Secretary of State Marco Rubio With Lara Trump of Fox News

QUESTION:  Secretary Rubio, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Thank you.

QUESTION:  Since becoming Secretary of State, you really have made some big changes here.  You’ve kind of pared things back at the State Department.  You’ve restructured some things here, and you actually say that this was long overdue.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  So tell me about the changes you’ve made and why you felt like they were so important.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, the important thing to know is that we’ve reorganized the boxes in our org chart in terms of how the State Department functions.  This wasn’t an effort to go in and get rid of people.  It was an effort to reorganize.  Now, if you get rid of a bureau you’re not going to use anymore, obviously you don’t need those positions anymore.  And it was very small.  I mean, it was 1,300 people out of 70- or 50- or 60,000.  I read these reports about how we’ve gutted American diplomacy.  It’s really silly.

But here’s the fundamental nature of it:  It took too long to get things done.  We had too many bureaus, too many offices.  They were unaligned with each other.  I get these decision memos, and these decision memos have to be cleared by these different desks, these different offices.  Some of them had 30 or 40 boxes; 30 or 40 people had to clear it before it even got to me, and that’s why it takes the State Department so long to function. 

So what we’re changing on that is people can certainly give their opinion.  If they don’t agree with a decision or they have concerns about it, that can be noted.  But ultimately, I need to get that decision memo to my desk so we can take action.  We can’t wait six weeks, six months, to do things.  It renders us irrelevant, especially in a world that moves so fast.

QUESTION:  Let me ask you about Russia.  The President gave Russia 50 days to strike a peace deal or face, possibly, 100 percent tariffs.  Where do you think Putin is on this?  Do you think this is an effective strategy, and what do you expect to see happen?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, first of all, I think everybody should be very happy that the American president, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is focused on peace.  There’s nothing he wants more than to be a part of peace agreements, stopping wars, preventing wars, ending wars.  It’s not his war.  He didn’t start this war.  It didn’t happen – it never would have happened – had he been president, but it did.  He inherits it, and he’s done everything possible to bring it to an end.  I think he’s growing increasingly frustrated that, despite having very good interactions with Vladimir Putin in phone calls, it never leads to anything.  So the time has come for some action here, and I think the President has made that abundantly clear.  He’s losing his patience.  He’s losing his willingness to continue to wait for the Russian side to do something here to bring an end to this – to this war that wasn’t his war, but he wants to see it come to an end.

Since January of this year, over 100,000 Russian soldiers – just on the Russian side – have been killed.  It’s a bloody conflict with a lot of death and destruction.  A lot of this engagement has been really about playing for time and sort of delay tactics to make it look like they’re interested in peace but not really serious about it.

He’s not going to fall into that trap of being pulled into endless talks about talks.  And I think he picks up a lot of that from his just understanding of human nature and human behavior, having dealt with some of the most cutthroat people in business for 40, 50 years.

QUESTION:  The negotiator-in-chief, some say. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah, and he enjoys that part of the job, by the way.

QUESTION:  He does, yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  He does.  He enjoys that part of the job.  And I think it’s very useful for us because, ultimately, we know we have the ultimate closer in the administration with our President.  And as our job is to put these deals together, bring them, usually, to the 95 percent range of agreement, and then he comes in at the end and closes it.  And whether that’s on trade or hopefully on peace, that’s the role he’s played, and it’s a very powerful role.  That last 5 percent, those last few yards, are always the hardest one in any negotiation.

QUESTION:  Well, so many people talk about the fact that China is conspiring with Russia and Iran.  How does the U.S. deal with that and a potential alliance between those three?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Everybody knows – it’s not a secret – that China is giving Russia as much aid as they can get away with without being discovered.  The Europeans have caught onto this.  There is no way that Putin could have sustained this war without Chinese support, particularly buying his oil.  And I think the Chinese have an incentive to see this war go on.  They think that the longer this war goes on, it’ll distract us and prevent us from focusing on other parts of the world that they’re interested in.

With Iran, the Chinese also buy a lot of their sanctioned oil and have provided them some defense articles in the past.  I think everyone – China, Russia, others, even North Korea – have become a little bit more cautious about supporting Iran, especially after our B-2s flew halfway around the world and conducted an operation and left before anyone found out about it.

So I think that what’s happened now is a lot of these countries are being – in the middle of that war, when Iran turned to Russia, turned to China, turned to some of their proxies, they all kind of took a pass and said we don’t want to get involved in this thing.  It sort of reminded the world that we have a strong President and the most extraordinary military capabilities in the world.  No one has the things we have in our defense, whether it’s our airplanes, our missiles, our bombs that we use, and our guided munitions.  A lot of people had forgotten that.  President Trump reminded them.

QUESTION:  You also recently met with the Chinese foreign minister.  Do you feel like there are still areas where we could see cooperation between the U.S. and China, and what came out of that meeting overall?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah, look, the United States and China are the two most powerful and important countries in the world.  So we have to have relations.  We have to be able to talk to them, and we have to, if possible, find areas of cooperation. 

We’re going to have some irritants, there’s no doubt about it.  I think just talking about the trade perspective, just understand – everybody should understand this – for 30 years the Chinese have basically carried out this economic scheme or operation where they could sell anything they want into the United States.  Every Chinese company, unfettered access to the U.S. market, the most important consumer market in the world.  But the Chinese market is completely closed.  So their market is closed and their companies are protected inside of China, but then they want the right to be able to sell us anything they want and export anything they want.

And it’s not just been going on for a year or two years.  This has been going on for three decades.  President Trump has been talking about this for 20 years.  This is not some new thing he discovered the day after he was sworn in.  He’s been talking about this forever.

So all he’s saying is, I don’t understand it.  They get to do whatever they want here; we get to do nothing over there.  How is that fair?  I’m going to rebalance it.  But the – but I think we have to be able to do that, and at the same time understand that there are things we have to be able to interact with the Chinese on just to avoid misunderstandings.

So we have to have relations with them.  We want to have respectful relations with them.  And in those areas where we have disagreement, we always have to stand on the American side of the issue. 

QUESTION:  We used to see hostages kind of used as a bargaining chip.  You don’t really see that anymore —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah. 

QUESTION:  — not under this President.  So tell me about this three-country prisoner swap that involved El Salvador and Venezuela with the United States.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  Well, let’s start with who was in El Salvador.  Who was in El Salvador were about 250 members of Tren de Aragua, which is a designated terrorist organization; it’s a street gang from Venezuela.  Normally you would take them and deport them back to their home country.  The problem is Venezuela was using that as a weapon against us.  They were saying, okay, we will do that; we will only take deportees if you give us this concession or that concession.

When Joe Biden was president, he made a deal with the Venezuelans on deportations.  And in exchange, two convicted drug dealers – who happen to be the nephews of Nicolás Maduro – were returned.  His bagman, his moneyman, his henchman, the guy that collected all his money from around the world, was also indicted, was in a prison in the United States.  He was released.  They gave him all these concessions.  In the case of President Trump, he says, I’m not giving you any concessions.  So, since Venezuela wouldn’t take them, we sent them to El Salvador, who housed them in their prisons.

Now, an opportunity presented itself for those people to be sent – those criminals, those gang members, to be sent back to where they belong, which is in Venezuela.  It’s where they came from.  Maduro, who’s not even the president of Venezuela – he’s a narco-trafficking leader – he is an indicted drug dealer by the Southern District of New York in the United States, and he desperately wants us to take that indictment off of him.  That’s what he wants.  He’s not going to get that, and he didn’t get that.

And that’s a big difference from what you saw in the past.  If we had done that, within five days you would’ve seen 10 more Americans arrested.  Because that’s what all these countries around the world are doing:  They arrest Americans, knowing that they can use them as bargaining chips.  But not with this administration.

QUESTION:  Well, what about the hostages held by Hamas?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  There’s been some success and movement there.  Do you feel like there could be more on that front?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  The good news is every American is out now.  We care about all the hostages.  And there’s a very simple solution to what’s happening in Gaza:  Release all the hostages, lay down your arms, and the war ends for Hamas.  They don’t agree to that, obviously.  So Steve Witkoff, who’s amazing, has been working on that day and night for weeks.  And they’ve made a lot of progress, and they’re close. 

But we’re optimistic and hopeful that any day now we will have a ceasefire agreement where at least half the hostages, including the deceased, will be released, and at the end of that 60-day period the remaining hostages would be released.  I think Steve’s doing a phenomenal job with that, and hopefully we’ll have good news to report on that as soon as possible.

(Break.)

QUESTION:  Well, I want to talk about you.  You are the son of parents who came here from Cuba to pursue the American dream.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah. 

QUESTION:  Do you think they would have ever imagined having a son who was first a United States senator and now Secretary of State?  That is really the American dream. 

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  And I don’t know how many kids grow up to say I want to be a senator and secretary of state, either.  (Laughter.)  I don’t know if they would have imagined it.  I do think my parents really believed and instilled the best – my parents didn’t leave me any money or connections or anything like that.  But the one thing I did inherit from my parents was this unyielding belief that we weren’t limited because of who they were.  In essence, my parents never made us feel like – because he was a bartender and she was a maid, and they came from Cuba – that there are things I couldn’t do, there are things their kids couldn’t do.  We never – I never felt that growing up.  On the contrary, I always – they instilled in us that, basically, you can be anything you want.  If you have the ability to do it, you’ll have a real chance to do it because you’re in the one place on Earth where that’s possible.

So that’s the greatest gift my parents left me, and I think it speaks more broadly to what America has always been about.  And I mean, it’s not just me.  I mean, if you look across our government, if you look across our business class, if you look across – very little of the top leaders in American business inherited the companies they now run.  Many of these are people that came from different backgrounds that achieved extraordinary things.  And that’s what we always want to continue to be as a country. 

So yeah, it’s a testament to my parents, but I really think it’s a testament to America.

QUESTION:  And as he leads the way for America on the world stage, Secretary Rubio is saying true to those core values.

I know that your faith, Secretary, has always been a big part of your life, so how has that come into play to help you in your new role here?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  That’s a great question.  I think you rely on your faith more than anything else to ground you, like to remind you that at the end of the day everything you do is transitory and that there’s – it also reminds you that as big as government is or as important as politics is in many cases, there’s something more important.

I think it also reminds you too of, like, the most important jobs you have.  I’ve always said it:  I don’t care what job you have, the most important job I’m ever going to have is my role as a husband and as a father, and that comes from my faith as well.

QUESTION:  Your family is also, I know, such a big part of your life.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  And you I talked once upon a time, and I know famously when you were in the Senate you didn’t miss games, you didn’t miss any of the important things in your —

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I tried not to.  Sometimes I did, I know.

QUESTION:  You tried not to.  But how is it working now?  Because this is a big job.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, it’s a little harder.  My kids are a little older now.

QUESTION:  Yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So I think they have more going on in their own lives that doesn’t involve us as much in terms of, like, being there.  But I still try not to miss things.  The rule always was if it’s something that’s never going to happen again, I want to be there.  I think we did a pretty good job on that.

QUESTION:  Seems like it so far.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  (Laughter.)  All right, we’re going to go have some coffee.  Let’s go.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  This is your shot of Cuban coffee.

QUESTION:  So this is it.  Okay.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, you’ve had this before.

QUESTION:  Yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  All right.

QUESTION:  What do I need to know?  How do we drink it?  Sip?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I drink it – like, try to in two sips, is my —

QUESTION:  Okay, let’s see.  Oh, in two sips.  I’ve got to catch up.  Hold on.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.  Well, the thing about this is like – what I love about Cuban coffee is that if you buy it from a coffee stand in Miami, it’s like a dollar.  If you buy an espresso from Starbucks or one of these other places, it’s like four.

QUESTION:  Yeah, I know.  This is the way to go.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  So it’s the same thing – it is.

QUESTION:  This is the way to go.

We’re looking out over the U.S. Capitol Building there, and you were there for 14 years as a senator.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  So does it feel surreal to be here now, looking out over what used to be your old job?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, we’ve been so busy the last six months that I haven’t had time to sort of sit back and sort of appreciate that.  But I will tell you that a lot of what I learned working in that building, which is a very different job from this one, has been very useful to me here and in understanding and appreciating the role Congress plays.  But now I’m in the Executive Branch, right?  So I think being there prepared me for this.  I didn’t know I was going to be here.  And I have great – we did a lot of really good things while I was over there that I’m very proud of, but yeah, I haven’t had time to sort of take that in.  We’ve been really busy the last six months.  We’re going to —

QUESTION:  We like you busy.  That’s good stuff.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Yeah.

QUESTION:  So we want you to keep it up.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  We will.

QUESTION:  Certainly keeping busy alongside President Trump.  You’d almost forget they were once staunch opponents.

Tell me about going from sparring with President Trump on a debate stage to now working alongside him every single day.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  I’m a big fan of martial – particularly, like, MMA, but boxing and stuff like that.  And I always chuckle when politics – because if two people – when two guys get in the ring, they can like each other.  And you see after every fight, they shake hands, they appreciate the combat.  You respect someone who’s willing to step into that octagon, right?  Because very few people in the world are willing to actually step in there and do that.  But no one’s ever asked these fighters:  Why did you punch that guy in the face in the second round?  I mean, no one would ask that.  It was a stupid question, right? 

So in 2016, both President Trump and I were – I didn’t know him; I’d never met him before.  I knew who he was, obviously, but I’d never met him.  And we happened to be competing for the same thing.  So in any competition, especially as you get down and it narrows down to three or four people, punches are going to be thrown.  But then that ends, and then the – then we’re on the same team, because he’s the Republican nominee and I’m a Republican.

I was in the Senate during the four years of his first term and it was the best four years I had in the Senate.  We got a lot done together.  And then obviously he’s a resident of Florida, so he was my constituent, and we stayed in touch during that time.  And then I was very happy to be helpful on the campaign.  He picked one of my closest friends in politics, JD Vance, to be Vice President.  It was a great team.  And then we were on the same team from that point forward and have been ever since.

QUESTION:  How is he to work with daily?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  It’s a lot of fun.

QUESTION:  Yeah.

SECRETARY RUBIO:  It is fun.  And, I mean, it’s fun for two reasons.  The first is he’s a person of action.  And I don’t mean that in a reckless way, but in a let’s get this thing done, and it isn’t like let’s wait six months to do it.  It’s more like on a six to eight-hour time constraint.  So I think the chance for someone like me that’s been around this for a little bit, coming from the Senate where it took forever just to get a bill passed, to be in a place and in a position where things that you’ve wanted to do – reorganizing the State Department, getting engaged in different parts of the world and doing some of the things we’ve done – to actually be able to execute and do and have the backing of the President to do things and get things done is incredibly rewarding.  There is no point in being in this business, in this line of work, if you can’t get things done.  So that makes it a lot of fun.

And then I think the other part that most people don’t see – and, frankly, I had not seen as much until the last couple years being around him – he’s a lot of fun to be around as a person.  I mean, and he has extraordinary – in my view, uncanny – instincts.  And I’ve seen that play out time and time again, and I think that’s a very underappreciated part of his leadership skill set.  He has incredible instincts for human behavior, human nature, and it translates to politics and global events.

QUESTION:  Final question:  You just brought up your run in 2016 for president.  You are talked about quite frequently as a possible contender in 2028.  Do you have your sights set outside of the State Department?

SECRETARY RUBIO:  Well, I think JD Vance would be a great nominee.  (Laughter.)  And if – I think if he decides he wants to do that.  And so – and I think he’s doing a great job as Vice President.  He’s a close friend, and I hope he intends to do it.  I know it’s kind of early. 

But being in the role that I’m in here as the Secretary of State, I really don’t play in politics.  There’s actually rules against me being involved in domestic politics, and I want to do this job as long as the President allows me to do it and stay in that job, which would keep me here all the way through January of 2028.

I feel honestly – you never know what the future holds; you never rule things out or anything, because you just don’t know.  Things change very quickly.  But that said, I believe that if I am able to be here through the duration of this presidency and we get things done at the pace that we’ve been doing the last six months, I’ll be able to look back at my time in public service and say I made a difference, I had an impact, and I served my country in a very positive way.  And I would be satisfied with that as the apex of my career, and so that’s what I’m focused on right now, because we’re doing some special things that I think are going to bear dividend and fruit for a generation.