Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to American Prestige.

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today.

Stephen's a journalist and he's also a history PhD candidates at

Yale University, focusing on the Americas. And we decided to invite Stephen to talk a little bit about

Marco Rubio. And just as a disclaimer, it's been reported that Rubio is set to be Trump's

Secretary of State. This hasn't been officially confirmed, but it's been reported widely enough where we think it's useful to actually talk about this guy. So, Stephen,

thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So let's just start with the first

basic question, which is who is Marco Rubio? Where does he come from? And what does he actually

believe?

So way back in the 2015 campaign, the first time around, which I can't believe it's,

you know, it's been a decade of essentially just reliving the same thing over and over.

But I had the pleasure of covering Rubio's extremely failed run against Trump in the 25-15 primaries.

And he's a pretty unimpressive character, to be honest.

He lies about being the kid of Cuban refugees from the revolution, which I think probably goes over pretty well in southern Florida.

It turns out his parents actually came over prior to the revolution fleeing the U.S. supported Batista regime.

He kind of was a C student in high school, probably like a midling jock,

uh, failed up by ingratiating himself to a number of, uh, important or at least

influential Florida politicians and came up that way.

And, you know, in 2015, his, his whole gambit was that there would be room in the Republican

Party to respond both to Obama's seemingly very solid consolidation of the Latino vote and

sort of emergent Trumpian nativism by kind of refashioning the Republican Party as a kind of multicultural

...