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Millions of Americans yearn for 7 November 2028, the scheduled date of the next presidential election. That’s the day the Trump era effectively ends. Probably. That’s the day the Democrats will atone for Kamala Harris’s calamitous 2024 failure. Possibly. That’s the day US democracy is reborn. Hopefully. Succession talk is tantalising Washington. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, has given the clearest sign yet that he’ll run and glossing over past blunders, Harris reckons she deserves a second chance.
Yet most attention is focused on the Republicans, after Trump, 79, again threatened to defy the constitution and seek a third term. “I would love to do it,” he said this week. He rowed back later, albeit unconvincingly. “We’ll see what happens,” he teased. This undignified narcissist’s electoral fan dance will drag on interminably. Of greater practical interest are the two names Trump picked out as his most likely successors: JD Vance and Marco Rubio, vice-president and secretary of state respectively.
Trump predicted a two-horse race for the 2028 Republican nomination – although his favourites frequently fall, as Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and many others can testify. Nor are Trump’s opinions much shared beyond his base. Vance and Rubio have already shown themselves to be unsuited to high office. Yet as matters stand, the possibility one of these mediocre chancers will assume Maga’s mantle and seize the crown must be taken seriously.
It’s a choice between a pit bull and a poodle. Aggressive, noisy, nasty and occasionally jaw-droppingly ignorant, JD Vance, 41, is the bro to beat, the heir apparent and dauphin to King Don. He leads by huge margins in early polling in Republican primary states. His language is vulgar, his views simplistic. When it was suggested the US’s extrajudicial killing of alleged drug smugglers could be a war crime, he wrote on X: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” Charming.
Vance habitually weaponises social media to defend Trump and vilify “crazy leftwing radicals”. In one notorious exchange, he tried to excuse racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments about “monkeys”, Hitler and rape made in a Republican online chat group. Challenged over a cruelly offensive AI video targeting a black Democrat congressman that was reposted by Trump, Vance said: “I think it’s funny. The president’s joking and we’re having a good time.”
In contrast, following the murder of his hard-right ally, Charlie Kirk, Vance demanded a nationwide crackdown on “far-left” dissent – meaning views he disliked. This display of double standards echoed his pitiful overseas debut in Munich in February, when he hypocritically lectured Europe on freedom and censorship while courting Germany’s far-right leader, Alice Weidel. Vance subsequently confirmed his reputation as a muddled, unmuzzled attack dog by savaging Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who knows more about defending liberty than he ever will.
If Vance does run, he will have to spell out what he believes. The problem is, he doesn’t know. He once dismissed Trump as an “idiot” he would “never” support. As an Ohio senator, he opposed foreign wars; as vice-president, he has backed unilateral attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela. In his self-indulgent, self-promoting book, Hillbilly Elegy, he criticised white working-class communities for blaming their problems on China, migrants and “woke” elites. Now he himself does exactly that, all the time.
Rubio is an altogether quieter, strangely passive figure and possibly the most ineffectual secretary of state of recent times. While Trump runs the show and hogs the limelight on Israel, Ukraine and China, Rubio, 54, acts as prop, cheerleader and repairman. His job: to make sense of Trump’s ill-considered, hyped-up deals – an impossible task at which he fails daily. His dangerous tardiness in implementing security elements of the Gaza “peace plan” is a case in point.
Rubio wasn’t always so feeble. As a 2016 presidential candidate, competing against Trump (who ridiculed him as “Little Marco”), he championed traditional US alliances, human rights and foreign aid. Referencing Russia, he condemned efforts “by large powers to subjugate their smaller neighbours”. Yet since he took the Trump shilling, his principled stands have mysteriously eroded. US overseas assistance budgets have been gutted, democracy promotion and human rights deprioritised, and direct US support for Ukraine eviscerated.
His tenure as secretary of state was initially overshadowed by Elon Musk, who slashed state department jobs and soft power programmes while Rubio looked away; and more recently by Steve Witkoff, the Trump crony dubbed “envoy for everything”. Yet in one policy area, this son of anti-Castro migrants is consistent: his antipathy to leftwing regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. In his other role as national security adviser, Rubio leads the increasingly militarised charge to topple Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship in Caracas.
Justifying lethal maritime attacks on suspected drug smugglers from Venezuela and Colombia, Rubio declared in September that lawful interdiction didn’t work. “What will stop them is when you blow them up... And it’ll happen again,” he warned. Which it has, repeatedly. Rubio plays front man, too, for Trump’s crude pressure campaigns against Panama, Brazil and Mexico, mass deportations of migrants to prisons run by El Salvador’s repressive regime, and overall attempt to reduce Latin America once again to a semi-colonised US backyard.
While all this may win Rubio support on the right, it risks alienating independent voters. His behaviour only makes sense if he, like Vance, plans to run for president as a second-generation Maga mini-me. Both these ever-malleable Trump chumps look set to do precisely that in 2028. Like their boss, they know nothing of statesmanship or a higher calling. Followers not leaders, they are united in unbridled ambition – and unfitness to rule.
Surely the US can do better than this. Oops! That’s what they said about Trump in 2016.
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Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
