Marco Rubio Delivers First Speech of the 2028 Presidential Race
Marco Rubio delivered the first speech of the 2028 presidential campaign where none of his votes come from but from where all of our votes come.
“The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity,” he said in front of the Acropolis. “Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born — Philadelphia — is itself a Greek name. The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours.”
And those who hate what came out of Philadelphia obsess over a project to unmoor it from that heritage — i.e., to essentially repeal Western Civilization. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic … to, well, Brownsville on the Gulf of America, this the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house assault on Western Civilization acts as the umbrella issue of our times.
In 2016, Rubio looked like a College Republican who borrowed his father’s suit. A decade later, he looks like the adult in the room. The speech showcased gravitas. This man, it announced without announcing, is no longer twerp but force. It, unlike every other speech delivered by a presidential aspirant this year, noted that The Federalist papers cited Plutarch more than any other author and discussed thumos, an idea ruminated upon by Plato, Miguel de Cervantes, and C.S. Lewis but not Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Pete Buttigieg.
“The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it — the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride — is the heart of great civilization,” the secretary of state told the small audience. “And without it? Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.”
The speech receives an A+ grade. It contained the perfect script delivered perfectly by the performer before the perfect setting of the Acropolis with the perfect (ostensible) theme for the moment (flatter the Greeks and remind alienated Europeans that we hail from the same family of nations). That it contained no overt or subtle digs at potential rivals placed Rubio in a more presidential light. That he sought not to imitate Trump’s imitation of Don Rickles or embrace his extemporaneous style seems very smart in that the president’s Republican successor surely does not become the claimant to the throne by adopting his sui generis style. Temu Trump could become president of the United States of CPAC but not the president of the United States.
Though he jettisoned 47’s style, Rubio imbued the entire address with the substance of MAGA’s winning, America First message.
“Now it has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people,” he told the dignitaries gathered. “And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.”
This passage, and the entire address, worked as a means to shore up a weakness, i.e., that Rubio amounts to an anachronism — an interventionist in the mold of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney in an America First party. The pixelated chattering class’s enthusiasm for him, and the kick-me signs they periodically place on JD Vance’s back, goes quite noticed — and likely increases in ferocity as hawks see the party drift away from them as Iran showcases their foolishness (as Iraq, Somalia, Lebanon, and points beyond did before it). Why do they like him so much if not for the belief that he returns the Republican Party’s foreign policy to that live-action Risk game they so enjoyed playing and watching?
“For 25 centuries … the Parthenon has stood,” Rubio said on Wednesday. “Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.” The built-in obsolescence of empire strikes as a sage warning from Rubio. His success or failure in 2028 depends largely upon whether he can heed it.