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, one of several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Another person said Trump has taken to remarking that his vice president has been looking good lately.
“There’s been a lot of that,” the person added.
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. He also sat for an interview with Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time”; Maher later said he would be open to voting for Vance in 2028. He logged extensive time on Fox News — the president’s preferred cable news channel. And he appeared on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, where he criticized the infighting within the MAGA movement over the war in Iran as “very immature.”
It was that stretch — Vance holding his own in semihostile terrain while carrying the administration’s message — that caught the president’s attention, these people said.
It hasn’t hurt that Trump has been privately complimentary about Vance’s weight loss, according to two people familiar with the comments. 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.
Trump is notoriously mercurial, and his feelings about people in his orbit can shift from day to day. One person familiar with the matter said the president expressed disappointment over the collapse this month of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, which Vance had negotiated alongside Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. And Vance and his team have grated on some senior White House staff with what one official described as a near-obsessive focus on online chatter about Vance and the administration.
“Team Vance is extremely self-conscious about what people are saying about him — both here and just randos online — almost to a fault,” a White House official said.
Olivia Wales, a spokeswoman for the White House, wrote in an email to MS NOW that Vance is Trump’s “right-hand man” and “an invaluable member” of his national security team, adding that this trust led to Vance being given major responsibilities of leading the Iran negotiations, chairing the White House’s antifraud task force and working to pass the SAVE America Act.
Whether Trump was ever really weighing Vance against Rubio is itself contested. Camps for both men have insisted that any rivalry between the two has been overblown and that Trump has historically enjoyed keeping potential successors competing for his favor rather than settling on one.
“I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice,” Vance joked during a May press conference when he was asked about a possible 2028 matchup against Rubio.
Publicly, Vance has called Rubio “probably my best friend in the administration,” and Rubio has said he would defer to the vice president if Vance runs in 2028. Three people familiar with their relationship told MS NOW that their friendship is genuine.
That has not stopped hawkish Republicans, uneasy with Vance’s noninterventionist instincts, from making Rubio a totem — a dynamic the war with Iran has only sharpened.
Trump can anoint an heir. Whether the party and the hawks still carrying Rubio’s banner follow him there is a different contest, and nobody’s closed it yet.
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