Over in The Spectator, my old friend Freddy Gray tries to explain to a perhaps skeptical audience the position JD Vance is in.
Vance’s backers, who include some major party donors, are less reluctant when it comes to dismissing other 2028 Republican hopefuls. Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and failed 2016 candidate, is widely mocked for daring to put his name about. Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, is considered far too conventional a politician for the age of Trump. Spencer Cox, the bald-headed Utah governor, may be applauded in more liberal-minded journals as a good man who could ‘heal’ a divided country – but that sort of praise is toxic to many Republican voters.
The most realistic post-Trump alternative to Vance is Marco Rubio, 13 years older and currently Trump’s ‘Secretary of Everything’. Rubio leads the state department as well as serving as National Security Adviser, acting administrator of the US Agency for International Development and acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. Between them, Rubio and Vance do much of the administration’s high-level gruntwork, the complicated policy stuff that Trump prefers to avoid.
Identifying Vance as a consistent thinker and systematizer of Trumpism, Gray sees the bigger threat to Vance coming from the fringier side of the MAGA coalition, represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who captures the wilder side of the Trump movement, and seems to be breaking away from the president Vance has bound himself to serve.