WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s perfect day is watching 15 hours of college football, and he prefers hip-hop and EDM to country music, which he finds “too sad.”
America’s top diplomat opened up to Katie Miller for her podcast alongside his former Miami Dolphins cheerleader wife Jeanette in a rare candid conversation that veered from his typical portfolio on matters of world peace and national security.
Still, Rubio said he had to deploy diplomacy to find common ground with his wife’s choice in music.
The one-time wedding DJ revealed that he figured out a creative way to get amped up about country music, his wife’s genre of choice.
“I love a lot of electronic music because it fuses classical, increasingly, it does country music,” Rubio explained on Katie Miller’s podcast. “I like a lot of the remixes of songs that you’ve heard — there’s this EDM mix of ‘Ring of Fire’ which is really good. So I like that stuff.”
“I listen to a little bit of everything except for — I don’t hate it, okay?” the nation’s top diplomat said carefully while sitting next to his wife, Jeanette. “I’m not against it. I’m not anti-country music, but that’s not my thing. She loves it. She loves country.”
“I think it’s just very sad,” Rubio vented of his wife’s choice. “Most of the songs are about, like, somebody whose wife and dog left them.”
Jeanette, the country music buff, protested that he needs to “listen to more Morgan Wallen and others.”
Rubio said Tupac Shakur is his favorite rapper, while lamenting the “Dear Mama” rapper didn’t live long enough for the world “to know what he would’ve turned into.”
He recoiled at Miller’s suggestion that he adopt the rapper name of “Lil’ Marco,” a spoof of President Trump’s once go-to insult against him during the 2016 presidential campaign cycle.
“I haven’t thought about it. I mean, I wouldn’t be a good rapper, but I probably could be a good producer in terms of like identifying talent and so forth,” he said.
The sit-down with Miller brought out the lighter side of Rubio, including how he’d like to spend his limited downtime.
The Secretary of State, who also serves as acting National Security Advisor and briefly was the acting Archivist and acting Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has long been a big football buff.
He fantazied about his dream weekend of watching college and NFL football from morning to night, with a little nap in between games.
“That is an incredible weekend, in my opinion,” he awed. “But that’s never going to happen.”
Jeanette confirmed that she doesn’t like to watch too much football, but is happy to watch “some” of it, especially when their son Anthony, a running back for the Florida Gators, is playing.
As for a hypothetical career after politics, Rubio floated getting involved in “sports stuff,” particularly at the intersection of culture.
He even suggested a sports podcast that “won’t be about politics” and “might not even be about foreign policy.”
“I don’t know, obviously. I hadn’t even thought about that yet,” he mused when asked about what comes after politics. “But basically, whatever pays the most.”
