President Donald Trump has come back around to a potential MAGA heir for a surprising – and entirely superficial – reason, according to a new report.
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The 80-year-old president’s months-long habit of quietly weighing Vice President JD Vance against Secretary of State Marco Rubio as his potential 2028 successor appears to have run its course — and the tipping point was a book tour, reported MS NOW.
According to five people familiar with Trump’s private commentary, the president has shifted from treating the two officials as rival contenders to openly signaling that Vance is his guy. “It’s become, ‘JD’s our guy, we gotta help JD,'” one senior administration official said.
The inflection point, sources say, was Vance’s press run for his new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” which sent him into friendly and semi-hostile media terrain alike — a notably warm appearance on ABC’s “The View,” a sit-down with Bill Maher (who later said he’d consider voting for Vance in 2028), heavy rotation on Fox News, and a podcast appearance with Megyn Kelly where he criticized MAGA infighting over Iran as “very immature.”
Trump reportedly took note of how comfortably Vance handled himself across that stretch, and another person said the president has taken to remarking that his vice president has been looking good lately.
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“There’s been a lot of that,” the person added.
Adding to the goodwill: Trump has also been privately complimentary of Vance’s weight loss, tied to a sauerkraut-heavy diet several administration officials — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — have adopted.
Still, the shift isn’t without friction. Trump reportedly expressed disappointment over the collapse of a U.S.-Iran memorandum Vance helped negotiate, and some senior staff have grumbled that Vance’s team is overly fixated on online chatter about him.
The White House downplayed any formal succession race, with a spokeswoman calling Vance the president’s “right-hand man” and pointing to his role leading Iran negotiations and the SAVE America Act push.
Vance himself has publicly waved off talk of a competition with Rubio, calling him “probably my best friend in the administration.”
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