Rubio channels Trump ideas without being an asshole. EU standing ovation!

If only Voldemort could learn from me! I'm always shoveling the tabloid slop with a silver tongue. You guys lap it up.

In Munich, Rubio Points to a Path Forward for the GOP

The secretary of state makes a forceful case for Trump’s policies without his stylistic excesses.

By Gerard Baker, WSJ

Feb. 16, 2026 12:08 pm ET

Marco Rubio’s elegantly bravura speech at the Munich Security Conference Saturday sharpens the question for Republicans back on this side of the Atlantic: What sort of party do they want to be?

The secretary of state managed to convey to a European audience roughly the same U.S. foreign policy objectives President Trump has been pursuing, but without the gratuitous asperity of the boss. His touching invocation of the shared roots of Western civilization that unite America and Europe didn’t obscure the warnings Mr. Trump has been sounding, which Mr. Rubio echoed: Europe can no longer rely on American security for its own peace, it has followed disastrously wrong economic paths for too long, and on its current trajectory its civilization is headed for extinction. And yet it was all delivered in a way that earned him a standing ovation from the assembled Euro-elites. It’s amazing what you can achieve if you resist the temptation to say you’re going to annex Greenland.

Although it took place in a hotel ballroom in the Bavarian capital, it painted a helpful picture of the Republican Party’s fundamental and deepening challenge at home: Can you deliver the necessary jolt to a decaying system without the noxious baggage that seems to come with it? Can you be so radical and revolutionary that you force the kind of changes needed to reverse a failing national path without terrifying people that you are actually mad, bad and dangerous? With Trumpism, it is the age old question: Can you have the substance without the spectacle?

It’s a germane question not only because Mr. Rubio presumably wants one day to be the party’s standard-bearer. Last year the Munich audience was treated to a very different presentation from another GOP aspirant, when Vice President JD Vance stripped the home truths of their diplomatic padding and whacked his listeners around the head with them. These two approaches capture the rhetorical Republican bifurcation well.

That America needed a shock to its system should have been obvious by the middle of the last decade. Instead it was the key insight of the improbable political genius of Mr. Trump.

The Republican Party by that stage had become a futile and curious hybrid of ossified economic thinking from the late 20th century and reluctant submission to the progressive social and cultural orthodoxies of the 21st. Its record in office in this century was defined by a hubris and a myopia that combined to produce one of the worst foreign-policy disasters in American history and the most serious economic crisis in three-quarters of a century.

Mr. Trump’s first campaign and presidential term were a blazing dumpster fire of spectacle and substance. For much of it the spectacle was the substance: the crudeness, the nocturnal tweeting, the sheer stylistic novelty. His front was a form of governing itself. There was something about this spectacularly dishonest man that was piercingly honest: Only someone unburdened by a lifetime in politics could dare to say the things he said. Yet eventually the spectacle trumped the substance and his revolution was undone.

But by the delayed second term, the substance promised to be supreme: a more organized and concerted assault on illegal immigration, the economy’s weaknesses, the emaciated state of America’s global power.

The problem is that a year in, polling suggests that for most Americans ugly spectacle is obliterating the substance: the unparalleled grift, the wild weaponization of justice against the president’s opponents, the needlessly inhumane immigration enforcement, the grotesque eructations of the vilest prejudices from the mind of an overgrown child.

The substance has been much better, but increasingly ignored: the border closed and hundreds of thousands of worthy deportees removed, the economy robust with inflation heading firmly downward, the woke hegemony in our cultural institutions and bureaucracies being dismantled, the reassertion of American power in the world.

The Trumpian defense is that you don’t get these desirable outcomes without the ugliness. Europe is a case in point: Would the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ever get its act together without an American president threatening to take its territory and promising to walk out of a security treaty? At home, would you get this kind of immigration reform or reversal of woke intolerance without an attack on many of our freedoms?

This is America, a country that has mostly righted its wrongs the right way for a century and a half, so I’d like to think the answer is yes: You don’t have to be offensive to be effective; you don’t have to be abusive to disabuse. But don’t take my word for it. The proof, I suspect, is in our looming electoral conditions: the growing risk that voters are so sick of the spectacle that they rebel and we end up with a very different outcome—not only a Republican defeat in the midterm elections this year that will stymie any further efforts at change, but President Gavin Newsom and Vice President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez taking the oath of office in 2029.

Then Republicans would be forced to ask with a new urgency: Was the substance worth the spectacle?