President Donald Trump’s informal audition for his 2028 successor appears to be over — at least for now. For months, Trump treated Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as something like rival contestants, polling aides and donors on the two men and floating each as a possible heir without tipping his hand. In recent weeks, that has stopped, according to five people familiar with the president’s running commentary on the race to succeed him in 2028.
“It’s become, ‘JD’s our guy, we gotta help JD,’” said a senior administration official.
People familiar with Trump’s shift pointed to a specific inflection point: Vance’s press tour for his new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” about his 2019 conversion to Catholicism. The tour took Vance to ABC’s “The View,” where the reception was warm enough that co-host Ana Navarro asked co-host Joy Behar why she was “so in love with” him.
Another person said Trump has taken to remarking that his vice president has been looking good lately. At an event in Michigan last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he and Vance were among several administration officials following a sauerkraut-heavy diet devised by the physician Dr. Sean O’Mara, The Wall Street Journal reported.
This is a preview of an article by Jacqueline Alemany and Jake Traylor. Read the full article here.
