The 2028 presidential election is JD Vance’s to lose, Maggie Haberman said on “Meet the Press” Sunday – something Donald Trump isn’t happy about.
As Haberman put it, “I will say, there is nothing in our reporting that suggests that Rubio is doing the things one would be doing to run. And it is still Vance’s to lose, which also doesn’t necessarily thrill Trump, who doesn’t like the idea of somebody coming next.”
Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” were asked by host Ryan Nobles if Trump is truly concerned about Republicans winning midterm elections this fall.
Swan denied that Trump doesn’t care at all, but noted that “his closest aides, his top aides wish he cared more.”
“And there was a very revealing comment that Trump made last year when Republicans did extremely poorly in the off-year elections,” Swan continued. “He said, ‘People have been saying they can’t win without Trump on the ballot.’ And he said, ‘That’s a great honor,’ okay? So play that forward a little bit. He obviously doesn’t want to get impeached again. But at the same time, you know, he’s not going to get convicted. There’s no universe in which he gets convicted.”
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Vance, Nobles noted, “appears to be someone, at least on some level, willing to tell President Trump things he doesn’t necessarily want to hear.”
The relationship between the two is “really interesting,” Haberman said.
“Because he was not the only person who opposed this war in Trump’s world, to be clear. In our reporting, and we write about this in the book, none of Trump’s senior advisors, none of his Cabinet really thought this was a good idea,” she said of the decision to attack Iran.
“But Vance was the only one who really vocally took issue with this with Trump. And it irritated Trump. It cost Vance with Trump. But he was the only person who was really sort of rattling the cages,” she continued.
Marco Rubio is also one of Trump’s “potential successors,” Nobles pointed out.
“Trump likes to play games with people. That’s not new to anybody. He has been doing this version of whole testing, ‘Who do you like? Do you like Marco or do you like JD Vance?’ In fact, we have this pretty remarkable scene in the book where at a dinner with Rupert Murdoch and a bunch of other people in the Blue Room of the White House last October, Vance is there, Rubio is there, several other people are there,” she explained. “And Trump starts asking Murdoch, you know, ‘What do you think of Vance?’ And Murdoch, who did not want Vance to be the VP, says that JD has the potential to be great. And Trump says, ‘What about Marco?’ And Murdoch just sort of flatly says, ‘Marco is brilliant.’”
But that doesn’t mean Rubio has any real chance of unseating Vance.
“I don’t know that it needed too much tilting,” Haberman added.
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