Rubio for president in 2028

OPINION:

In the wake of the remarkable success of the joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, it’s clear whom President Trump has chosen as his explainer in chief.

“What they are trying to do, and have been trying to do for a very long time, is build a conventional weapons capability as a shield” for the nuclear program, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the media after his briefing to Congress.

Mr. Rubio crystallized the administration’s argument. The nuclear, ballistic, drone and naval programs, as well as the surrogate terrorist armies (Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis), are all an inextricable part of an overall program by the Nazi-like Iranian regime to threaten and attack the West.

All parts of this program must and can be dismantled through aerial strikes and without committing U.S. troops, he explained. In the meantime, the door would finally be open for 90% of the Iranian people to reclaim self-determination from the fascist ayatollahs.

This is not the first time Mr. Trump has apparently handed the baton to Mr. Rubio.

“People like you,” the president said during his State of the Union last month, addressing Mr. Rubio. “You have done a great job, great secretary of state. I think [you]’ll go down as the best ever.”

Of course, this all followed Mr. Rubio’s triumphant speech in Munich in February. Vice President J.D. Vance’s less-than-successful remarks at the same conference a year earlier had landed like a thud.

What the president seems to be sensing is what nearly every Democrat now knows: Marco Rubio could be the Democrats’ worst nightmare.

Where Mr. Vance appeals to a much narrower ambit of the MAGA movement — the more revanchist, dour scolds that flirt with the ethnonationalists such as Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson in a smaller politics of resentment — Mr. Rubio is now showing an almost Ronald Reagan-like sunny appeal. It’s garnering praise from both the Republican stronghold and the critical swing centers, and even the Neville Chamberlain-like naifs in the European Union.

Our goals in Iran can be achieved “without ground forces,” he said, shutting down the preternatural naysayer liberals in the mainstream news media who seemed flummoxed as to where to poke next.

Mr. Rubio’s valedictorian speech in Munich was universally praised by both the MAGA base and the target of these remarks: the preening EU elites who seek to appease the haters of the West and the Western values that have uplifted humanity more than any other civilization in history.

Europe is confusing the naive empathy of a woke college sophomore with the abdication of responsibility for its civilization, Mr. Rubio argued in Munich.

“Controlling who and how many people enter our countries — this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty. And the failure to [control who enters] is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people,” he told the EU leadership, whose stone faces melted into nodding approval as his words seemed to manifest an undeniable common sense.

So what is Mr. Trump’s calculation in giving Mr. Rubio the mic? The president seems to recognize that Mr. Rubio outclasses the liberal left media and political voices arguing that the commander in chief’s actions are illegal and incoherent.

Iran has been committing acts of war against the West for decades, even as the Obama administration and appeasing EU leaders showered the regime with cash. Presidents Obama and Biden dropped thousands of bombs without congressional authorization — and without a peep from Democrats.

Mr. Rubio makes these points with warmth and aplomb. Critics on the left seem reluctant to challenge his big-picture explanations or his command of detail. The weather-vane politicians in the EU, such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who initially criticized the strikes as an apparent attempt to pander to the hard left, now seem to fall in line with Mr. Trump.

All this makes Democrats and liberals nervous.

The Democrats fret that Mr. Rubio is Bill Clinton’s triangulation all over again, only on the right. He can appeal to 70% of the electorate: the MAGA base that rejects wokeism and the commonsense center that rejects both the woke left and woke right, with all its ethnocentrism and antisemitism.

If he launches a 2028 presidential campaign, Mr. Rubio will most likely take the lion’s share of the Hispanic vote, the pivotal voter demographic that has been slipping from Republicans over the past year and could be the shot-caller base in 2028.

Mr. Rubio’s universally recognized warmth, oratory talent and desire to call us all to a common purpose — a reprise of Reagan’s “conservative internationalism” framework — may just be the magic Republicans need to counter the effete left.

• Julian Epstein is a former chief Democratic counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and former staff director of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.