This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Just after midnight on January 3rd, American Special Forces

shot their way into a Venezuelan military complex and seized President Nicholas Maduro. At the

press conference later that morning, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood quietly behind President

Donald Trump, then stepped to the microphone to offer

what journalist and my guest today, Dexter Filkins, describes as a familiar routine,

lavishing praise on the president, then explaining that the nighttime invasion of a sovereign nation was somehow completely ordinary.

And I hope what people now understand is that we have a president. The 47th president of the United States is not a game player. When he tells you that he's going to do something, when he's going to tell you he's going to address a problem, he means it. He actions it. I can tell you, I've watched this process now for 14, 15 years, been around it. Everybody talks, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. When I get there, we're going to do this. We're going to say, this is a president of action. Like, I don't understand yet how they haven't figured this out. And now, if you don't know, now you know. In his new profile for the New Yorker, Filkins traces how Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants who built his career championing democracy and

human rights, became the unlikely executor of Trump's foreign policy. One European diplomat told

Filkins that if you listen closely to Rubio, you sense that there's still a person in there

somewhere underneath it, as he put it, a very thick layer of whatever it is

that's covering him. Dexter Filkins is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the

Forever War. He's reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and conflict zones around the world.

His new piece is called Power Trip, how Marco Rubio went from Little Marco to Trump's Foreign Policy Enabler.

Our interview was recorded yesterday.

Dexter, welcome back to the show.

Thank you very much.

Dexter, you've actually noticed a pattern at these press conferences.

Rubio praises Trump and he explains why what just happened is actually

ordinary. And in this case, that we just heard, he was talking about the administration's

actions in Venezuela. Walk me through what that has looked like over the last year and how it's

evolved because at one time, Rubio actually called

President Trump a con artist. Yeah, this is quite a story. You know, my personal favorite, it's not in the

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