Secretary of State Marco Rubio has laughed off the White House press team's comparison of his outfit for Air Force One’s flight to Beijing this week to the sweatsuit worn by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro after his capture by U.S. forces.
Rubio was pictured in a grey Nike tracksuit by White House communications director Steven Cheung on Wednesday as the president and his posse traveled to China for a summit with Xi Jinping. Wearing the pristine light-grey fit, an unsmiling Rubio posed for the camera on board the plane with his hands in his pockets.
Cheung then captioned the photo: “Secretary Rubio rocking the Nike Tech ‘Venezuela’ on Air Force One!”, kicking off a slew of memes across MAGA-supporting X circles. The New York Post headlined the photo: “Maduromaxxing”.
On Thursday, Rubio denied knowing ahead of time that Cheung saw a similarity between his outfit and the jailed Venezuelan president’s.
“No, no, no,” he said, laughing off the comparison when he was asked about it and the “context” of the post by NBC’s Tom Llamas. “There’s no context. It’s a nice suit.”
When Llamas pressed that it was the “same one that Maduro was wearing”, the secretary responded: “It is, but you know what? He copied me, because I had it before [him].”
Despite Rubio’s denial, the official White House account still ran with a meme on X after Cheung’s initial post. A brief video shared from the official White House account depicted Rubio quoting Biggie Smalls at a press conference following Maduro’s capture — “if you don’t know, now you know” — before displaying the two images of Maduro and Rubio over the rapper’s 1994 tune “Juicy”.
Maduro was pictured blindfolded, handcuffed and wearing ear protection after his capture on January 3 by U.S. forces at his compound in Caracas, Venezuela. The Venezuelan leader was brought on board a U.S. aircraft carrier and transported to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges after a night raid to capture him was carried out by U.S. special forces.
The secretary is part of Donald Trump’s presidential delegation to China for a short visit, which included a major summit between the U.S. president and Xi Jinping, the first of Trump’s second term. Trump was serenaded with the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A” during an elaborate state visit ceremony, and the U.S. president invited the Chinese leader to Washington in return.
Other members of the president’s delegation included Elon Musk, Trump’s on-again, off-again ally, and several other American CEO’s, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
The vice president was a notable exclusion from the trip, and spent his week in Maine and in an interview with the “looksmaxxing” streamer Clavicular as the president and his other advisers met with Xi and discussed broadening U.S.-Chinese economic ties, per readouts from the two sides. The Strait of Hormuz and ongoing war with Iran were also a topic, according to the White House, as violence continues to spiral in the region and a U.S.-Iranian ceasefire deteriorates.
Rubio’s star in the administration and broader MAGAworld is rising as the president’s top diplomat increasingly finds time in front of the camera under Trump’s second term, while Vance has been relegated to less prominent duties.
At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Texas this year, Rubio came within 20 points of Vance as the favorite among attendees to wear the MAGA crown in 2028, after barely registering in the poll’s results just a year before.
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