Will JD Vance be ready to take over the MAGA movement when it is forced to move on from Donald Trump?
Voters have made it clear: the president’s base of right-wing support would probably vote for him a third time, if he gave them the option. But with Trump already the oldest president to ever serve in office and approaching his 80th birthday in June, the new core base of support for the Republican Party will need to find another champion to rally behind.
At CPAC 2025, there was one candidate favored by the MAGA-happy crowd. JD Vance was the overwhelming winner of the straw poll and was dubbed Trump’s obvious successor as the president’s second term got off to a blisteringly fast start. Nearly a year later, Vance is still talked about alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio as one of the administration’s key power players and as a figure of prominence on the GOP’s bench of future candidates.
And there’s concern that his time could come before 2028. With Trump’s age increasingly showing during the first 365 days of his second presidency, especially in moments where he wanders away from Cabinet meetings to peer at the foundations of his yet-to-be-built presidential ballroom or falls asleep, many have wondered if it is now the Republican president whose own health-related concerns could sideline him before the end of his four years in office.
Trump is only done with one of four years in a seat that famously ages its occupant, and could be spending two more battling Democratic majorities in either the House, Senate or both – beginning in 2027.
While the White House continues to bat away rumors or insinuations about Trump’s ability to perform as president with a wave of a strangely discolored hand, Vance appears to be taking it into account as he discharges the duties of the vice presidency, of which there are relatively few.
The vice president has remained a very public figure, often spotted with Trump or taking the lead as the White House’s chief defender in the media, both in interviews and on social media, where he relentlessly battles with left-leaning pundits and journalists. In recent days, that trend continued as he led the defense of an ICE agent who was seen on camera repeatedly shooting a woman in her car, killing her. Federal authorities and the White House have claimed the Minnesota woman was trying to ram officers with her vehicle.
He has also operated as one of the White House’s point men on Greenland, where he has used his word-twisting abilities to try to soothe hurt feelings caused by the president’s threats of taking the territory by any means necessary while still maintaining the administration’s line.
And unlike former Vice President Kamala Harris, who was pushed into the background on a mission to address the root causes of illegal immigration to the U.S., Vance hasn’t shied away from issues of controversy, including the administration’s efforts to broker a ceasefire in Gaza. He visited Israel in the fall as the White House pushed Hamas and Israel towards the second phase of the peace agreement.
This isn’t to say that Vance has everything trending his way.
Axios reported last week that Steve Bannon, the former first-term Trump White House chief strategist and War Room podcast host, is prepping his own bid for the top job in 2028. According to the news outlet, he isn’t even serious about winning: his only aim is to halt anyone who doesn’t support a “non-interventionist foreign policy, economic populism and opposition to Big Tech,” according to the outlet.
That almost assuredly refers to Vance, whom Bannon has sporadically attacked on social media and his podcast as an ally of Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley, which Bannon and his allies view as threats to civil liberties as well as other areas of the MAGA agenda, including immigration and visa reform.
It also refers to Rubio, who is floated as another likely 2028 candidate but one who hails from a more traditional hawkish conservative background.
“J.D., Marco…if you’re not blowing the tech bro, right now they’re owned by the tech bros. They’re owned by the broligarchs and they’re owned by David Sacks and his crowd,” Bannon said of the pair in November.
Bannon doesn’t speak for all of MAGA, however, and it’s very possible that Vance (or Rubio!) will still have a lock on the Republican base without his support, especially without any other serious candidates in the field. The question may ultimately come down to the vice president’s charisma and how seriously he is able to be taken on issues like immigration, where fewer MAGA voters eye him with confidence than his boss.
If Vance continues to raise his profile and be seen at the heart of the action over the next three years, he will be extremely well-positioned in a Republican primary, far moreso than it is conventionally believed Kamala Harris would have been in a hypothetical 2024 primary to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket.
That’s due simply to the relationship he and Trump have, with Trump unafraid of being overshadowed by the obviously meeker Vance while giving the vice president and Rubio both a four-year stage to audition for his job — a sort of MAGAfied version of The Apprentice, which could decide the outcome of the 2028 primary before it even takes place.
