President Donald Trump has proven to be especially erratic and uncontrollable in his second term, and as one top insider revealed in a new interview, some within his Cabinet have taken unusual steps to keep up with him.
Maggie Haberman is a New York Times reporter with extensive experience interviewing and reporting on Trump. This week, she appeared on the Fifth Column podcast to promote her smash-hit book about Trump’s second term, Regime Change. During the conversation, she was pressed on how the president has been receiving information compared to his first term and how that has impacted his cabinet, which led her to reveal an odd fact about how Secretary of State Marco Rubio has handled his relationship with Trump.
Despite how his job typically works, Rubio has made relatively few overseas visits, which Haberman said is the result of an intentional effort to stick close to Trump.
“No, he’s sticking around the White House because that’s how you influence the president to make sure you don’t get some bad news about what the president decided to do on Truth Social late at night,” host Matt Welch observed.
“Rubio did tell people that he felt the need to be around Trump because, as you say, this is a very tiny group of people making decisions and you could be at the top level of a major Cabinet agency and have no idea what is happening if you are not in the room with him,” Haberman explained later. “So, that is how Rubio has functioned. I don’t know whether Trump will sour on him.”
The approach seems to have worked out well for Rubio, as Haberman noted that he and Trump seem to get on well despite their past conflicts and disagreements.
“Trump has a natural chemistry with Rubio that has been pretty surprising considering if you, like me, you remember the ‘Little Marco’ [name-calling], or the, you know, the d—— jokes on stage [in the 2016 presidential debates] about the hands or whatever,” she explained.
Haberman also noted that, compared to his first term, Trump is working with far more “true believers” in his approach to politics, as well as more people willing to go along with his approach despite past reservations.
“All of that is very different and the people who are around him are either true believers — and there are many, I would put Susie Wiles is in that camp, I’d put Steven Miller in that camp — a bunch of other people, or they are willing to, you know, claim a conversion, like Scott Bessant and Howard Lutnik, both of whom were warning in 2024 that Trump wasn’t really serious about tariffs, which tells you how well they understood him or knew him.”