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Donald Trump likes to pit his advisers and staff against each other – very characteristic of Trump. Student it may have been made, but not this one. Recently, New York Times he noted this weekend, this has become official Trump voting friends and advisers about who will be the best Republican presidential nominee in the next election: JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Making predictions about how voters will feel by the 2028 election is futile, but for a long time, the frontrunner seemed to be decided within the administration. “If JD Vance runs for president, he will be our nominee, and I will be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio said. Vanity Fair last year. Prominent outdoor activists such as Erika Kirk they have also given us their vote and Vance.
Now Rubio seems to be gaining momentum. The Secretary of State (who is also Trump’s national security adviser) is suddenly everywhere, whether he’s sparring with Trump in a UFC fight, at a desk in the pope’s Vatican office, or standing behind a lectern in a White House briefing room. Like my colleague Matt Viser wrote last week, Rubio—who often seemed sloppy early in the administration—now appears to be having the time of his life. Researcher Sarah Longwell also reported in Atlantic last month that the voters of MAGA in the groups he runs express a new interest in Rubio.
This does not seem like an obvious time to everything comes down to Marco. Rubio is the president’s top adviser on national security and diplomacy at a time when the United States is embroiled in an unpopular war that appears to be a war. strategic disaster. The US government cannot or will not define its goals and has no means of achieving them even if it does; at the same time, gas prices are rising and the world economy is bad. That Rubio has become a prominent spokesman for this conflict would seem to threaten rather than increase his chances in 2028.
Vance, by contrast, has been quiet over the past few months, perhaps wisely. He was skeptical about the war in his early days, as even Trump has noted, and has continued to ask directed questions about how it is run. (Vance has weak rejected Atlantic reporting that he has asked such questions to continue his war on the press and possibly stay in Trump’s good graces.) And the (very early) numbers remain on Vance’s side. Three in four Republicans view Vance favorably, versus two in three who view Rubio favorably. according to Pew voting earlier this year.
One thing Rubio has going for him is that, unlike the grumpy and stubborn vice president—or even the most likely president– he is closer to what passes for the common man among politicians. (“He seems more human than most of the other characters” in the administration, a Trump 2024 voter told Longwell, characters being an aptly chosen word.) He is also less ideological than Vance, which may have some appeal. But he has also already tried to run for the presidency, in poor condition and occasionally robotic results.
The Iran war will challenge Vance, Rubio, or any other administration official who runs. In that way, it is the lesser of two challenges that any successor to Trump will face. First, they will need to build a base of support, which means trying to put together as many MAGA alliances as possible. Trump’s ideological shift and personality-based politics have allowed him to assemble a group that agrees on nothing but love for Trump and hate for Democrats, and that group is already beginning to fall apart, in part due to his criticism of his handling of the war. (Interestingly, Rubio and Vance are latecomers to Trumpism compared to most GOP voters.)
But just keeping the majority of the MAGA base united will not be enough to win the general election. The second challenge will be for the candidates to separate themselves from the things that have made Trump a historically unacceptable president among the general public without angering Trump and alienating his strong supporters. Think how bitter Kamala Harris was to criticize Joe Biden during the 2024 election, and how that might hurt her and voters—and then think how that might work with a president who is more vindictive and more influential with his base.
Trump’s questioning of Rubio and Vance—whom he reportedly calls “kids”—is a reflection of Trump’s concern about his legacy, which Atlantic has reported It has become an obsession recently for him. The paradox of this stability is that some of the steps Trump has taken to try to maintain this legacy, such as his attacks on Iran, will also make the electoral environment more difficult for any successor he wants to anoint. Look at my children, you schemers, and despair!
Related:
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Today’s news
- President Trump he said the ceasefire in Iran was on “life support” after negotiations between the United States and Iran stalled again at the end of the week. On Sunday, Tehran demanded war reparations, recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to US sanctions in exchange for reopening a key shipping lane and negotiating an end to the war, according to Iranian state media.
- The 17 Americans who were on a ship affected by the hantavirus arrived in the United States earlier today and are being monitored at a medical facility in Nebraska. A Department of Health and Human Services official stressed that the risk to the public remains “very low.”
- Trump He said he wants to freeze the federal gas tax as oil prices rise because of the Iran war, although Congress would need to approve the move. The average price of gas in the country was reached $4.52 a gallon todayup to 50 percent since the conflict began.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
I remember America before the Measles Vaccine
By Fran Moreland Johns
Lately, I’ve come to realize that the weirdest and scariest pieces of my childhood are coming back. I was born in 1933, and most of what I remember as a little girl was defined by war or what we called, simply, disease.
I myself was blessed with very good health, but my friends, family, and community suffered from childhood illnesses from time to time. Neighborhoods froze in fear when diseases suddenly broke out: dam closures during polio outbreaks, quarantines when mumps or measles flared up. I remember one very sad time when my older sister Mimi and I were locked at home, watching our friends play on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often dangerous for babies and toddlers but among the childhood illnesses that have been most debilitating for older children, so freedom to play when coughing. Neither I nor Mimi ever got it—something I was thankful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my smoking-damaged lungs and he said, “At least you never got whooping cough.”
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Take a look. Last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live (flowing into the Peacock) evoked a mother’s imagination, with a little twistErik Adams writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this magazine.
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