A Sans-Serif Font and a Sans-Serious Secretary of State
Even the straight news reporters who wrote articles in The Guardian and The New York Times failed to conceal their bemused confusion when reporting on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's announcement early this week that his department will henceforth return to using Times New Roman rather than the Calibri font. Yes, the story truly is that stupid, but that is Rubio's world in late 2025.
Not that the font change itself deserves much discussion, given Rubio's claim that the now-returned-to-its-rightful-place-of-greatness font "restore[s] decorum and professionalism to" State's printed communication. Sure. Also, he claimed that it was "wasteful" to have changed to Calibri in the first place, which evidently means that it costs money -- or at least Rubio is willing to stand publicly beyond the claim that it costs money -- to have changed the font, which means that it will cost money to switch it back. I guess two wastes make an efficient, or something. (If, dear reader, this evokes echoes of all those change-backs to Confederate generals' names in public places and reinstalling their statues, you are an astute observer.)
But the news articles made clear that Rubio's edict was in fact merely more culture-warmongering, with Rubio now taking bold action against anything that could remotely be associated with caring about other people. Indeed, it turns out that this was part of an anti-DEIA campaign by the Trumpies. What is DEIA, you ask? We all know that DEI is the dreaded "diversity, equity, and inclusion" bogeyman that Republicans have used to claim that the world pre-Trump was unfair to White men (to the point where anyone who is not a White man is presumptively unqualified to hold a job, in the bro-world's view). Nothing is subtle anymore.
But DEIA? I quickly learned that the A stands for accessibility, as in making public accommodations of the sort that the first President George Bush's Americans with Disabilities Act has required for more than a third of a century. Yes, I knew that Trump was willing to mock people with disabilities, but that was hardly his go-to bigotry. And yes, apparently some hardcore Trump supporters (and Trump himself) want to be able to use the word that does not rhyme with reward as freely as they once did in gym class.
Even so, this is some pretty inanely specific hatred. Under former President Biden, Rubio's predecessor Antony Blinken adopted Calibri "to improve accessibility for readers with disabilities, such as low vision and dyslexia, and people who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers." But Rubio insists that the shift did "achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence." Again, sure.
As an aside, Donald Trump receives far too much credit for his nickname putdowns. We remember some of them because he simply repeats them endlessly (and often because other people talk about how stupid or childish they are). But in general, they are uninspired or fall flat. Lyin' Ted? Not wrong, exactly, but hardly unique to Cruz, and it completely missed the creepiness that defines the Texas senator. Shifty Schiff? Lazy. Marjorie Traitor Brown? Roundly mocked because Trump himself had to keep explaining the supposedly sick burn ("Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!"). Ron DeSanctimonious? Whatever. (Meatball Ron was at least visually accurate.) Even Crooked Hillary was hardly a coup de grace by Trump, because Republicans had spent decades inventing that whole lie. He just repeated it over and over again.
But oh, man, was Lil' Marco a bullseye! It achieved what that kind of insult is supposed to: capture something that everyone saw and felt but had not yet put their finger on, and in so doing define the target in a way that they can never escape in the future. When we look at Rubio, even today we think of his weird grab for a water bottle long before Trump came along, but we also look at how diminished he looks while sulking on a sofa in the Oval Office. Did you know that he is 54 years old? For most people, looking younger than one's years is a great thing. For Lil' Marco, however, it merely reminds everyone that he is not a big boy.
I confess that criticizing Rubio always feels not only like punching down but also like bullying a kid who is incapable of fighting back. He has all the gravitas of a Mylar balloon with a clown's face on it, and he exudes the seriousness appropriate to a bachelorette party on Bourbon Street.
But he deserves the criticism, harsh as it is, because he allowed himself to become the Secretary of State. Importantly, this is not just any old cabinet position. (Does anyone truly care that the current Secretary of Transportation is a former "actor" on MTV's "The Real World: Boston"?) We have even had some truly unserious Attorneys General. This, however, is the State Department.
Why does that matter more than almost all of the others? There have certainly been terrible Secretaries of State over the years. Dean Rusk, who served under both JFK and LBJ, was a major architect of the Vietnam War (along with Robert McNamara), but he was a very serious and careful person. Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, for heaven's sake, but no one ever mistook him for a lost undergraduate who wandered into a faculty seminar.
Secretaries of State have important things to do, and although many have done horrible things (see above), there are true successes as well. As it happens, I took a short trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland, earlier this week. I had never been to that part of the UK, but a friend recommended that I take the short train trip while I am living on the same island as the former location of The Troubles. My mental image of Northern Ireland (and especially Belfast) had been entirely formed by decades of news about how bad things were up there.
But in 1998, a true diplomatic success occurred. I have hardly been shy about expressing my disdain for Bill Clinton over the years, but this is the one exception to my "I will always despise" Clinton rule. As exceptions go, it is a whopper. He "took a keen interest in Northern Ireland," and in the end, he and his team of foreign policy experts were able to broker the Good Friday Agreements, which changed everything.
One would not have known on my train rides to or from Belfast that one was crossing an international border (other than receiving a text from my data provider telling me the roaming rules). There was no border check of any kind. I brought my passport, but it was unnecessary. The only other difference was that I paid for goods and services in pounds rather than euros.
The point is that this is a miracle. Being able to experience this as just another trip to a European city that is (mostly) successfully navigating post-industrialism meant that this trip was no different from when I gave a lecture at, say, the University of Leeds in England in 2019. It feels like no big deal, and that is the point. And even when Boris Johnson's "Get Brexit Done" insanity put all of that at risk, the success of the Good Friday Agreement was too widely treasured for even that human political wrecking ball to destroy it.
There is plenty of credit to go around for the success of the negotiations back in the 1990's, certainly most importantly to the people who had to agree to come to the table and then reach a very difficult set of compromises. But the US diplomatic effort was a but-for cause of that success. Clinton named the Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, as special envoy (and he eventually chaired the talks), but the Secretary of State at that time was Madeleine Albright, who was a key player beyond the scenes throughout the process. She was an asset..
Do I even need to say what readers are already thinking? Rusk and Kissinger caused countless deaths, and Albright helped prevent countless more. But the point is that they were all serious people who would never had considered, say, sitting in a cabinet meeting and saying that Trump is "the only leader in the world that can help end" the war in Ukraine. They were serious people who would not have wasted time announcing that the Calibri font is bad because serif fonts are "generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony."
The thing is, Rubio did not have to do any of this. He was a multi-term US Senator from a huge state, having won reelection in 2020 by seventeen points. Despite his utter lack of substance or charisma, he was pushed forward in 2016 as a presidential candidate. He could have decided a year ago to stay in the Senate and do what his colleagues do. Cruz is a part-time politician and full-time podcaster/troll. Tom Cotton is an eager apologist for war crimes. They surely have plans to run for President whenever Trump is not around. Why would Rubio leave?
Meanwhile, Rubio reportedly is saying that JD Vance is the frontrunner for 2028 and that he (Rubio) would "support the vice president if he chose to run." So now Rubio is trying to make nice with a younger man who would make sure that Rubio never achieves his dream of being in charge. It is one thing to imagine an ambitious person suppressing his own desires to keep the old man happy. But this?
It is possible, of course, that Rubio is doing what he is doing because he truly believes in it. OK, stop laughing. I at least had to write it down. There is no evidence that he cares about anything as a substantive matter. He once agreed to join a Senate effort to reform immigration laws to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Now, he happily serves in an administration that grabs even US citizens off the streets to deport them.
More broadly, does anyone know what this man stands for? I mean, even with Vance's flip-flopping to become Vice President, we know what he believes in (and it is scary). We also know what motivates Cruz or Josh Hawley. But Rubio? If he ever did or said something that could have been his signature issue or his coming-out moment, he made a pretty lil' deal about it.
Maybe he should consider using a more impressive font.