The Secretary of State’s recent pivot to spitting rap lyrics and spinning tracks has been hailed by scholars as a devastatingly urgent piece of performance art about imperial decay.
To properly contextualize the Secretary of State’s recent foray into spitting rap lyrics from the White House briefing room—pausing his recitation only to playfully entertain a purportedly final two questions before magnanimously accepting seven more—one must look beyond the pedestrian realm of Sunday morning punditry. We are witnessing a profound, almost devastating interrogation of imperial collapse, functioning much like the frantic, joyous disassociation found in the storm-swept third act of Shakespeare's King Lear, assuming, of course, that the Fool had access to a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 controller and a captive press pool. The sheer audacity of acting as a DJ at a family wedding, headphones pressed to his ear as his hand pumps to an unseen beat while his administration oversees a grinding ground war and soaring domestic gas prices, is a masterstroke of the avant-garde, a calculated refusal to engage with the vulgar, literalist mechanics of geopolitical reality that you, the casual news consumer, presumably still cling to.
It is impossible not to trace the genealogy of this moment back to the 1962 Fluxus happening Danger Music Number 17, in which Dick Higgins famously asked performers to scream until their vocal cords gave out. Rubio, ever the innovator, has merely inverted the piece, choosing instead to unleash a barrage of lighthearted dad-jokes into the void of a dimming GOP midterm outlook. Yet, the most rigorous scholars of the form will inevitably recognize the tonal DNA of an entirely different canon, finding the true spiritual predecessor to Rubio’s White House residency in the 2003 live-action CGI comedy Kangaroo Jack, a cinematic text similarly obsessed with the cheerful, oblivious navigation of imminent, catastrophic violence.
The Secretary's decision to aggressively pump his fist to a wedding playlist while the republic teeters on the brink of structural insolvency is not mere glad-handing, but rather a violent disruption of the electorate's expectation of statecraft.
It is precisely this tension that elevated his midweek audience with Pope Leo XIV from a mere diplomatic errand into a transcendent, site-specific installation. Escorted through the marble hallways of Vatican City by the plumed members of the Pontifical Swiss Guard, Rubio presented himself not as an angry surrogate for a President and Vice President who have actively criticized the pontiff, but as the happy warrior—a beaming, frictionless void reflecting the papacy’s own ornamental obsolescence right back at it. In a more normal time, the uneducated observer might mistake him for just another glad-handing politician, utterly failing to grasp that his joyful, spitting lyricism is the only rational aesthetic response to a world already engulfed in flames.