Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visibly proud on Friday after his daughter, Daniella, introduced him ahead of a major speech following the midterm elections.
“Was that cool or what?” Rubio said enthusiastically after his daughter addressed the audience at the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention.
“I don’t know where she got this,” he said, marveling at her confidence. “There’s no stage fright. She’s not afraid to speak. I don’t really like public speaking that much, but she, on the other hand—that’s fantastic.”
Daniella, Rubio’s youngest daughter, is in her third year at the University of Virginia School of Law. Rubio and his wife, Jeanette, have four children—two sons and two daughters.
When another law student asked how Americans could “instill in the next generation a love of freedom,” as Rubio had done with Daniella, the secretary offered a playful response: “Well, my home was not a democracy.”
Rubio quickly clarified that he was “not the dictator” in his household, joking instead that he served as “the minister of defense.”
His appearance marked Rubio’s first speech since Republicans suffered sweeping losses in last week’s midterm elections, but he struck an upbeat and forward-looking tone.
He urged conservatives to keep the latest results in perspective, pointing to the “devastating losses” Republicans experienced during the 1982 midterm elections under former President Ronald Reagan.
“Less than two years into Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, everything sort of seemed headed in the wrong direction,” Rubio said. “It’s hard for us to remember that right now, but that’s what it was like.”
Rubio encouraged Republicans to focus beyond the immediate political moment and take a long-term view.
“We have much more to do over the next two, the next six, the next 20 years,” he said. “Great things that last are built in decades, not election cycles.”
“There will be more victories, and there will be more defeats. There will be more triumphs, and there will be more disappointments. This is the nature of all undertakings of this weight and of this magnitude,” Rubio continued.
“There are no great men or great causes in the pages of history that did not suffer the same,” he said defiantly. “But we are persuaded of the justice of our cause, and we too will triumph in the end.”