Ex-Rubio voter wonders if he can still trust Trump’s newest right-hand man

After returning to the White House on January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump made a point of surrounding himself with ultra-MAGA loyalists — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a traditional pre-MAGA conservative who is wearing multiple hats in the second Trump administration (he also serves as acting national security adviser). And Never Trump conservative Matt K. Lewis expresses his reservations about him in an op-ed for NOTUS.

"Marco Rubio's stock has been rising recently, and it's pretty clear the secretary of state is a leading 2028 presidential candidate," Lewis explains in NOTUS. "That may sound like good news for Never Trump conservatives like me. But actually, it poses something of an existential headache. I voted for Rubio in the 2016 Republican primary. And I seem to recall having written one of those embarrassingly premature 'Marco Rubio for president' columns, circa 2010, for the now-defunct Politics Daily. I've also been an ardent critic of Donald Trump from Day 1. So, the possibility that this sad detour in American politics could end with a President Rubio offers, at least on the surface, a tiny bit of hope…. But then, there's the uncomfortable part."

The "uncomfortable part" with Rubio, according to Lewis, is that he "is one of Trump's top deputies, with all the baggage that entails."

"The image of Rubio sinking into that couch while Trump and JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is permanently etched in my brain," Lewis writes. "It's really a catch-22: Any Republican who remained opposed to Trump has already been purged, which means the only viable Republicans have, to varying degrees, been tainted. Democratic readers are probably shouting, 'Exactly! That's why you should vote blue, no matter who.' In 2026, that seems reasonable. But what about 2028, after Trump is, presumably, no longer on the ballot?"

Lewis recalls that Rubio once expressed "Ronald Reagan's sunny conservatism," but the Never Trumper wonders how Reaganesque the Florida Republican can be after serving in an ultra-MAGA administration.

"Even today, some Democrats worry about the threat posed by Rubio's appeal," Lewis observes. "'If Marco Rubio is the nominee for president,' Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona) recently warned, 'we are in trouble.' Still, it's hard to get past Rubio's complicity in Trump's administration — and the lack of clarity surrounding his motives. Is he still the fundamentally compassionate conservative who believes in the American dream but calculated he could do more good by occasionally nudging Trump in the right direction? Has he transformed into a genuine populist nationalist? Or is he simply a chameleon? Is there even a 'real' Rubio? I don't know the answer, but I do think it matters."