In one of the most predictable and contradictory "personnel choice" moves for his Cabinet, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump recently announced that Senator Marco Rubio would be his Secretary of State.
"He will be a great defender of our country, a true friend to our allies and a fierce warrior who will not back down from our adversaries," he argued.
The politician, who grew up in the ranks of the most rancorous of the Cuban-American ultra-right, has known how to navigate in stormy waters and change his mind whenever necessary in order to achieve his goals.
Donald Trump, in the fierce campaign of 2016, "swept the floor" with the Floridian aspirant, in a contest in which rude insults abounded.
Let's remember how the Senator for Florida called the tycoon a "professional swindler", before thousands of people in Texas. Rubio also suggested that he could have "wet his pants" during the debate.
For his part, Trump had told Rubio, in 2015, that Rubio was a total lightweight, whom he would not hire to run one of his smaller companies.
Most recently, at a campaign rally in Miami in early July, the billionaire also mocked the idea of choosing Rubio as his running mate, questioning him even as a senator.
Beyond the constant exchange of insults -a normal thing in American politics-, it is contrasting that the next tenant of the White House has appointed, for such a high position, a person whose vision of the world differs from the most isolationist position favored by the Republican extreme right.
The person who is now about to become one of the key figures in the government counts among the feats to his name the legislation he co-sponsored during Trump's first term to hinder the withdrawal of the U.S. from nato.
The new potential Secretary of State is in favor of U.S. citizens carrying guns, and opposes any kind of amnesty for illegal immigrants, issues on which he is close to the Trumpist leader.
A staunch enemy of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China and Russia, many of his followers expect the application of a tough policy against these and any government that shows signs of independence and sovereignty before the empire.
"The United States has a moral duty to defend our nation's interests, and we must continue to defend the democratic order and justice in our hemisphere," the Senator said in a speech in the House in mid-2024.
With his nomination, neither the "Cassandras" nor the Nostradamus on duty will have to invest efforts in trying to guess the probable scenarios. The next Secretary of State said it clearly: they are coming to bring to the world the pax of the Yankee empire.
