Donald Trump just endorsed installing his Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the president of Cuba. Yes, you read that right.
The 79-year-old president went on a Truth Social posting spree early Sunday morning after a conservative columnist floated the idea of Trump being the one to finally topple the Cuban regime.
When one user replied “Marco Rubio will be president of Cuba. 😂,” Trump reposted it with the comment: “Sounds good to me!”
THE DETAILS: This wasn’t a one-off joke. Trump followed up with a threatening rant aimed directly at Havana: “Cuba lived, for many years, on large amounts of OIL and MONEY from Venezuela. In return, Cuba provided ‘Security Services’ for the last two Venezuelan dictators, BUT NOT ANYMORE!”
He continued: “Venezuela now has the United States of America, the most powerful military in the World (by far!), to protect them, and protect them we will. THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
The White House and State Department didn’t respond to requests for comment. Of course.
BUT BUT BUT: This isn’t coming out of nowhere. The U.S. recently launched air strikes to kidnap Venezuelan autocrat Nicolás Maduro, and Trump put Rubio in charge of the operation. Shortly after, Rubio issued his own warning to Cuba: “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned at least a little bit.”
Rubio, whose parents immigrated from Cuba in the late 1950s, has undergone quite the transformation from bitter Trump foe to one of the president’s most loyal servants. He’s currently juggling secretary of state, national security adviser, and acting U.S. archivist—all at once. He also briefly ran USAID while the administration was busy dismantling it.
Last week, Rubio even joked about the absurdity of his role accumulation, posting that he wasn’t being considered for head coach of the Miami Dolphins because “my focus must remain on global events and also the precious archives of the United States of America.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: the President of the United States is publicly entertaining the idea of installing a member of his cabinet as the leader of a foreign nation. That’s not foreign policy—that’s imperialism with a Truth Social account.
Republican strategist Mike Madrid told Politico that Rubio’s increasingly high-profile role in these operations could backfire on his 2028 presidential ambitions. “What may look like the president knighting him as a sort of competent successor may actually, in fact, be him carrying all the weight of the unpopular actions of the president in a couple of years,” Madrid said. “There’s a greater likelihood of that than not.”
But the real stakes here aren’t about one man’s political future. It’s about an administration that just seized control of one country and is now openly threatening another—while joking about who gets to be puppet dictator.