Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been having a moment — the kind that makes people wonder if he might be a candidate for president sooner than later.

On Tuesday, he took over press secretary duties while Karoline Leavitt was on maternity leave and fielded questions for more than 45 minutes, happily trading rap lyrics with reporters along the way. On Wednesday, his staff clipped one of his exchanges into a campaign-style video over soaring music. On Thursday, he met Pope Leo in the Vatican, exchanging gifts and kind words even though the president and vice president have feuded with the world’s most prominent religious leader.

More broadly, his popularity among the MAGA faithful is rising, it seems, as President Donald Trump’s presumed successor, Vice President JD Vance, sees his fall (at least a bit). The betting markets are suddenly bullish on Rubio as a potential 2028 nominee.

It’s not surprising he’d get a moment in the sun; secretaries of state are often among the more popular and attention-getting Cabinet members historically. He wouldn’t be the first to see their stock rise while memes spread about their hard work around the globe. He’s been careful not to make too much of it, tamping down presidential speculation.

But the way Rubio has gone about his role also raises some pressing questions about the party’s long-term future. It’s starting to look like he might want a say in mapping out what a post-Trump GOP world looks like, one that perhaps steers away from a harsher, more nationalistic version of the MAGA party. Whether that’s possible 10 years into the Trump era is an open question.

One particular answer during his press conference stood out in this regard. In response to a softball about his “hope for America,” Rubio articulated a vision of the American dream that seemed to paper over the last decade of Trump-era politics and felt like a time jump back to his 2016 presidential campaign.

“My hope for America is what it’s always been,” he said. “We want it to continue to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity, but frankly, it’s a place where you are able to overcome challenges and achieve your full potential.”

This was no rehashing of anti-woke/DEI diatribes, of pseudo-white nationalist demands about speaking English and tracing ancestry, or any of the familiar doom-and-gloom lines you might hear in a classic MAGA speech or from Trump’s familiar cast of characters.

Instead, it sounded something like the pre-Trump GOP, of a time when Rubio argued the Republican Party could usher in “a new American century,” centered around active world involvement, free markets, and younger leadership. It’s that old Reaganesque ideal, championed by candidates of both parties, of America as an idea: a nation united by principles of liberty, equality, and opportunity. And he always rooted these appeals to greatness in his own family’s immigrant heritage.

Rubio’s staff, it seems, noticed how well this answer was received, and clipped a minute-long video of it for both the secretary’s official and personal social media accounts. Its most notable feature: It overlaid his remarks with images of Trump.

In doing so, the clip wasn’t just a preview of what a Rubio 2028 campaign might look like, but also a crystal-ball picture of how he might try to merge Trump’s MAGA aesthetics with a pre-Trump message, and then sell it as the party’s logical next step.

Let’s put aside the question of whether Rubio, who has insisted he’s not running and is reportedly close to Vance, might have a chance in a primary against the vice president.

The minute-long clip is one of the best signals we’ve had as to Rubio’s vision of conservatism, a question that’s not easy to answer 10 years into his transformation from principled Trump critic to irrepleaceable ally. And it raises the possibility that the battle to define MAGA in 2028 and beyond may be more varied and competitive than it seems right now.

Instead of the “carnage” and destruction that Trump campaigned on, he revived an old GOP version of American exceptionalism and of what the American dream is:

“This was the healthy vision that I supported Marco Rubio on in 2016,” longtime California GOP adviser Mike Madrid, and a prominent Trump critic, told me. “This was the positive, aspirational big-tent Republican that I supported. He not only failed miserably; he capitulated and stuck a knife in that by becoming a Trumper. So to see him trying to resuscitate it is fascinating.”

And this message stands in contrast to the vision frequently advanced by Vance and his post-liberal wing of the GOP. In Vance’s telling, America isn’t an idea: It’s “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation,” as he said at the Republican National Convention in 2024. His corner of the party tends to take a more pessimistic view of legal immigration as well as illegal immigration; advocates celebrate “heritage Americans” with deep family roots as the nation’s foundational story, rather than the “melting pot” of aspiring immigrants each new generation has incorporated.

That distinction also reflects a difference between Rubio and the other folks in Trump’s sphere: His ability to be seen as an “adult in the room,” not as tarnished as his peers are with the Trump administration’s messiest policies (even as he oversees foreign policy during an unpopular war), not as “online” as everyone else, and more decent and measured in how he conducts his work. Vance is better known for both his “attack dog” role and nonstop posting (though he reportedly gave up social media for Lent this year).

“He understands that the loudest voices on social media operate on a very different set of incentives than the country itself does. Their work is engagement; his is governing,” Giancarlo Sopo, a Florida-based Republican strategist, told me. “You get that kind of trust by speaking to the country as it actually is, a large, pluralistic society made up overwhelmingly of decent people who want their kids to have a better life than they did. That is the country he addressed, and that is why his words resonated the way they did.”

That, at least, is also what some Republican voters are starting to communicate to pollsters and researchers: He’s a “real statesman” one Floridian told GOP consultant Sarah Longwell last month, while a Biden-Trump voter called him “genuine.”

Though it’s still early (maybe too early) we may be seeing the next stage of the life cycle of MAGA and Rubio’s parallel evolutions: from the GOP’s brief attempt to pivot to openness and inclusion after their 2012 collapse, to Rubio’s eventual loss and conversion to Trumpism in 2016, to his rise to Trump’s good graces in 2024 to a MAGA-lite platform in 2028.

Madrid and Sopo agree that anything is possible — Trump showed that — but disagreed on whether Rubio could create a gentler MAGA while reviving these old platitudes.

“What he’s going to try to do is say this is what Trumpism has always been about,” Madrid told me. “Trump is prominent in that ad. He’s trying to recast the narrative of what it was. He’s trying to put an aspirational mask on grievance. He’s trying to put a forward-thinking, shining-city-on-a-hill veneer on top of a pile of hate and division.”

Sopo thinks it looks much more possible. While Vance belongs to a movement of committed right-wing intellectuals, Trump’s own agenda has the loosest ideological underpinnings, making future iterations of MAGA logically plausible. If you squinted hard enough, you could cobble together some inconsistent Trump statements — his 2016 call for a “big beautiful door” in his border wall for legal immigrants, his business-friendly soft spot for certain migrant workers, his occasional kind words for DREAMers — and argue Rubio’s pitch is the next iteration.

“Conservatism was never meant to be ideological,” Sopo said. “Edmund Burke would have recognized his own vision in what Sec. Rubio articulated yesterday. It is a better, more authentic kind of conservatism.”

Rubio’s rise in 2016 was fueled in part by a then-popular argument that Republicans needed a more welcoming pitch to Latino voters and immigrant communities of all kinds. But Trump’s victory was powered by working-class white voters in 2016, and then his major gains with Latino voters in 2024, while running on “mass deportation,” seemed to decisively end that conversation.

Now, Latino and Asian voters appear to be abandoning the party in droves again, both in polls and real-world elections, which might suddenly put Rubio in the spotlight. A gentler MAGA might still be appealing to segments of the country that are more persuadable, are upset with Trump’s fumbling of his 2024 promises, like immigration and inflation, and are likely to flip between parties, like Latino and younger voters, both Sopo and Madrid said, in part because it will sound new to them after the Trump-Biden years.

“Most of the GOP’s recent gains with Hispanic voters have come among English-dominant Hispanics,” Sopo told me. “The more heavily Spanish electorate is the next frontier.” And to that point, Rubio can talk to them in Spanish, articulate this vision, and interweave his own heritage into it.

“He also brings serious thinking to the issues Hispanic families care most about: work, family, and the freedom to build a stable life,” he added. “That combination is rare in American politics right now.”

This triangulation sounds plausible in a hypothetical general election. But it may ultimately depend on what the GOP electorate wants, Madrid told me. They had the chance to elect Rubio in 2016 and decisively rejected him, in part over a flirtation with immigration reform that he’s long since abandoned. The party has only moved further from his message since then, and electability arguments have rarely been compelling since Trump’s 2016 run proved this line of thinking wrong.

“Did the Republican party just go on a bender and everyone’s going to ignore it?” Madrid said. “It’s a very peculiar way of speaking to a base that could not care less about a ‘shining city on a hill’ anymore or about making it in America. It’s about isolationism and protectionism. It’s not about expanding Jeffersonian ideals and demonstrating peace through strength. It’s about a medieval understanding of what raw power is.”