Marco Rubio sees his 2028 odds soar on Polymarket after Venezuela attacks

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s prospects of becoming the next president of the United States have more than doubled in response to Saturday’s dramatic events in Venezuela, which saw the U.S. military topple dictator Nicolas Maduro.

After months of tensions with the South American oil state, missile blasts were heard over Caracas in the early hours of Saturday morning as American forces swooped into the capital and captured Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, subsequently removing them to New York to answer to drugs and weapons charges.

The intervention was approved by President Donald Trump, who was flanked by Rubio, as well as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, at a Mar-a-Lago press conference that afternoon at which he said the U.S. intends to “run” Venezuela until a new government is ready to take over. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, has since been sworn in as acting president.

“Don’t play games with this president in office, because it’s not going to turn out well,” Rubio warned at the press conference.

The secretary’s central role in the operation has seen his odds of becoming the next occupant of the White House soar from just 4 percent last month to 9 percent on Monday morning, according to the betting company Polymarket.

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That still leaves the 54-year-old some way behind Vice President JD Vance in the race to be Trump’s successor on the Republican ticket, with MAGA’s heir-apparent, 41, currently well ahead on 30 percent.

The highest-placed Democrats, according to Polymarket’s 2028 forecast, are California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at 18 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

The Wall Street Journal reported last summer that Trump has been in the habit of playing Vance and Rubio off against each other over who might succeed him, rather than explicitly endorsing either man.

“Which one of you is going to be at the top of the ticket?,” he reportedly asked them. “I used to think it would be Vance-Rubio, but maybe it will be Rubio-Vance.”

Unlike many members of Trump’s “America First” coalition, opposed to U.S. intervention in foreign conflicts, Rubio, who was raised in Miami’s anti-communist Cuban expatriate community, has spent much of his career denouncing leftist governments in South America over their hostility towards the U.S. He has long advocated for regime change in Venezuela and Cuba.

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The Floridian has further boosted his profile over the last two days by serving as the public face of the Trump administration’s actions, making clear that Washington expects Rodriguez to cooperate with its demands now that Maduro is gone.

“We expect to see changes in Venezuela,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning when questioned about the country’s immediate future.

“Changes of all kinds, long term, short term, we’d love to see all kinds of changes but the most immediate changes are the ones that are in the national interest of the United States. That’s why we are involved here. Because of how it applies, and has a direct impact on the United States.”

He continued: “We are not going to be able to allow, in our hemisphere, a country that becomes a crossroads for the activities of all of our adversaries around the world.

“We can’t have a country where the people in charge of its military and in charge of its police department are openly cooperating with drug trafficking organizations. We’re not going to allow that.”

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Rubio also denied that the true goal of the operation was seizing control of the country’s plentiful natural resources, insisting, “We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. We have plenty of oil in the United States… This is not about securing the oil fields.”

A Trump administration insider has since told Axios they expect the power vacuum in Caracas to be filled temporarily by “a small committee, led by Rubio, with the president heavily engaged,” with Hegseth, Caine, Ratcliffe, White House adviser Stephen Miller, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum all likely to play a part.

Rubio has already reportedly begun making calls to Rodriguez in Spanish, which the president has characterized as friendly and productive – despite Rubio saying he does not consider her a “legitimate” president and she moving to denounce the snatching of Maduro.

Meanwhile, the secretary’s role in the mission has been brutally denounced by Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times, who invoked Rubio’s past attacks on Trump when they were rivals for the Republican nomination in 2016 to call him the “worst vendido (sell-out) of them all,” arguing that putting him in charge of foreign policy is like “putting an arsonist in charge of a fireworks stall.”