The Curious Buzz Around Marco Rubio

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one. Lately, The New York Times noted this weekend, this has played out as Trump informally polling friends and advisers on who would be a better Republican presidential nominee in the next election: J. D. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio.Making predictions about how voters will feel by the 2028 election is futile, but for a long time, the front-runner seemed to have been decided within the administration. “If J. D. Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair last year. Prominent outside activists such as Erika Kirk have also thrown their lot in with Vance.Now Rubio appears to be gaining some momentum. The secretary of state (who is also Trump’s national security adviser) is suddenly everywhere, whether ringside with Trump at UFC fights, deskside in the pope’s Vatican office, or perched behind the lectern in the White House briefing room. As my colleague Matt Viser wrote last week, Rubio—who often seemed glum early in the administration—now looks to be having the time of his life. Pollster Sarah Longwell also reported in The Atlantic last month that MAGA voters in the focus groups she runs are expressing new interest in Rubio.This does not seem like an obvious moment for everything to be coming up Marco. Rubio is the president’s top adviser on both national security and diplomacy at a moment when the United States has blundered into an unpopular war that appears to be a strategic catastrophe. The U.S. government can’t or won’t define its goals and has no path to achieving them even if it does; in the meantime, gas price