Senator Rubio’s declaration to the Sun in respect of President Trump that “I took my shots and he took his shots” during the 2016 primary could presage a renewed alliance between the two Floridians in advance of the election later this year.

Mr. Rubio, who in 2016 was derided as “little Marco” by the 45th president, is quick to add that he knows of “no reason” why Mr. Trump should pick him to be his vice president.* The senator, though, in a wide ranging conversation with this correspondent, projected himself as a man at the van of his party. 

As Israel fights at Gaza, Mr. Rubio denounces the “far-left antisemitic, anti-Israel, and pro-Hamas element” that he alleges has dug its hooks into the Democratic Party and the Biden administration. He declares that “Hamas has to be defeated” and denounces “efforts to appease” the terrorist army, who he lambasts as “animals” seeking to render Israel an “unlivable hellscape.” 

Diving into the crux of the conflict between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Biden — whether the Jewish state will attack Hamas’s last redoubt of Rafah — Mr. Rubio explains that he supports “Israel winning and you can’t win without Rafah.” He notes that for Israel, this war is “existential” and efforts to undercut its fighting forces are “abhorrent.” 

Mr. Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, adopts a stern tone when the topic turns to the southern border. He describes the chaos there not as immigration, but as “mass migration” and a situation that “has to stop.” He urges Mr. Biden not to reach for a new law, but to “admit” that Mr. Trump was right on stringent executive orders at the border. Mr. Biden reversed those. 

The senator came out against a draft bipartisan immigration bill hammered out by Senators Lankford, Murphy, and Sinema. Mr. Rubio claims that its provisions would create an “even stronger magnet for even more illegal immigration,” and tells the Sun that opposing the measure “wasn’t a tough decision.” It, he insists, “wasn’t my deal.” 

Mr. Rubio is eager to talk TikTok. He, after all, introduced legislation in 2022 that proposed to ban it from operating in America, and has long warned of the threat posed by its proximity to the Chinese Communist Party. That looks to have been prescient. A bill that passed the House of Representatives last week would, if okayed by the Senate, order the sale of TikTok within six months to a buyer approved by our government. 

Pushed by the Sun as to whether this forced sale would amount to excessive governmental intrusion into the free market — a heavy rather than an invisible hand — he reminds that the “fundamental obligation of the government is to protect us from foreign threats.” TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, “must do whatever the Chinese government orders them to do.” The senator worries above all about the algorithm, controlled at Beijing.

Mr. Rubio, turning from threats from abroad to what perceives as baleful developments here at home, worries that the sundry prosecutions of Mr. Trump preview a country “where partisans can threaten a president.” He agrees that “nobody is above the law,” but calls Mr. Trump’s invocation of presidential immunity — to be heard by the Supreme Court next month — a “legitimate issue.”

The senator decries what he calls an “all-out assault” against Mr. Trump with respect to the four criminal and various civil cases brought by state and federal prosecutors. The racketeering one brought by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, is, he asserts, a “joke,” and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money prosecution is “an even bigger joke.”

Mr. Rubio also evinces skepticism that Mr. Trump could ever get a fair trial — that’s ordained by the Sixth Amendment — at the District of Columbia, where the former president is being tried by Special Counsel Jack Smith for attempting to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

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*Such a ticket would likely post constitutional hurdles for the campaign.