There is a photograph which, since yesterday, has been circulating on social media across half the world. Marco Rubio, the United States Secretary of State, is leaning against a door of Air Force One en route to Beijing. He is wearing a grey Nike Tech Fleece tracksuit, hoodie and sweatpants. It is exactly the same outfit Nicolás Maduro was wearing, blindfolded and handcuffed, in the photographs of his arrest on 3 January, personally released by Donald Trump on Truth Social. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted the image with the caption: “Secretary Rubio shows off the Nike Tech ‘Venezuela’ on Air Force One!” Followed by a laughing emoji.
Let us stop for a moment. The scene deserves to be described in full before being commented on. The head of diplomacy of the world’s leading power, flying to a summit with Xi Jinping at a time of growing international tension, has himself photographed dressed as a political prisoner. Not just any prisoner: a man currently being held in American custody, awaiting criminal trial in New York. And the White House communications machine amplifies it as though it were a locker-room joke. Some will say: it is only a tracksuit. Political folklore. The new social-media grammar of diplomacy. But this is where honesty is required. That gesture is not folklore: it is the explicit transformation of the Department of State into a meme account. It is the ritual humiliation of a detainee turned into political merchandising, complete with hashtag and the product’s commercial name. The capture of a head of state - whatever one may think of Maduro, and there is a great deal, much of it serious, to think - becomes material for a barracks joke. And the joke is made by the Secretary of State.
The same man who last week came to the Vatican to meet Pope Leo XIV and gave him a crystal paperweight shaped like an American football bearing the seal of the Department of State. The Pope, a Chicago native and a White Sox supporter, returned the gift with an olive-wood pen, taking care to explain to him that the olive tree is “the plant of peace”. Let the contrast speak for itself: on one side, a millennia-old symbol; on the other, a desk ornament with a corporate logo. It is immediately clear who the adult in the room was. And this is the man whom certain embarrassing figures continue to describe as the moderate face of an administration that resembles a psychiatric ward. Let us come to the real point, the one raised by the message. There are those who, more “devoted to the White House” than to the Pontiff, have been writing for years that Rubio is the other one. The serious Republican, the one in a tie, the Washington man with a classical education, the Cuban-American son of exile who spoke about human rights in an era when his own party had shelved them. The moderate. The adult version of Trumpism, some columnists said. The reassurance for certain extremist Catholics who want to vote for Trump without feeling guilty: look, there is Rubio. There is someone who reads Thomas Aquinas. There is a grown-up in the room.
Well. The man who was supposed to be the grown-up in the room put on the prisoner’s tracksuit to take a viral photograph. The question one asks oneself in front of scenes like this is always the same: how does anyone even conceive of such an idea? Because someone thought of it. If not him personally, then someone on his staff suggested it to him. He said yes. And everyone around the table agreed that it was a brilliant stunt to take with them to China.
The serious point here is that there is no moderate version of Trumpism. There are only people waiting for their turn to be part of it. The distinction certain commentators construct between the “vulgar” Trump and his “institutional” collaborators is a consoling fiction. It serves us, the observers, more than it serves them. It allows us to say: the problem is only one man, it is personal, and there are adults around him. That is not true. It never has been. Rubio is not degenerating inside Trump’s White House; Rubio is simply showing who he already was.
And the Catholics? Those who defended him by saying that at least he had a moral formation, that he had published serious documents on social doctrine, that he quoted Centesimus Annus at conferences? Let them explain to us what the dignity of the human person - a non-negotiable pillar of the magisterium - has to do with a Secretary of State clowning around by wearing the uniform of another detained human being’s humiliation. Because Maduro is a dictator and has committed grave crimes. But he is also, at this moment, a man in custody, awaiting trial. Is this supposed to be America, beacon of democracy? Turning an arrested man into an Air Force One mascot is exactly the opposite of everything any Christian magisterium has ever taught about the treatment of enemies and prisoners. The argument most often heard from those who want to minimise it is that this is “effective communication”. That this is how politics is done today. That one has to speak the language of one’s electorate. Perhaps. But even were that the case - and that is far from obvious - one should at least have the courage to stop calling influencers statesmen. The problem is not that Rubio put on a tracksuit. The problem is that we continue to pretend to be surprised. Marco Rubio was never the moderate version of anything. He was the presentable version for as long as it was useful to be so. The grey tracksuit on the flight to Beijing is the first truly sincere political statement he has made since taking office: we are all the same thing, get used to it. At least this much, it must be acknowledged, has become honest.
fr.V.C.
Silere non possum