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Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one. Lately, The New York Times noted this weekend, this has played out as Trump informally polling friends and advisers on who would be a better Republican presidential nominee in the next election: J. D. 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 front-runner seemed to have been decided within the administration. “If J. D. Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair last year. Prominent outside activists such as Erika Kirk have also thrown their lot in with Vance.
Now Rubio appears to be gaining some momentum. The secretary of state (who is also Trump’s national security adviser) is suddenly everywhere, whether ringside with Trump at UFC fights, deskside in the pope’s Vatican office, or perched behind the lectern in the White House briefing room. As my colleague Matt Viser wrote last week, Rubio—who often seemed glum early in the administration—now looks to be having the time of his life. Pollster Sarah Longwell also reported in The Atlantic last month that MAGA voters in the focus groups she runs are expressing new interest in Rubio.
This does not seem like an obvious moment for everything to be coming up Marco. Rubio is the president’s top adviser on both national security and diplomacy at a moment when the United States has blundered into an unpopular war that appears to be a strategic catastrophe. The U.S. government can’t or won’t define its goals and has no path to achieving them even if it does; in the meantime, gas prices are rising and the world economy is precarious. That Rubio has become a high-profile spokesperson for this conflict would seem to threaten rather than enhance his chances in 2028.
Vance, by contrast, has been fairly quiet over the past few months, perhaps wisely. He was skeptical about the war in its early days, as even Trump has noted, and has continued to ask pointed questions about how it is being conducted. (Vance has weakly denied Atlantic reporting that he has raised such questions in order to further his war on the press and perhaps stay in Trump’s good graces.) And the (too-early) numbers remain on Vance’s side. Three out of four Republicans view Vance positively, versus two of three who view Rubio positively, according to Pew polling earlier this year.
One thing Rubio has going for him is that, in contrast to the smirking and censorious vice president—or even the ever more dour president—he does come across as closer to what passes for a normal person among politicians. (“He seems more human than a lot of the other characters” in the administration, a Trump 2024 voter told Longwell, characters being an aptly chosen word.) He is also manifestly less ideological than Vance, which may have some appeal. But he’s also already tried to run for president, with underwhelming and occasionally robotic results.
The Iran war will pose a challenge for Vance, Rubio, or any other administration official who mounts a run. In that way, it’s a microcosm of two challenges that any would-be Trump successor will face. First, they will need to forge a base of support, which means trying to keep together as much of the MAGA coalition as possible. Trump’s ideological flexibility and personality-based politics have allowed him to assemble a group that doesn’t agree on anything except loving Trump and hating Democrats, and that group is already starting to splinter, in part due to criticism of his handling of the war. (Interestingly, Rubio and Vance are latecomers to Trumpism compared with many GOP voters.)
But just keeping a majority of the MAGA base united won’t be enough to win a general election. The second challenge will be for candidates to distance themselves from the things that have made Trump a historically unpopular president among the general population without infuriating Trump and alienating his hard-core supporters. Think about how loath Kamala Harris was to criticize Joe Biden during the 2024 election, and how that may have hurt her with swing voters—and then imagine how that might work with a president who is both more vengeful and more influential with his base.
Trump’s parlor game of asking about Rubio and Vance—whom he reportedly calls “kids”—is a display of Trumpian anxiety about his legacy, which The Atlantic has reported has been a recent obsession for him. The paradox of this fixation is that some of the moves that Trump has taken to try to establish this legacy, such as his attack on Iran, will also make the electoral landscape more difficult for any successor he wishes to anoint. Look on my kids, ye strategists, and despair!
Related:
Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Stephen Miller in retreat
- Trump has gone from unpredictable to unreliable.
- Anne Applebaum: Putin’s war comes home to Moscow.
Today’s News
- President Trump said that the cease-fire in Iran was on “life support” after talks between the United States and Iran stalled again over the weekend. On Sunday, Tehran demanded war reparations, recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and an end to U.S. sanctions in exchange for reopening the crucial shipping lane and negotiating an end to the war, according to Iranian state media.
- The 17 Americans aboard the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship arrived back in the U.S. early today and are being monitored at a medical center in Nebraska. A Department of Health and Human Services official emphasized that the risk to the general public remains “very, very low.”
- Trump said he wants to suspend the federal gas tax as fuel prices surge because of the Iran war, though Congress would need to approve the move. The national average gas price reached $4.52 a gallon today, up about 50 percent since the conflict began.
Dispatches
- The Wonder Reader: Rafaela Jinich explores stories on how to understand our mothers.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
I Remember America Before the Measles Vaccine
By Fran Moreland Johns
Lately, I’ve come to notice that the strangest and most terrible pieces of my childhood are roaring back. I was born in 1933, and much of what I remember as a little girl was defined by either the war or what we called, simply, sickness.
I myself was blessed with exceptionally good health, but my friends, family, and community were regularly struck with childhood diseases. Neighborhoods were frozen in fear when maladies suddenly erupted: pool closures during polio epidemics, quarantines when mumps or measles raged. I remember one particularly galling time when my older sister Mimi and I were confined to the house, morosely watching our friends playing on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often deadly for babies and toddlers but among the less debilitating of childhood diseases past for older children, thus the freedom to play while coughing. Neither Mimi nor I ever caught it—a fact I was grateful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my cigarette-compromised lungs and he remarked, “At least you never had whooping cough.”
More From The Atlantic
- Send the frigates.
- China believes America will flame out.
- Marty Makary set the conditions for his own downfall.
- Xochitl Gonzalez: People who don’t like people are making all of our decisions.
- Alexandra Petri: I have some questions for the new Florida U.S. history curriculum.
Culture Break
Read. Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney are wringing great art and performance out of the relationship between the present and the past. David L. Ulin explores a new book about how rock and roll faces the inevitable passage of time.
Watch. Last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live (streaming on Peacock) poked fun at maternal fantasies, with a little twist, Erik Adams writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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