Before he embarked on a round of high-stakes negotiations in Saudi Arabia and Canada this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in some personal diplomacy aimed at shoring up his standing within the Trump administration.
Mr. Rubio flew to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for talks set to begin on Tuesday aimed at prodding Ukraine into a settlement with its invader, Russia. He plans to go from there to Canada for a meeting of top diplomats from the Group of 7 allied nations.
His foreign travel comes after Mr. Rubio asserted himself in a tense confrontation with Elon Musk during a White House cabinet meeting last week and then dined with Mr. Musk and President Trump on Saturday night.
The meal, at Mr. Trump’s Mar a Lago’s resort, amounted to a cease-fire between Mr. Trump’s chief diplomat and the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX mogul, one that extended into friendly social media exchanges between the men over the following days.
To a world scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s personality-driven administration for clues about who has the president’s confidence, and who does not, the events suggested that Mr. Rubio’s standing with Mr. Trump may be stronger than many foreign diplomats and U.S. officials had assumed.
It was a welcome change in narrative for Mr. Rubio, who has faced doubts about his standing from the start. Mr. Trump had ridiculed him as “Little Marco” when the men were 2016 presidential campaign opponents and then stocked his new administration with a slew of special diplomatic envoys whose assignments — the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine and the nebulous “special missions” — left some asking what remained for Mr. Rubio.
Since then, Mr. Rubio has endured criticism for appearing to have surrendered longtime principles on such matters as his backing for robust U.S. foreign aid and his staunch support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.
That perception crystallized when Mr. Rubio went viral on social media earlier this month after the heated Feb. 28 Oval Office argument between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. When a reporter for a pro-Trump media outlet tauntingly asked Mr. Zelensky, clad in his standard military garb, whether he owned a suit, Mr. Rubio’s pained expression and compressed shoulders, and his sunken position in a yellow sofa, made for online memes mocking what the MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough called “a soul-crushing experience for a lifelong Russia hawk.”
And for the second week in a row, Mr. Rubio was lampooned on “Saturday Night Live” as a Trump flunky who endures demeaning treatment and off-the-wall commentary from both the president and Mr. Musk.
While Mr. Musk’s shoot-first style and mass firings of federal workers have frustrated many top Trump officials, most are loath to confront a Trump confidant who happens to be the world’s richest man and the owner of a powerful social media platform.
But as Mr. Musk criticized Mr. Rubio in the Thursday meeting for failing to make deeper cuts at the State Department, Mr. Rubio, a former senator from Florida, defended himself with anger and sarcasm. That earned Mr. Rubio supportive words from Mr. Trump, who said he had done a “great job.”
Saturday’s trilateral dinner seemed a further sign that the president expected Mr. Musk to peacefully coexist with Mr. Rubio — and vice versa.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Musk appeared to shake hands via social media when Mr. Rubio posted on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk, that he had completed a review of contracts at the U.S. Agency for International Development and canceled 83 percent of them for failing to advance “core national interests of the United States.”
Mr. Rubio did not mention his anger that Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had led the ruthless dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., whose work Mr. Rubio has often supported in the past.
“Tough, but necessary,” Mr. Musk replied. “Good working with you.”
A day earlier, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Musk teamed up for an online slap-down of Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of Poland, a crucial NATO ally. Mr. Sikorski accused Mr. Musk of threatening to shut off Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine’s military is highly dependent on.
After Mr. Musk wrote on X that Ukraine’s “entire front line would collapse” if he ended the country’s Starlink access, Mr. Sikorski retorted on Sunday that the tech mogul was “threatening the victim of aggression.”
“Just making things up,” Mr. Rubio responded in a post of his own, adding that Mr. Sikorski should “say thank you” because of the crucial role Starlink has played in supporting Ukraine.
Mr. Musk then jumped in again. “Be quiet, small man,” he wrote in a post aimed at Mr. Sikorski, adding that he had not been threatening Ukraine and “will never” cancel Ukraine’s Starlink contracts however much he disagrees with the country’s policies.
Mr. Rubio’s shot at his Polish counterpart is a departure from the friendly tone he struck when he hosted Mr. Sikorski for a meeting in Washington last month. But it was in keeping with Mr. Rubio’s recent willingness to amplify Mr. Trump’s hostility toward core U.S. allies — including Ukraine, whose president Mr. Rubio has sharply criticized in recent days, echoing Mr. Trump, after years of steadfast support.
Episodes like that have made American diplomats more anxious over Mr. Rubio’s leadership.
And within the department’s headquarters in Washington and in embassies worldwide, the diplomats are also increasingly concerned over internal proposals to cut the State Department’s budget, employee ranks and overseas missions.
To many of them, it is even unclear to what degree Mr. Rubio has authority over his own staffing.
They wondered whether Mr. Rubio exercises control over Pete Marocco, a divisive and aggressive administration appointee in the State Department who, along with Mr. Musk, is leading the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D.
Another senior department appointee, Darren Beattie, the acting assistant secretary for public diplomacy, has a since-deleted record of mocking Mr. Rubio on social media, CNN reported on Monday, including calling him “low IQ” and resurfacing a false homophobic rumor about him. Mr. Beattie was fired from a job in the first Trump administration after public reports emerged of him speaking at a conference with prominent white nationalists.
Last October, Mr. Beattie wrote online: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Mr. Beattie is not the only person working for Mr. Rubio to have once ridiculed him online: Politico found at least seven times that the State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, had done so between 2014 and 2016, when he was a Trump political rival.
Even as Mr. Rubio grapples with politics in the building, he remains a spear tip for many of Mr. Trump’s policies.
Invoking an obscure legal statute, Mr. Rubio ordered the Department of Homeland Security over the weekend to arrest and deport Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student who is a legal U.S. resident. Mr. Khalil helped lead mostly peaceful pro-Palestinian campus protests.
Mr. Rubio wrote online on Sunday that “we will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
Even so, guessing how long Mr. Rubio will last as secretary of state is the subject of a popular Washington parlor game. Few officials in Mr. Trump’s first term with Mr. Rubio’s internationalist worldview and bipartisan support lasted long.
Perhaps notably, Mr. Trump has joked more than once about how many Democrats voted to confirm Mr. Rubio, telling reporters in the Oval Office last month that he was “a little nervous” about it.
Mr. Trump repeated a similar crack during his address to Congress last week. He said that Mr. Rubio “has been amazing” and noted that he had been confirmed unanimously. “And I’m either very, very happy about that,” the president said, “or I’m very concerned about it.”
