The Trump whisperer: Marco Rubio has the president’s ear on Latin America

quote:

---

Donald Trump has a distaste for the State Department and its legions of diplomats tasked with crafting the nation’s foreign policy. So when it comes to Latin America, the CEO-turned-president is listening to a man he derided on the campaign trail a year ago: Marco Rubio.

And Rubio is well-positioned to take advantage of a vacuum of leadership in the State Department and communicate directly with a president who dislikes diplomacy-as-usual on Latin American foreign policy, according to interviews with former Rubio foreign policy staffers and State Department officials.

“They’ve asked for my input on basically every issue in Latin America and the Western Hemisphere and … we’ve been engaged with them and they’ve been very open,” Rubio said. “In some ways, the fact that they didn’t come in with preconceived ideas of what to do has created the space for that debate to occur."

---

quote:

---

Rubio “found a way to say, ‘You don’t want to listen to the experts, listen to me,’ ” said James Williams, president of Engage Cuba, a group that lobbies for closer Cuba ties and is opposed to Trump’s policy changes. “He found a really successful way to tell Trump, don’t listen to your own bureaucracy.”

---

LINK

As I've been telling you for months, Trump is making Marco closer and closer to the inner circle. The only person in Congress with any constructive ideas but also how to implement those ideas are Marco Rubio. Trump understands this and understands that Marco is the exact no nonsense, non-beaucratic advisor he needs on all issues involving the Western Hemisphere.