TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has named Sen. Marco Rubio as his nominee for secretary of state.
Here are five things to know about the Florida Republican, now in his third term in the U.S. Senate:
He is the son of Cuban immigrants
Rubio, 53, was born in Miami and still calls the city home. His father was a bartender and his mother was a hotel maid. In his first Senate campaign, he repeatedly reminded voters of his working-class background and his “only-in-America” story as the son of Cuban immigrants who became a U.S. senator.
He is Catholic. But Rubio spent about six years of his childhood in Las Vegas, where he was baptized in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and attended Mormon services. When Rubio was eight, the family moved to the city and his parents found work in the growing hotel industry.
When he was 14, they returned to Miami.
Rubio played college football and married a professional cheerleader
Rubio is a huge football fan who dreamed of making it to the NFL when he played in high school. But he only had solid offers from two colleges.
He chose the little-known Tarkio College, located in a town of fewer than 2,000 people in rural northwest Missouri. But when the college faced bankruptcy and he suffered an injury, Rubio gave up football and transferred to a school in Florida. He graduated from the University of Florida and the University of Miami Law School.
He got engaged to Jeanette Dousdebes, and she tried out and made the Miami Dolphins cheerleading squad. They married in 1998 and have four children.
He was almost Florida’s attorney general
Rubio was elected to the Florida House of Representatives, where he also served as majority leader and speaker.
He was a hopeless candidate against then-Gov. Charlie Crist for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2010. He was pressured by party leaders to drop out of the Senate race and instead run for attorney general, with the party promising to clear the field for him. “I had almost convinced myself to drop out of the Senate race,” he wrote in his memoir, “An American Son.”
But when an Associated Press reporter confronted him with the suggestion that Rubio would be moving to the attorney general position this week, Rubio said unequivocally, “No.” At that point, Rubio wrote, he felt he had his word no longer take it back. He stayed in the race and won his first term in the Senate. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in 2022.
Rubio ran for president in 2016 and took on Trump
Rubio entered the presidential race in 2016 facing a crowded Republican field that included Trump. Rubio won Minnesota, where Texas Sen. Ted Cruz came second and Trump came third. His only other victories came in Washington, DC and Puerto Rico.
He dropped out of the race after Trump routed him in his home state. Trump won Florida with 45.7% of the vote, while Rubio came a distant second with 27%.
Rubio and Trump exchanged verbal jabs during the race, with Trump calling Rubio “Little Marco.” Rubio responded by insulting the size of Trump’s hands and calling him a “fraud” and “vulgar.”
Their relationship improved when Trump was in the White House. When ABC News played some of Rubio’s 2016 comments earlier this year, he downplayed them, saying, “It was a campaign.”
He remained close to Trump even after he was passed over for vice president in favor of Ohio Senator JD Vance. He traveled with the former president during the final leg of the race and gave speeches in English and Spanish at several rallies on the final day of the campaign.
He often speaks about foreign threats, particularly from China
Rubio rode the Tea Party wave in 2010 and gained national prominence. On the campaign trail, he said that then-President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress threatened the country’s economy by supporting disastrous domestic spending, taxation and health care policies.
As vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio now speaks frequently about foreign military and economic threats, particularly China. He warns that China, Iran, North Korea and Russia are increasingly collaborating against the USA.
“They all have a common goal: to weaken America, to weaken our alliances, to weaken our standing, our capabilities and our will,” he said in a speech last March.
