If Donald Trump doesn’t see JD Vance as his 2028 successor, who could be? check it out…

If Donald Trump doesn’t see JD Vance as his 2028 successor, who could be? check it out…

Does Donald Trump view JD Vance as his inevitable successor in 2028?

“No,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier in his Super Bowl weekend interview. Ouch!

Plucked from an odd position of micro-celebrity into politics in 2022, then thrust into the national spotlight after winning Trump’s endorsement during the Ohio Senate race, Vance is practically the perfect MAGA convert, tainted only by a slight veneer of uncertainty thanks to his past descriptions of his boss as “America’s Hitler.”

He has been a loyal warrior for Trumpworld ever since winning his biggest supporter in the president’s inner circle: Donald Trump Jr, who lobbied for his father to support Vance in his Senate race and was a key backer pushing the Ohio senator over rivals for the VP nod including Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum.

But if his performance hasn’t yet won his boss over to the extent that Trump would give him the acknowledgment of naming him the likely 2028 GOP frontrunner, who else could the president be eyeing to be the MAGA standard-bearer in the next election cycle?

#1: Donald Trump

The Constitution is very clear: Donald Trump can’t run again in 2028. But why should that stop him, if America’s founding legal document won’t dissuade him from trying to end the concept of birthright citizenship or punishing news organizations that refuse to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”?

Here’s the facts: there’s nobody Donald Trump trusts more than himself to lead the MAGA movement going forward. He has hinted, mostly jokingly, on repeated occasions that he could run again in the future. A conservative supermajority with a clear willingness to rewrite precedent controls the Supreme Court.

And Donald Trump craves the spotlight and the attention of being the leader of a movement more than anything. Is such a figure likely to pass on the torch unless he’s absolutely forced to? No.

#2: Donald Trump…Jr

First son Donald Trump Jr was heavily involved in JD Vance’s rise to become Trump’s running mate, ever since the vice president’s earliest days in politics. Trump Jr became an intricate part of constructing the MAGA version of Vance for the same reason that he has been the most active, of any Trump family member besides the Donald himself, in media appearances and speeches since his father stepped on to the political stage.

He wants a piece of the pie. And if Vance can’t pick up the torch and run with it, Trump Jr almost certainly will.

The two men overlap greatly, not just in terms of their political rhetoric and policy stances but in terms of their advisors, aides, and respective fractions of the broader extremely-online young right-wing sphere in the US, which has been in Trump’s corner and confounding older media since 2016.

Put simply; if Vance falters, his support base will likely be behind Trump Jr in an instant. But will Trump Jr get permission from his father to attempt such a leap into an actual campaign for office?

#3 Glenn Youngkin

The governor of Virginia was careful to stay out of the VP shortlist talk in 2024. The reason was obvious: he didn’t see the role as a guaranteed slingshot into momentum that could translate into a 2028 bid, and is looking at other ways of gathering the support he’d need to mount a run.

Virginia’s state constitution bars him from seeking a consecutive term, but Youngkin is still riding high off of a win in 2021 which quickly took the wind out of Joe Biden’s sails; the Democratic president had campaigned for Terry McAuliffe, Youngkin’s rival.

But it raises the question: will anyone remember him in three years? Youngkin faces possibly the greatest challenge of any possible candidate on this list — the battle to remain relevant while Trump dominates the headlines over his presidency. He’ll have plenty of time to prove that shying away from VP speculation was a good idea.

#4 Vivek Ramaswamy

Donald Trump loves to back a winner. And Vivek Ramaswamy is not one — yet. That could change, though, as Ramaswamy is publicly leaning towards a run for governor in Ohio, one of the former swing states Trump dominated in his three presidential runs, accelerating a reddening trend.

The race is in 2026, meaning that Ramaswamy will have nearly a full year to “govern” — in all likelihood, his second audition for the presidency — before the 2028 primary begins in earnest. But as anyone knows, the real “audition” will be for Trump’s endorsement, and a commanding win in the Ohio gubernatorial election could be the deciding factor in favor of Ramaswamy, who even when running against the president in 2024 was constantly effusive towards his rival for the nomination.

#5 Ron DeSantis

Speaking of winners: Florida’s governor may have lost the 2024 GOP nomination, but he remains in his second term in the governorship of a formerly-purple red state with Republican majorities in both chambers of the legislature (and with the total collapse of the Florida Democratic Party, one that appears to be still ongoing).

The governor’s worst attribute in Trump’s eyes (his stand against the president in 2024) is also his strongest advantage: DeSantis, of all the likely 2028 competitors, has the strongest existing campaign infrastructure. He’d likely still hold an advantage in that department even if Ramaswamy, his certain-rival, wins in Ohio and develops his own network of contacts and donors through a partial term in the governor’s mansion.

But DeSantis has no strong alliances within the broader GOP, something that was evident in 2024 as Trump won the support of electeds in DeSantis’s home state whom the governor should have had in his camp. And that could be another disadvantage if he faces a rising MAGA star in the next cycle.

#6 Marco Rubio

That inability to win over Florida’s congressional delegation could be a real problem for DeSantis if our last likely contender, Marco Rubio, enters the race.

Rubio is the former senator from Florida now serving as Trump’s Secretary of State; he has served two terms in the chamber and was re-elected handily for a third in 2022. And he has clear presidential ambitions; he ran against Trump, unsuccessfully, in 2016 only to undergo the exact kind of evolution necessary to remain politically relevant on the national stage in today’s Republican Party.

He still retains a wide number of allies in the GOP and sailed through the confirmation process last month, though he is easily the least MAGA-fied of anyone on this list. That will be his greatest challenge if he does run: he still sounds unconvincing when adhering to the right-wing populist line (as evidenced by his inability to sound enthusiastic about Trump’s plan for the forced expulsion of Gaza’s civilians, something that would likely be considered ethnic cleansing).

What he does have is decent camera training and an insider’s knowledge of running for office.