Nine days before Christmas in 1987, federal drug agents descended on a modest one-acre property in West Miami. Their target was a drug dealer named Orlando Cicilia, whom they arrested and charged with selling and distributing millions of dollars of Colombian cocaine. The raid against Mr. Cicilia and his associates would prove to be one of the biggest drug busts in Florida history. In retrospect, it was notable for one other fact: Mr. Cicilia was Marco Rubio\u2019s brother-in-law.<\/p>\n
Some of Mr. Rubio\u2019s most vivid early experiences took place in the house where Mr. Cicilia was arrested. Mr. Rubio\u2019s \u201cfondest childhood memory\u201d was of a Christmas Eve party where Mr. Cicilia roasted a pig in a pit covered with palm fronds in the yard of the house, according to Mr. Rubio\u2019s memoir. Later, when Mr. Rubio wanted to buy season tickets to Miami Dolphins games, he earned money by washing his brother-in-law\u2019s and sister\u2019s dogs in the yard. He even lived in the house briefly while his parents were moving across the country.<\/p>\n
Mr. Rubio has come a long way in the four decades since, rising to the role of global vanquisher of drug cartels and \u201cAmerica first\u201d enforcer as President Trump\u2019s secretary of state. Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Rubio to \u201crun<\/a>\u201d Venezuela after the military operation to seize the dictator Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and bring him to the United States on drug trafficking charges in January. Mr. Rubio has said little over the years about his brother-in-law\u2019s arrest, beyond noting the shock and heartbreak it caused his family.<\/p>\n The contrast between Mr. Rubio\u2019s childhood relationship with a man who was later convicted of drug dealing and his current globe-trotting role might seem like one of those random biographical quirks that are more common in fiction than in real life. Yet understanding Mr. Rubio has always required reconciling such conflicting story lines. As a Florida legislator, he communed with migrant laborers and backed tuition discounts for children of undocumented immigrants, then became an immigration hard-liner when he ran for the United States Senate, then morphed again into a bipartisan immigration reformer in Congress.<\/p>\n The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio\u2019s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion<\/a> of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers<\/a> of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary<\/a> of the president\u2019s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes<\/a> on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president\u2019s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere. Having lambasted President Barack Obama\u2019s 2015 deal to ease sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on its nuclear program, Mr. Rubio is now among the loudest supporters of a similar agreement that Mr. Trump hopes will end the war there.<\/p>\n Mr. Rubio\u2019s gymnastics have made him an increasingly successful ally of the president and increasingly puzzling to those who thought he\u2019d be a moderating, less MAGA-ish force within Trump 2.0. Yet his shape-shifting is not a new phenomenon; it is a defining characteristic. A close look at Mr. Rubio reveals one consistent truth about him: Marco Rubio has always found a way to belong.<\/p>\n In his Venezuela ascendancy and through his navigation of the failures of the Iran war, he has managed to deepen his relationship with Mr. Trump and cement his membership-in-good-standing in the political movement the president created. He has seemed just fine with going on television to defend Mr. Trump\u2019s war of choice in Iran, when others, including his main rival to be Mr. Trump\u2019s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, occupy more prominent public roles in negotiations to end the conflict. As when he was playing high school football, Mr. Rubio seems delighted to be on the team, even if he\u2019s not a star player.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say Mr. Rubio won\u2019t get his chances for glory. Mr. Trump frequently mentions him as the man who will bring Cuba into line with the president\u2019s goal of regional domination. As the Iran war lumbers to an inconclusive end, that hemispheric goal is returning to Mr. Trump\u2019s attention. On May 20, the Justice Department indicted the country\u2019s former president, Ra\u00fal Castro, and a Trump-imposed oil blockade has set off an economic crisis on the island. Mr. Rubio, for his part, has offered<\/a> the country $100 million in aid via the Catholic Church or independent charities.<\/p>\n At some point, it seems as if Mr. Rubio\u2019s pileup of contradictions will have to catch up with him. Yet over the two decades I have observed him, including writing a 2015 biography, Mr. Rubio\u2019s paradoxes haven\u2019t been a liability. If anything, they\u2019ve been an asset, at least from a political perspective. Few are better at reading the American room. Which means Americans have a real interest in Mr. Rubio\u2019s serial metamorphoses, not just because he is currently both secretary of state and national security adviser, but because he clearly still harbors ambitions of becoming president himself one day.<\/p>\n Born in Miami in 1971, Mr. Rubio spent hours at the side of his beloved grandfather, Pedro V\u00edctor Garc\u00eda, listening to the family\u2019s stories. In many ways, they were familiar tales of an immigrant family new to America. Mr. Garc\u00eda had come to the United States in 1956 from Cuba in search of a better life. In 1962, after an extended stay abroad, an American immigration judge ruled that Mr. Garc\u00eda had relinquished his legal resident status. The judge ordered<\/a> Mr. Garc\u00eda deported, according to a recording of the proceeding. The order was issued shortly before the Cuban missile crisis threw relations between the countries into chaos, however, and Mr. Garc\u00eda ended up staying in the United States for good.<\/p>\n In the ensuing years, the American dream did not come easily to the Rubio family. Mr. Rubio\u2019s father, who had arrived in the United States in 1956 before the start of the Cuban revolution, struggled to earn a living, tending bar and managing a residential building near Miami\u2019s airport. They did find community in religion. The Rubios belonged to a neighborhood Catholic church in Coral Gate, west of Little Havana. The young Mr. Rubio delighted in dressing up like a priest after Mass. \u201cI had a habit as a child of playacting scenes from experiences that had made an impression on me,\u201d Mr. Rubio wrote in his memoir.<\/p>\n In 1979, when he was 8, the family left behind a Miami roiling with drug-cartel violence and moved to Las Vegas, where an aunt of his would factor heavily into his life. The aunt was Mormon. So were the boys who lived next door. Marco wanted to be Mormon, too. To entertain himself and his family, he would lip-sync the songs of the Mormon television stars Donny and Marie Osmond. Soon enough, he and his mother were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The conversion was short-lived: In 1984, the family moved back to Florida, and by the time Mr. Rubio was in high school, his family had followed him back to Catholicism.<\/p>\n They embraced the intense and ever-present anti-Castro Cuban exile atmosphere of Miami. That would become an abiding hallmark of Mr. Rubio\u2019s political identity. Ascending from his days as a 20-something member of a suburban Miami city commission to become the first Cuban American speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio was propelled in part by the power of a story he recounted about his family. He told the Cuban Americans among the audiences for his speeches that he was one of them \u2014 a son of exiles whose parents were forced to leave Cuba by Fidel Castro.<\/p>\n It was a story that turned out to be inaccurate<\/a>. While researching my biography of Mr. Rubio, I came upon documents that proved his parents and older brother had arrived in the United States before the Cuban revolution began \u2014 nearly three years before Castro took power, around the same time as Mr. Rubio\u2019s grandfather. In fact, his grandfather had returned to Cuba after Castro\u2019s ascent and taken a menial transportation job in the government.<\/p>\n When I wrote an article about the discrepancy for The Washington Post, where I was a reporter at the time, Mr. Rubio said he had relied on the oral history of his family and that was what his parents had told him. He denied purposefully telling an inaccurate story for political gain. He said his parents should be considered exiles<\/a> because they\u2019d wanted to return to Cuba, but couldn\u2019t. It was a fair point, even if it didn\u2019t exactly clean up the story he\u2019d been telling.<\/p>\n Soon enough, Mr. Rubio would face uglier challenges to his family\u2019s history. When Mr. Rubio was a Republican vice-presidential contender in 2012, a theory began circulating<\/a> that he was not a \u201cnatural-born citizen.\u201d The argument went that his parents, though they were legally in the United States, were not U.S. citizens when he was born and that he would therefore not be eligible to become president someday.<\/p>\n It was a bogus attack \u2014 because he was born in the United States, Mr. Rubio has been a lifelong citizen. But in 2016, while running for president, the story line resurfaced in a court case. As The New York Times\u2019s Adam Liptak reported last year, Mr. Rubio felt compelled to file papers<\/a> in which he made a full-throated defense of birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n As one of the first acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued an executive order<\/a> greatly expanding the categories of people born in the United States who would not be eligible for birthright citizenship. The order has been stalled by court challenges, and in arguments before the Supreme Court in April, Mr. Trump\u2019s case seemed headed for defeat. Whatever the result, Mr. Rubio and his family would not be affected. Mr. Rubio has embraced Mr. Trump\u2019s move.<\/p>\n Despite all the contradictions, Mr. Rubio has cemented his membership in Mr. Trump\u2019s MAGA movement. He has flipped<\/a> from ardent support for Ukraine to an inclination to make concessions to the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He has abandoned his longtime support for the work of U.S.A.I.D. and is now<\/a> instead presiding over its death.<\/p>\n Some of Mr. Rubio\u2019s changes cut particularly close to home. His hard line on punishment for drug offenders contrasts with the leniency he once showed his former drug dealer brother-in-law, according to documents I unearthed with Scott Higham, who was then my colleague at The Washington Post. When Mr. Rubio was the majority whip of the Florida House of Representatives, he used<\/a> his official stationery to recommend to the Florida Division of Real Estate that Mr. Cicilia, who had recently been released from prison, should be granted a real estate license. The recommendation letter didn\u2019t mention his personal relationship to Mr. Cicilia. (At the time, Mr. Rubio dismissed suggestions that he did anything unethical.)<\/p>\n Mr. Rubio is one of the few politicians who have survived crossing swords with Mr. Trump \u2014 so far. Mr. Trump won\u2019t be president forever, and Mr. Rubio\u2019s relationship with him and the movement he created is something the secretary of state will never be able to hide. Together they have embarked on building a world order that will be difficult, if not impossible, to undo: a go-it-alone, interventionist America that takes what it wants. From Venezuela to Iran, and now Cuba, Mr. Rubio is along for Mr. Trump\u2019s disruptive ride. What if it all goes wrong?<\/p>\n I can imagine Mr. Rubio nimbly rising from the ashes, just as he did when Mr. Trump humiliated him in his home state, Florida, by trouncing him in the 2016 presidential primary. I have no doubt Mr. Rubio is simultaneously relishing it and feeling conflicted when he is, once again, trying on a new persona \u2014 a Trumpian MAGA role that he might one day need to abandon. The now-famous photographs of him on the Oval Office sofa watching Mr. Trump berate Ukraine\u2019s Volodymyr Zelensky have become memes for good reason, capturing both his tough-guy frown and his discomfort as he shrinks into the pillows.<\/p>\n Yet it says a lot about Mr. Rubio\u2019s skills that in the small group of shape-shifting survivors close to Mr. Trump, the secretary of state is emerging as a top contender in the race to succeed him. This new iteration of Mr. Rubio is angrier and more sullen than the often-sunny politician who became the charming and precocious darling of the Republican Party in the 2010s. His tone has become strident; his words, more biting. For now, at least, he\u2019s sending a clear message to the MAGA world that he is one of them \u2014 and would be a fitting heir.<\/p>\n Manuel Roig-Franzia is the author of \u201cThe Rise of Marco Rubio,\u201d and a former Washington Post bureau chief in Miami and Latin America.<\/p>\n Source photographs by SAUL LOEB\/Getty Images.<\/p>\n The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters<\/a> to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips<\/a>. And here\u2019s our email: letters@nytimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook<\/a>, Instagram<\/a>, TikTok<\/a>, Bluesky<\/a>, WhatsApp<\/a> and Threads<\/a>.<\/p>\n