But Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been championing a different approach. The former senator from Florida, who also serves as the president’s national security adviser, has a long-standing abhorrence of leftist Latin American dictators and has advocated for Maduro’s ouster, a call backed by the legions of Venezuelan and Cuban exiles in Miami. To bring his arguments in line with Trump’s domestic priorities, Rubio has portrayed the Venezuelan leader as the head of a narcotics enterprise running drugs into the United States, as well as an agent of the destabilization that fuels migration.