Why did the Marco Rubio pick take so long? 

Rubio, Rubio, wherefore art thou Rubio? How Little Marco, as Donald Trump dubbed him in 2016, must have squirmed. It was reported on Monday, with great confidence, that Trump had chosen Rubio as his secretary of state, along with Congressman Mike Waltz as his national security advisor. 

The news came as a relief to national security establishments across the West. There had been grave concerns in the foreign policy world that Trump would choose somebody antithetical to the interests of NATO.

The elevation of Rubio and Waltz also served as further evidence of the growing power of Florida in Trump’s America — Waltz and Rubio are both politicians from the Sunshine State. But Trump being Trump, he delayed the Rubio announcement to combine with the news that Tulsi Gabbard would be director of national intelligence, so that the one might offset the other.

Yesterday, Trump, who’s clearly enjoying using his Truth Social platform as the go-to resource for appointment updates, duly confirmed that he has selected Waltz, a former advisor to vice president Dick Cheney, as his national security advisor. But the “Truth” about Rubio took a while to emerge, with the president-elect waiting until Wednesday afternoon. 

Instead, last night, we had a typically eccentric hire: Trump “truthed” that he would be making Pete Hegseth, a man known mostly as a fairly goofy Fox News host, his next secretary of defense. Hegseth “is a graduate of Princeton University and has a Graduate Degree from Harvard University,” said the official Trump-Vance statement, which is a way of saying Pete is not as stupid as he looks. 

Hegseth is an ardent defender of Israel and that will please the more neoconservative factions making their voices heard this week in Mar-a-Lago — especially with the peacenik former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard in charge of the nation’s intelligence.

But why was Hegseth revealed ahead of Rubio? Trump has now announced most of his national security team without indicating who would get the biggest foreign-policy job. Is something up? 

There were whispers of squabbles breaking out behind the scenes over the secretary of state role. It seems as if Rubio had indeed got the nod on Monday, but the news upset MAGA loyalists, who are not convinced by Marco’s apparent transformation from “New American Century” primacist to America Firster. 

One insider suggested last night that the odds of Rubio becoming America’s next secretary of state were dropping by the second. It’s said that Ric Grenell, one of Trump’s favorite gay men and his former director of intelligence, is leading the pushback, though Grenell fiercely denied that claim on Twitter/X last night.

Yet the longer Trump waited to make the announcement, the more such gossip spread. 

Trump has always tended to use his appointments to play different factions off against each other — and when it comes to national security he has two words in his head, in capitals: PEACE and STRENGTH. He will seek to intimidate America’s adversaries through his appointments — he picked the mustachioed war pervert John Bolton, remember, partly because he looked scary in big meetings — in order to help him be more emollient as commander-in-chief. 

It’s possible that, having driven the more dovish parts of his inner circle barmy with his appointments so far, he was thinking about giving them a treat by dashing Rubio’s hopes once more. Perhaps deep down Trump still loathes Marco, who after all once questioned the size of his manhood on the campaign trail. In July, Donald led Rubio to believe that he might be destined for the vice presidency, only then to give the job to J.D. Vance. He could have been considering royally shafting him again. 

That’s the marvelous thing about the Donald: he always likes to keep things, as he puts it, “nice and complicated.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.