Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud at 11:15 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, according to a scheduling notice circulated by the financial news wire @FirstSquawk. The sit-down is the latest in a series of high-level diplomatic engagements for Rubio, who met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in New York on September 23 for closed-door talks, according to a report by Memesita.
The meeting comes as the Trump administration navigates a delicate moment in its confrontation with Iran. President Donald Trump said Iran is waiting on midterm elections to cut a deal, while Rubio warned that Tehran is misreading American politics, according to Fox News. Iran says it is awaiting a "definitive" response to its latest proposal on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, despite Trump rejecting the earlier offer, according to a CNN report carried by WSVN 7News in Miami.
Against that backdrop, a separate and distinctly domestic firestorm has erupted on the American right, centered not on Riyadh or Tehran but on a former British prime minister and the online coalition that once cheered her. The flashpoint was a post from @mehdirhasan, who wrote: "A reminder of how redpilled and radicalized and far right Truss has become, here she is in 2021 as Foreign Secretary:"
The post included a video clip of Liz Truss, then serving as the United Kingdom's foreign secretary, speaking in 2021. The post is a social media post, not a work of reporting, and it presents the clip without independent authentication of its contents or context.
What followed was a cascade of reaction across the conservative and populist-right ecosystem, with accounts on multiple sides of the MAGA coalition weighing in on Truss's trajectory and on the broader question of what the movement now considers its own. The dispute is the latest iteration of a long-running argument inside the American right about the boundaries of acceptable allies, an argument that has grown louder since the 2024 election and shows no sign of cooling.
The @mehdirhasan post landed at an awkward moment for the broader conservative coalition. Rubio's Monday meeting with the Saudi foreign minister is expected to touch on regional security and energy markets, though the State Department has not released a readout of the agenda. The Lavrov meeting in New York was similarly closed-door, according to Memesita, and no joint statement followed.
The Iran file remains the most volatile element of the administration's foreign policy. Trump has publicly rejected Tehran's latest proposal on the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes. Iran's response, per the CNN report, is that it is waiting on a "definitive" American answer. Rubio, for his part, has argued that Tehran misunderstands how American presidential power actually works, a point he made in remarks reported by Fox News.
Into that already crowded news cycle stepped the argument over Truss. The former prime minister, who served as foreign secretary before her brief and turbulent tenure at Number 10, has since become a fixture on the American right-wing speaking circuit. Her 2021 remarks, as presented in the @mehdirhasan clip, are now being recirculated as evidence of how far she has traveled politically — or, depending on who is doing the recirculating, of how consistent she has been.
The reaction spread quickly across accounts that track the daily arguments of the online right. The dispute is not, strictly speaking, about Saudi Arabia or Iran. It is about the internal sorting of a coalition that has spent the better part of a decade arguing over who belongs in it and who does not. Truss, a foreign politician with no formal role in American governance, has become an unlikely proxy for that argument.
Next News Network could not independently verify the contents or context of the 2021 clip as presented in the @mehdirhasan post.
The broader diplomatic calendar, meanwhile, continues to move. Rubio's Monday meeting with Prince Faisal is the kind of engagement that rarely produces immediate headlines but often sets the table for larger announcements down the line. The Saudi foreign minister has been a frequent interlocutor for Washington on Yemen, on Gulf security, and on the long-running effort to normalize relations between Riyadh and Israel — an effort that stalled after the October 7 attacks and has not yet been revived in full.
It is not yet known whether the Rubio-Faisal meeting will address the Iran file directly, whether the Strait of Hormuz proposal will be discussed, or whether any readout will be provided afterward. The State Department has not commented publicly on the agenda.
What is clear is that the American right is in the middle of one of its periodic internal contractions, and the Truss clip has become the latest vehicle for that argument. Whether it produces any lasting change in the coalition's composition is a question no one can answer today. What it has produced, so far, is a great deal of noise — and a reminder that in the current media environment, a former British prime minister's 2021 remarks can become a live American political story in the space of a few hours.
For now, the official business of the United States government continues on its own schedule. Rubio will meet the Saudi foreign minister at 11:15 a.m. Monday. The Iran proposal remains unanswered in definitive form. And the online argument over Liz Truss will run its course, as these arguments always do, until the next one arrives to take its place.
Our Take
The Trump administration is trying to conduct serious diplomacy with a serious adversary while its own coalition tears itself apart over a British politician who has not held office in years. Rubio's meeting with the Saudi foreign minister matters. The Iran file matters. The Strait of Hormuz matters. What does not matter, at least not to anyone with a real stake in American foreign policy, is whether Liz Truss said something in 2021 that some people on the internet now find inconvenient. The MAGA movement's inability to stop litigating its own membership rolls is a luxury it can afford only because the stakes of that litigation are low and the entertainment value is high. Meanwhile, Tehran is watching, and Tehran is not confused about what it sees.
