WASHINGTON — For Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the enemy is near. In fact, it lives two doors down. And it’s a cat.
When he’s not dealing with world events, he is waging war with his famous neighbor’s feline, Rubio revealed to Katie Miller for her podcast.
And that cat may know a thing or two about warfare. It belongs to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his wife Jennifer, who live near the Rubios on a military base in the Washington, DC area.
“I never took Pete for a cat guy,” the dog-loving Rubio mused of the Pentagon chief.
In an hour-long, wide-ranging interview with his wife Jeanette, Rubio touched on everything from his MAHA diet aversion, concerns a White House staffer was dead on Air Force One, and his belief in UFOs flying over military bases.
But he had choice words for one of the Hegseth cats that likes to hang out on the secretary of state’s porch.
“I’ll get home at night and the cat is just sitting on my porch and just looks at me,” Rubio said, adding the cat has an “attitude.”
“The cat is a very arrogant cat,” he added.
The feline has made itself at home at the Rubios and shows no signs of leaving.
“It doesn’t even – usually a cat, you approach it and it takes off. This one does not take off running,” he noted.
“I don’t even know the name of this cat,” he admitted.
In fairness, the Rubio goldendoodles may have started it. One of their two dogs made itself at home at the Hegseths.
“We have one that’s really smart,” Rubio said. “Knows how to open the door. So one day, I think Pete and his family were just sitting around watching television, and they keep their front door open because they have cats.”
“My dog just walked into their living room and looked around, realized I’m in the wrong house, and turned around and walked out,” he added.
When not dealing with pet wars, Rubio, who also doubles as national security adviser, is busy with other job duties. He touched on several of them during the interview, including unidentified flying objects.
Rubio believes the truth is out there about UFOs and the Trump administration will find it.
He said he takes UFO sightings seriously and that the government needs to find out “what’s flying over our airspace.”
“I don’t know what it is, but there are things flying over our military installations and they’re not ours, and we should look into this, be serious about it,” he said.
He was clear he doesn’t believe there was some kind of conspiracy at work but said “we should know what’s flying over our airspace.”
There have long been reports about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena over US military bases, including a recent one about a 100-foot black triangular UFO over a Colorado military base. The Trump administration, led by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, have been working to solve the UFO mystery.
Rubio said if they could find an answer, President Trump “would be all over that.”
“He’d be showing the pictures and the videos. But Stephen is on that case now, and I think he’s doing a great job with that,” he added.
Katie Miller revealed her husband gives her no details because the information is “classified.”
Rubio and wife Jeanette joined Miller for an hour-long interview, talking about their sleep habits, their work in the Trump administration and their family life.
In the interview, Rubio revealed some issues with his famous next-door neighbors on the military base in the DC area. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his wife Jennifer have two cats – compared to the Rubios two goldendoodles – and the pets can present some challenges.
The Rubios’ dogs often wander down the street to the Hegseth home.
“We have one that’s really smart,” Rubio said. “Knows how to open the door. So one day, I think Pete and his family were just sitting around watching television, and they keep their front door open because they have cats, which I never took Pete for a cat guy.”
“My dog just walked into their living room and looked around, realized I’m in the wrong house, and turned around and walked out,” he added.
And he has his issues with one Hegseth cat, who likes to hang out on Rubio’s porch.
“I’ll get home at night and the cat is just sitting on my porch and just looks at me,” Rubio said, adding the cat has an “attitude.”
“The cat is a very arrogant cat,” he added.
And the feline has made itself at home.
“The cat just looks at you. It doesn’t even – usually a cat, you approach it and it takes off. This one does not take off running,” he noted.
The secretary of state also revealed he won’t try the popular MAHA diet that Vice President JD Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. utilize. Part of Make America Healthy Again, it involves eating meat and fermented foods like sauerkraut.
“This is a crazy diet,” Rubio said, extolling his love of sugar. “This is not a sustainable thing.”
Noting his hectic travel schedule as secretary of state, he added: “I’m not going to travel the world with a cooler full of sauerkraut. It’s ridiculous. I can’t do it.”
But Jeanette Rubio revealed the real reason: her husband’s love of Pop-Tarts.
“He eats all the things you should not be eating, every single thing,” she said.
Rubio extolled the virtues of the breakfast pastry: “The Pop-Tart is one of the great American innovations in the history of the world, if you think about it. It comes in this beautiful foil package.”
“You need carbohydrates to function,” he added.
But he also loves fast food, his wife revealed.
Rubio copped to his love of convenient food options but explained the one time he tried the keto diet – which limits carbohydrates and sugar – he went crazy.
“You just eat all this protein, and so you go through this massive withdrawal from sugar and carbohydrates for the first 72 hours. It was a near-psychotic event for me,” he said.
He didn’t talk about the NATO trip or the secret plane switch that resulted from a security concern about the president, but he did reveal on the flight back from an overseas trip to China in June that one staffer slept so long and deeply on a couch in the Air Force One conference room that they thought the person died.
“For a significant period of this flight, it was debatable whether this person had passed away or not, depending on how they’re sleeping,” Rubio said.
The person wasn’t responding to all the noise on the plane – the background noise of the engines or people chattering.
“I couldn’t see chest movement,” he said. “I couldn’t establish a consistent breathing pattern in the individual, but I also didn’t want to wake them up on the one hand or discover a dead body on the other.”
The staff worried what they would do if a dead body was discovered on the presidential plane and an ensuing investigation.
“We spent a considerable – like 90 minutes sort of debating, should we make a move? Should I call the doc? Should we deal with this? Because it’s embarrassing if you wake him up – oh, I was just sleeping. But if they were dead, like, what do you do? You have a dead body on the plane,” Rubio said.
“I don’t know what the protocol is for it.”
Fortunately, the unnamed person was fine and woke up.
On a serious note, Rubio described a day in his work life: starting at the State Department and moving over to the White House around noon.
And he talks to President Trump multiple times a day.
“He’ll start working the phones at or around 6:00 a.m.,” he said of the president, whom he described as a great storyteller.
“He’s been a public figure for almost half a century,” Rubio said. “He knew everybody at some point or another. He had interacted with everybody. He’s just got great stories. If you ask him about somebody, he’ll go back and tell you about them. And it’s a pretty amazing life he’s lived.”
