
Trump’s second term will face a precarious world with ongoing wars in both Ukraine and the Middle East, along with a far more aggressive Chinese communist regime.
In the Senate, Rubio has been a vocal critic of Beijing and has said that countering the Chinese regime is a top priority.
In 2019, he sounded the alarm over the acquisition of Musical.ly by Chinese social media app TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, leading to a federal national security review.
Rubio, a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China since 2015, has been on Beijing’s blacklist for his human rights advocacy since 2020.
He has recently proposed legislation requiring U.S. lobbyists to choose between representing American interests and those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has flagged Chinese battery companies with the Department of Homeland Security over human rights concerns. In late July, he introduced the Senate version of the Falun Gong Protection Act—which passed the House a month earlier—to combat Beijing’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting targeting the persecuted faith group.
Amid growing tensions around CCP aggression toward Taiwan, Rubio said in July that he expects that U.S. support for the democratic island will continue.
“I don’t have any worries about the U.S. being supportive of Taiwan and doing everything we can to discourage the Chinese from invading,” he told reporters in Milwaukee.
On Ukraine, Rubio said last week that he believes that the United States is “funding a stalemate that’s costing lives” and called for the war to be brought to a close.
He would likely face little opposition from a Republican-controlled Senate.
Under Florida law, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has the power to select Rubio’s successor to hold his seat until the next general election.
Rubio’s Democratic colleague Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) has already given his endorsement.
“Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own,” he wrote on social media platform X. “That being said, my colleague @SenMarcoRubio is a strong choice and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.”
Eva Fu and The Associated Press contributed to this report.