President Trump has named a stellar array of cabinet and White House picks -- Tom Homan, Lee Zeldin, Mike Waltz, Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles among them, and one of the apparent latest is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to lead the State Department.

Yes, it's still in the leak stage, so it might not happen, but if it does, that could be a beautiful thing.

According to the New York Times:

President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as his secretary of state, three people familiar with his thinking said on Monday, as Mr. Trump moves rapidly to fill out his foreign policy and national security team.

Mr. Trump could still change his mind at the last minute, the people said, but appeared to have settled on Mr. Rubio, whom he also considered when choosing his running mate this year.

Mr. Rubio was elected to the Senate in 2010, and has staked out a position as a foreign policy hawk, taking hard lines on China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba in particular.

It would be a fitting assignment, given Rubio's unwavering alliance to Trump over the last several years, and his foreign policy expertise, particularly on Latin America. The Times focuses on Rubio's stances on Russia and China, which have moved from a neocon orientation to Trump-like one -- he talks of China's unfair trade advantages and supports a negotiated solution for Ukraine, given the bloodshed going on otherwise. 

But it's Rubio's Latin American orientation that's really cool. Since when have we ever had a Secretary of State who genuinely understood, cared about, talked about, and acted on Latin America? The cartels and the border problems are there, Putin has a wonderful pawn in Caracas to set up his mischief against us, Mexico City and Havana have become Russian spy bases, and Nicaragua is actually profiting off Joe Biden's open borders. Now Mexico has elected a far-left shrew as president, undoubtedly to enable Mexico to do even more mischief to us, such as meddling in our elections and ushering in more caravans. Yet Latin America gets no attention, even as radical leftwingers get elected there and migrants surge, while true libertarian reformers, like Javier Milei of Argentina get ignored. Condi Rice came closest, but of necessity and interest put more time into other areas -- she once joked that upon returning from Miami, she felt as though she was returning from a foreign country.

But for Cuban-American Rubio, that's home, and Miami Cubans have loved the guy for years -- they are delighted to see his name put forward, knowing full well that it gives the Castro oligarchs and all its nasty communist pawns around the hemisphere the willies.

And Rubio does know his stuff about the region. I remember when Rubio was just getting his start in politics, and although he is a native Spanish speaker, he actually didn't know all that much about the region. But unlike Kamala Harris, he got to work as a quick study on the matter, acquiring heavy knowledge of the region in a fairly short time. He put in the hours, he did his homework, he made eloquent statements, he put out investigative papers. Rubio has since been a thorn in the side of every dirty dictatorship south of our border for years. In 2017, one of them even tried to kill him. 

The Times notes that he's an advocate of sanctions for bad guys, which is O.K., given that they don't like them, but nevertheless, not great for dislodging them from power. What he could do as Secretary of State is seek to separate Russia, China and Hezb'allah from their parasite-like relationship with countries like Venezuela and Cuba, and find ways to diminish China's economic influence in Latin America, which is worrying. He could also muscle Mexico to take care of the cartels or we will -- something Mexicans, and Mexican-American voters, and everyone else will thank him for. Latin America has been neglected for a long time and fixing these problems will solve a lot of problems here. America First, after all.

In short, putting Rubio in at State is bound to put Latin America front and center on the agenda at least some of the time. The place won't be ignored the way the Bidenites and most other presidencies have ignored it. This might even signal a latent plan to get rid of these dirty dictatorships once and for all.

Anyone want to think all those Latino voters who gave their vote to Trump might just be pretty pleased at this news? Just as markets are anticipatory, it's possible voters are, too.

Now, I know there are some concerns about him -- is he too neocon for the Trump movement, is he too close to Jeb Bush (who has applauded the choice, too)?

I would argue 'no,' I think those fears are overblown, because Rubio has shown strong public loyalty to Trump and the MAGA movement. He hasn't done anything fake or sneaky or swampy that I am aware of.

The thing that leaps out to me about this is that Trump has been able to work with neocons on important things in the past. A few days ago, I wrote about how in late 2018 Trump put out the order to the CIA to throw Venezuela's Maduro dictatorship out of power. That took me aback as it did many others. The change agent was then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, a neocon who left the Trump administration acrimoniously, but who tried to bull the ultimately unsuccessful project through.

According to Wired magazine 

After that UN meeting, the Trump administration amped up its efforts around the world to isolate and depose the Venezuelan leader, including by levying additional punishing sanctions against his regime. Much of that diplomatic maneuvering played out in public. But the administration also put into motion another, very much secret prong to the US’s regime-change campaign: a covert CIA-run initiative to help overthrow the Venezuelan strongman.

It failed, not because Maduro was impossible to dislodge, but because the CIA and Pentagon needed for the job were so resistant and incompetent. 

With Trump hosing out those agencies now, trying to make them competent for a change, it might mean that Trump still has his plan in mind and Rubio might be the perfect guy, with the Bolton mindset, but not the Bolton treachery, to execute it. You know that that's what the Marxist dictatorships are thinking. If Rubio does accept the position, he is going to need top talent Secret Service protection, for sure.

Politically, Rubio is very sharp on a lot of fronts and would understand this -- recall that he was the first to expose FEMA's money spigot to illegal aliens, leaving the agency's capacity to help hurricane survivors diminished. He was on that last June, well before Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina. He's done a lot of stuff like this. He would probably be able to handle the conniving deep-state snakes at State as well.

And he's been a stellar defender of Trump at times when it was unpopular, too. I would not be surprised if Trump gave him the post of Secretary of State, given his demonstrated competence and the good he could do.

If so, that's bad news for dictatorships plaguing our hemisphere, and good news for us.

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia // CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed