By Scott Ortkiese
Note to my readers:
The entertainment value of watching Rubio dance for the Donald would be hilarious if Trump weren’t using Rubio’s obedience to blow up Iran and the global economy. Meanwhile, the Big Orange Farce isn’t talking about inflation, Epstein, his polling numbers, or the midterms. Life will be as unkind to that lame duck as he was to Joe Kent on his way out the door. Strong message to follow. Chuck you, Farley.
Scott Ortkiese
so@throughlinesynthesis.com | www.throughlinesynthesis.com
Marco Rubio made his bet. He looked at the wreckage of his 2016 campaign (the moment he called Donald Trump a con man and a fraud on a debate stage in front of the entire country, and then got humiliated in his own state) and he decided that the path back ran straight through complete, unconditional submission. He became Secretary of State. He became National Security Adviser simultaneously, a consolidation of roles with no precedent in American history. He made himself the sole funnel through which all intelligence reached the President of the United States. And then he used that position to ensure that a peace deal with Iran (one that the Omani foreign minister described as hours away from completion, one in which Tehran had made sweeping concessions on enrichment and put UN inspectors on the table for the first time in history) went nowhere. The bombs fell instead.
That is Marco Rubio’s legacy now. Not the immigration work. Not the Cuba hawkishness. Not the earnest young senator from Florida who was supposed to be the future of a diverse, modern Republican Party. His legacy is this war. His legacy is 163 schoolgirls in Minab between the ages of six and twelve, dead. His legacy is the Strait of Hormuz closed, oil markets in freefall, and the entire Middle East on fire. He owns it. He was the funnel. He made sure nothing else got through.
And for what? The GOP nomination in 2028. The brass ring. The thing he’s wanted since he was a child, “reading about Reagan in a Miami living room.”
Here’s the problem: he’s made himself unelectable in the same transaction. The Republican base that will decide that nomination wants a fighter, not a functionary. They want someone who dominates, not someone who manages. Rubio has spent three years managing, managing Trump’s information diet, managing the State Department’s messaging, managing the optics of a war that 71% of Americans oppose. The man who called Trump a con man is now his war’s sole apologist. That’s not a campaign platform. That’s a political obituary. He burned his credibility with the left when he signed on. He burned his credibility with the right by being too polished, too cautious, too obviously calculating. He’s now owned by a record no serious candidate can run on. The soul-selling was visible, it was public, and it was permanent.
JD Vance is a different story, and here’s where it gets interesting.
Vance was thrown under the bus before the war started. The Omani mediator, fresh from Geneva, flew to Washington and went straight to the Vice President’s office. We almost have a deal. Within hours, the bombs were falling. Vance wasn’t consulted. Vance wasn’t in the room. Rubio had made sure of that. The Vice President of the United States learned about his own administration’s war the same way the rest of us did, after the fact, from the news.
If that doesn’t clarify your position in this White House, nothing will.
So Vance faces the oldest question in politics: do you go down with the ship, or do you get off while you still can? The calculus here is not complicated. He has no loyalty left to honor, it wasn’t reciprocated. He has no intelligence access to protect, he’s already been cut out. He has no political future inside Trump’s orbit (Rubio has consumed it. What he has is a platform, a national profile, a reputation as the working-class intellectual of the American right, and) crucially, the one thing neither Trump nor Rubio currently possesses: the ability to say I told you so and be believed.
The midterms are coming. The math is unforgiving. A war that the majority of Americans oppose, an oil shock feeding into inflation, body bags arriving home from a theater with no exit strategy, and an economy that was already wobbling before the first Tomahawk was fired, that is the Republican Party’s electoral environment in November. The losses will be significant. The recriminations inside the GOP will be vicious. Someone will need to be the adult in the room who saw it coming, who said something, who stood apart from the catastrophe while there was still time.
That someone could be JD Vance. The window is closing fast. If he’s already on record (measured, serious, constitutionally grounded, invoking the very principles of restraint and non-interventionism that got Trump elected in the first place) when the wreckage comes in, 2028 is his. Not Rubio’s. His. If he waits, he goes down with the ship like the rest of them, and some other Republican, someone we’re not even watching yet, walks through the door he left open.
Rubio sold his soul and got nothing for it. Vance still has his. The question is whether he has the nerve to use it.
If I’m lying, I’m dying.
Related reading
- The Jock Sniffing Soul Merchant and the Sacrificial Lamb with Horns: Rubio, Vance, and the Coming Reckoning
- A Bill of Indictment for Murder and Genocide Against the American Military and Trump, as its Commander and Chief
- Trump Blackmails Allies Abroad While Being Blackmailable at Home: The Irony of It All
- Susie Wiles Can’t Restrain Trump, So She Covers for the Malignant Orange Baby
