POLITICS: Rubio Confronted with Videos of Trump Falling Asleep Before the U.S. Senate

A Loyalist Caught in the Crosshairs of His Office

Marco Rubio is no novice. A Florida senator for over a decade, a 2016 Republican presidential candidate who ran against Trump himself, a renowned orator, and a seasoned debater. He knows how to handle a hearing. He knows how to dodge questions. He knows how to rephrase a trick question. But on Wednesday, something went wrong with his usual routine. As the videos played, his face betrayed what no amount of media preparation can fully hide: the realization that he was backed into a corner with no way out. Either he defends the indefensible, and becomes the visual accomplice to a documented lie, or he distances himself, and signs his own political death warrant within hours. Rubio chose the first option. Just like everyone else before him. Just like Mike Pompeo in his day. Just like Rex Tillerson, whose political career ended as a result.

His response was a verbal tightrope walk. He spoke of images taken out of context. He cited the crushing burden of the presidency, the endless meetings, the time zone differences at international summits. He tried to steer the debate back toward the diplomatic record: the agreements signed, the sanctions imposed, the president’s foreign trips. But his voice rang hollow. And Kaine didn’t let up. He pressed on. He clarified. He rephrased. The secretary of state eventually began shifting restlessly in his chair, a sign that he had lost control of the exchange. His aides, behind him, took notes without looking up. Capitol Hill was witnessing the public humiliation of an intelligent man forced to defend a narrative that no longer holds water. And this humiliation, unlike so many others in American politics, was filmed from every angle.

I look at this man and wonder what price he pays every night when he goes home. What conversations he has with his wife. With his children. With himself in the mirror. He was raised in the Cuban Catholic tradition, with a certain sense of honor, steeped in the narrative of exile and dignity. And here he is—defending a closed-eyes narrative before the United States Senate.

The political calculation of a potential 2028 candidate

Why is Rubio accepting this untenable position? The answer lies in four digits: 2028. The 54-year-old Secretary of State is one of the potential candidates to succeed the Republican president. He has long been considered the natural favorite in a post-Trump primary. His appointment to the State Department in January 2025 was seen as a strategic move. The idea was to give Rubio a high-profile, globally visible position so he could gain diplomatic experience before launching his campaign. On paper, the calculation was brilliant. But it assumed that the Trump administration would function normally, that the president would retain his capacity for leadership, and that the Secretary of State could carry out his duties without having to lie publicly every week. None of these three assumptions holds true today.

Rubio therefore finds himself facing an existential dilemma. Resigning with a bang would make him look like an opportunist in the eyes of the Trumpist base, which still dominates the Republican primary. Staying on until the end condemns him to bear, in 2028, the burden of all this administration’s failures. The choice is not an easy one. Several political analysts in Washington are beginning to bet on his resignation within the next six months. Others believe he will stick it out until the end, out of calculation, hoping that loyalty will eventually be rewarded. No one knows. Rubio himself, perhaps, is still wavering every morning. The events of November 19 will make that calculation much more difficult. Because Wednesday’s images will not fade away. They will be replayed on a loop throughout the 2028 campaign. Every opponent, every journalist, every debater will replay them. Rubio knows this. And perhaps that is what makes his face, on Wednesday, look so strangely closed off.

An Obsession That Backfired

For four years, Republicans made Joe Biden’s age their main weapon. Every stumble, every hesitation, every prolonged silence became a meme, a viral video, supposed proof of the Democrat’s inability to lead the country. The strategy worked. It contributed—more than policy platforms, more than track records—to weakening Biden to the point of forcing the Democratic Party to replace him with Kamala Harris midway through the campaign. Donald Trump, for his part, made his supposed vigor his central selling point. He hammered home that he had the energy, the health, and the mental sharpness. He mocked his opponent’s fatigue with a cruelty that made his supporters laugh and others cringe. But Trump is 79 years old. And the cameras, now, no longer lie for him either.

The American taboo surrounding a president’s age is coming back like a boomerang to haunt the Republican Party. Because the Constitution has never set an upper age limit. Because voters choose. Because the parties no longer dare to tell their aging champions that it’s time to step down. But also because the office has become physically overwhelming, in a world where crises never sleep. When Senator Kaine showed his footage on Wednesday, he wasn’t just setting Rubio up. He was posing a major civic question: Can a country be led by a man whose ability to stay awake in meetings has become a subject of parliamentary debate? The question is brutal. It’s uncomfortable. It’s necessary. And no one, on either side, really wants to answer it. Because the answer would open the door to constitutional reform—something both parties fear in equal measure.

I say this with no pleasure. What’s at stake here goes beyond Trump. Beyond Rubio. Beyond the Democrats. It’s the fragility of a system that has entrusted the nuclear codes to men whom biology is beginning to outpace—and that refuses to speak frankly about it.

The precedents no one wants to mention

American history is littered with ailing presidents whom their teams protected through thick and thin. Ronald Reagan, in his final months in the White House, was already showing the first signs of the Alzheimer’s disease that would eventually take his life. His inner circle kept it a secret. Woodrow Wilson, after his stroke in 1919, continued to formally hold office while his wife Edith actually made day-to-day decisions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at Yalta in February 1945, was a man at the end of his strength, two months before his death. The negotiations that sealed the postwar world order were led by an exhausted president, whom his doctors knew would not last much longer. What’s new in 2025 is constant video coverage. The smartphone that films. The streaming services that broadcast. The White House itself broadcasting live.

This imposed transparency changes everything. It makes the protective secrecy of the past impossible. It forces the administration to lie not in the hallways, but in front of the cameras. And it is precisely this obligation to lie in the full light of day that makes Rubio’s position so untenable. The Secretary of State can no longer simply deny things in private. He must deny them in the face of footage. In the face of comparisons. In the face of senators who’ve had time to prepare everything. Institutional lying has lost its shadow. It has become a spectacle. A spectacle in which the protagonists know they are being filmed while lying, and yet must lie anyway, because the political machine demands it. It is this dissonance, more than the images themselves, that makes the moment historic. Week after week, the American public witnesses a collective performance that everyone knows is false, and that none of the main actors dares to interrupt.

Increasingly Detailed Leaks

Trump’s inner circle is holding steady—officially, at least. Vice President JD Vance is making frequent media appearances to defend the president’s energy. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is tightening security around the Oval Office. The White House press secretary dismisses every viral video as a malicious montage. But behind the scenes, leaks tell a different story. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico regularly publish anonymous accounts of meetings where the president loses his train of thought, asks for points raised five minutes earlier to be repeated, or actually falls asleep before the end of a presentation. These accounts are officially denied. They are privately confirmed by multiple sources. The gap between the official version and the whispered reality continues to widen.

Rubio occupies a special place within this architecture of denial. As Secretary of State, he serves as the president’s interface with the world. He meets with foreign leaders whom Trump is no longer willing or able to meet with at length. He conveys the messages that the Oval Office can no longer articulate clearly. He has, in effect, become a permanent diplomatic stand-in. It is precisely this role as a front man that makes his testimony before Congress so compromising. Because he knows. Better than anyone, perhaps. He sees the president every week. He knows the true state of affairs. And he must, under oath, maintain that everything is fine. This mental burden cannot be sustained indefinitely. Government departments are beginning to operate with partial autonomy, each handling its own issues and making its own decisions, with coordination at the top becoming increasingly unclear. This technocratic drift, barely visible from the outside, is one of the tangible effects of the president’s observable failure.

We speak of a president. But what we’ve seen in action for several months now is an administration without a captain. A team rowing, each in their own direction, while pretending to follow a course. This is how democracies are hollowed out from within. Not by a coup d’état. But by a slow dilution of leadership.

The Cost to U.S. Diplomacy

Beyond the personal drama, there is a major strategic cost. The United States’ allies are watching. So are its adversaries. When the head of U.S. diplomacy is filmed defending his president’s lack of awareness, the signal sent to the world is devastating. European foreign ministries, already shaken by tensions over Ukraine, NATO, and tariffs, are quietly distancing themselves. Berlin, Paris, and London are preparing diplomatic continuity plans that assume a progressively failing U.S. presidency. Beijing is watching closely. Moscow is gloating, though it doesn’t say so openly. Tehran is calculating every move. The credibility of a superpower is measured by the strength of its word. And Rubio’s statement on Wednesday lost several notches of gravity in capitals around the world.

The concrete consequences will become apparent in the coming months. In trade negotiations with China, where the U.S. side will be perceived as weakened from within. On the Ukraine issue, where Europeans will be more hesitant to follow directives from a White House they suspect is run by a small inner circle rather than by the president-elect. In relations with Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu will exploit every American weakness to advance his own regional agenda. In relations with Latin America, which Rubio knows better than anyone, but which he now manages with diminished authority. The events of November 19 are not an isolated incident. They are a milestone. A signal sent to the 192 other UN member states. A warning that no official statement can erase. In just a few minutes of testimony, American diplomacy has lost some of what remained of its global prestige.

An Institution Rediscovering Its Tools

For eight years, since Trump’s election in 2016, the U.S. Congress has oscillated between fascination, complacency, and resistance. Republicans have largely fallen in line. Democrats have railed against the administration without always turning their anger into effective action. Committees have held a string of hearings—often fruitless—where each side played its part for the cameras before heading home. On Wednesday, November 19, something changed. Not in the partisan balance of power, which remains as it is. But in the nature of the confrontation. For the first time in a long while, a senator used the simplest and most devastating method: showing footage. Not commenting. Not interpreting. Just showing. And asking a senior executive branch official to comment on what everyone had seen.

This technique could quickly catch on. When a method works politically and in the media, it gets replicated. We can therefore expect, in the coming months, a proliferation of these visual confrontations. Every senior official in the Trump administration who appears before a committee risks finding himself facing a screen. Facing images. Facing comparisons. Capitol Hill has just rediscovered a weapon it had forgotten. And this weapon is all the more effective because it does not depend on a parliamentary majority. It depends solely on a senator’s ability to ask a question and show a video. Tim Kaine has just opened a toolbox that his colleagues will be quick to use in the coming weeks. The dynamics of Congress could be permanently altered as a result.

I’d like to believe this is an institutional breakthrough. I’m not so sure. It may simply be an effective communication tactic that will be used to the point of exhaustion, until the public grows tired of it. But in the meantime, it’s producing real results. And in American politics, real results have become a rare commodity.

The Democrats Are Finding Their Footing

Since Kamala Harris’s defeat in November 2024, the Democratic Party has been searching for a stance. A voice. A strategy. The party’s veteran figures are worn out. The young up-and-comers are hesitant. Second-tier senators are launching numerous initiatives without always seeing eye to eye. Tim Kaine, through his hearing on Wednesday, has just proposed a model—not a platform, but a method—and this method is beginning to capture the interest of the new generation of Democrats. Pete Buttigieg, from Indiana, publicly praised his colleague’s performance. Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan and a likely candidate in the 2028 primary, shared the videos with a measured but clear comment. Josh Shapiro, from Pennsylvania, did the same. The ranks are slowly regrouping around a simple idea: we won’t let this happen again.

This regrouping remains fragile. It will remain merely cosmetic until the Democrats regain a majority in one of the two chambers of Congress. The November 2026 midterms will be decisive. If the Democrats retake the House of Representatives, they will be able to launch genuine investigative committees, with subpoena power, budgets, and serious investigative resources. If the Senate also swings the other way, the prospect of impeachment proceedings in the event of proven misconduct by the president could once again become credible. But for that to happen, the momentum must hold until then. The images must continue to be broadcast. The administration’s contradictions must continue to be exposed. Voters must continue to see. The events of November 19 are merely the opening act. The play itself will run until the 2028 election. And its outcome will depend as much on the president’s actual health as on the opposition’s ability to turn every hearing into a moment of public truth.

Beyond the Political Gag

It would be easy to reduce the November 19 incident to a viral moment, a clever punchline, or a fleeting humiliation for a minister caught off guard. But that would be missing the point. What unfolded in that Capitol chamber was a clash between two regimes of truth. On one side, the official narrative—carefully crafted, rehearsed, and defended under oath by a high-ranking official whose career depends on his loyalty. On the other, the visual evidence—raw and accessible to any citizen with a phone and an internet connection. And in this confrontation, the official narrative lost. Not because it was logically dismantled, but because it was contradicted by the evidence of the senses. The country saw it. The world saw it. And no one can claim anymore that they didn’t see it.

This defeat of the official narrative in the face of visual evidence is the defining event of our political era. It transcends Trump, Rubio, Kaine, and even the United States. It affects all democracies grappling with aging leaders, bloated communications apparatuses, and citizen journalists who are constantly filming and broadcasting. Political lies—as old as politics itself—are gradually becoming untenable in their traditional form. It must now be reinvented. Disguised. Masked. But the truth always prevails in the end. Donald Trump’s closed eyelids, projected on Wednesday before the U.S. Senate, are perhaps the most accurate symbol of this era. A president asleep while his secretary of state defends before Congress the idea that he is awake. No political novel would have dared to write such a scene. Reality, however, wrote it without hesitation.

I close this column without certainty. I don’t know how long Rubio will hold out. I don’t know if Trump will finish his term. I don’t know what the 2026 midterms will bring. But I do know that Wednesday’s images will not fade away. They have entered the collective memory. They wait. They bide their time. And one day—perhaps soon—they will play their part again in an even grander scene.

Signed, Jacques Pj Provost, columnist