Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks during a Trump rally on November 4, 2024. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

By Jacob Kornbluh
November 11, 2024

Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is expected to be nominated as secretary of state in a second Trump administration, the New York Times reported Monday evening.

Rubio, who challenged Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, joined him on the campaign trail to help boost Trump’s appeal to Hispanic voters during the final weeks of the presidential election.

Earlier on Monday, Trump announced that another Florida representative, Congressman Mike Waltz, will serve as his national security adviser.

What a Rubio nomination would mean for Israel

Rubio ran for president in 2016 as a foreign policy hawk. He criticized Trump for promising to be “neutral” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, in recent years he has moderated his positions, making him more in line with Trump’s populist agenda. In an interview earlier this year, Rubio said his foreign policy has evolved because “the world looks different than it did five, 10, 15 years ago.”

He surprised former supporters and donors with his vote against emergency funding for Israel in April. Rubio argued that the foreign aid package should have included border enforcement measures, and objected to linking it to aid to Ukraine and Taiwan, a decision aligned with Trump’s base.

Despite this, Rubio’s vocal support for Israel remains consistent. As vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he visited Israel in April, and in November 2023 co-hosted a bipartisan screening for members of Congress of the film documenting the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 . Rubio compared the Israeli Defense Forces’ terrain operation in Rafah, opposed by the Biden administration, to the Allies’ pursuit of Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust.

Rubio’s nomination requires Senate confirmation.

Rubio’s complex relationship with Jews

Rubio was born in Miami to Cuban parents who baptized him as a Catholic and spent three years of his childhood as a Mormon. He has close ties to Florida’s Jewish community, which makes up an estimated 5% of the state’s electorate.

Norman Braman, a car dealership magnate and former president of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, was Rubio’s political patron and the biggest funder of his 2016 presidential campaign. In 2015, Florida Democrats criticized Rubio for organizing a fundraising event on Yom Kippur. at the Texas home of Harlan Crow, a conservative philanthropist whose art collection includes works by Adolf Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf and a “closet full of places.” sets and linens used by the Nazi leader.”

Rubio has been a longtime supporter of orthodox and religious causes. But he also angered Orthodox leaders in 2022 for introducing a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent across the country. (The bill would have made it more difficult to attend morning prayers and get to work on time.) The Senate passed the bill unanimously, but it stalled in the House of Representatives.

Rubio apologized to Trump after he repeatedly accused American Jews of disloyalty to Israel and suggested they would hate their religion by voting for Democrats. “Being your religion and being pro-Israel can be two different things,” Rubio said on CBS News Confront the nation in March. He accused President Joe Biden of trying to appeal to “anti-Semites” in the Democratic party by criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.

The Florida senator said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students involved in fueling the pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of Israel’s boycott movement in their efforts to counter growing anti-Semitism.

Last year, after October 7, as criticism grew over TikTok’s role in amplifying anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content on its social media platform, Rubio wrote on , now it is being used to downplay Hamas terrorism.” He played a leading role in a congressional effort to ban TikiTok in 2022.