Trump’s crony diplomacy is marginalizing Marco Rubio
The image of a secretary of state being kept out of the loop is a familiar one in Washington, but it carries extra weight when the person in the chair is Marco Rubio, someone who spent years in the Senate hammering on about the importance of American leadership abroad. Rubio is now in the awkward position of defending policy that is clearly being shaped elsewhere, often in real time on social media.
I think the real story here is less about Rubio's bruised ego and more about what it tells us about how foreign policy gets made. When diplomacy becomes a series of personal transactions between the president and whoever he happens to be talking to, the institutional memory and expertise of the State Department stops mattering. That can be efficient in the short term, but it also means the signals we send to allies and adversaries are harder to read.
Where I land is somewhere in the middle. There is something to be said for a president who wants to cut through bureaucracy and deal directly. But the trade-off is real, and Rubio's marginalization is a symptom, not the cause. I'd want to know how much of this is deliberate and how much is just the natural chaos of how this White House operates.