GOT SATISFACTION

Marco Rubio Boasts About Weird Encounter with Rock Legend

The secretary of state was unsure about meeting the musician, especially in his home country.

Marco Rubio met Mick Jagger during Donald Trump’s U.K. state visit in September—but it took some prodding.

Rubio, 54, told attendees of a Monday night party for Sergio Gor’s swearing-in as ambassador to India about the meeting, CBS News reported Tuesday. It was 38-year-old Gor, he said, who got the ball rolling.

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At a London restaurant with Gor, then the head of presidential personnel, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 63, Rubio said Jagger, 82, entered and sat down two tables away.

“And Sergio’s like, ‘I’m going go up to him. I’m going to get his picture,’” Rubio said, according to CBS. “I go, ‘Don’t go up to him.’ I looked it up online immediately—he’s not like an enormous fan of the president. So, I’m like, ‘Sergio, this might be really bad. We’re in the guy’s country. He’s a legend in this country. I mean, I don’t know how he’s going react.’”

But Rubio came around—on one condition.

“‘OK, whatever you do, don’t mention me,” he told Gor. “He doesn’t even know who I am. And if he knows who I am, it isn’t because he likes me.’”

Rubio said after the Rolling Stones frontman and Gor talked for a bit, he heard Gor say, “Marco Rubio would love to meet you. He’s sitting right over there.”

And it turned out that Jagger “couldn’t have been nicer,” the secretary of state recalled. What Rubio took from that encounter, he said, was that Gor was “going to be a good ambassador.”

The Daily Beast has reached out to Jagger, Rubio, and Gor for comment.

Jagger has been critical of the Trump administration, dating back to the president’s first term.

“We are in a very difficult situation at the moment, especially in the U.S., where all the environmental controls that were put in place—that were just about adequate—have been rolled back by the current administration so much that they are being wiped out,” Jagger said in 2019. “The U.S. should be the world leader in environmental control, but now it has decided to go the other way.”

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Jagger, who disapproved of Trump using Rolling Stones songs during campaign rallies, last year also appeared to mock Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

“We wanted to play ‘Wild Horses,’” Jagger told an Atlanta crowd at a June show while introducing the audience’s choice of tune. “All we needed was 11,000 more votes. There’s a more important vote coming up in November. Don’t forget to vote in that one.”

Jagger appeared to be referencing reports that Trump, in an early January 2021 phone call, tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” in the state that Joe Biden had won by that margin.

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