Bulwark Takes - The MAGA Heir No One Took Seriously… Until Now

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

Andrew Egger talks with JVL about a 2028 scenario that sounds ridiculous at first… until you actually walk through the logic. A surprise contender is polling near the top of the GOP field and could have a clearer path to the nomination than anyone wants to admit. They break down why the Republican primary may be effectively frozen for 2028, how the MAGA base shapes the field, and why some of the most obvious candidates could be boxed out before the race even begins.Read more from JVL's Triad: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-second-coming

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. Basketball fans can place live bets, create same game parlays, take player props on their favorite players, and bet on the NBA championships. Betmgm.com for T's and C's 19 plus the Wager Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or that of someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. Hey guys, this is Andrew Eger with the Bullwork. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but 2028 is already right around the corner. We are going to have presidential candidates coming out of our

ears much sooner than any of us are prepared for. I guess in a sense, it's fine. It's starting to look like, you know, at least as compared to this time last year, the odds of a Trump three coming down the pipe at us are a little bit diminished. The man is very unpopular. He's very old and tired. It's not clear he even really wants to. But never say never. And there are a lot of other Republicans that we're going to need to be familiarizing ourselves with. So JVL, our fearless leader, he wrote in his triad today, basically an early handicapping of the 28 GOP field. And we're going to talk about it a little bit. JVL, want to talk us on a little bit? First of all, maybe let's just put it this way. Who do you like? Who's in there that's fun and exciting and ready to,

ready to, you know, set aside all of the likelihood things. But is there anybody in there that would set your little Reforma Khan heart, a pitter pat going into 2028? No. And I just want to say, for anybody who thinks that I was doing this just to stir things up or because I didn't have anything else to say, not true. We are either back on for our ceasefire or back off of our ceasefire. Who can say, nobody knows.

That's changing by the minute. Over the weekend, my best friend Sarah Longwell sent me a notice from one of the polling aggregators saying that this surprise candidate had in the polling averages moved into a clear third place. And I saw this and my eyes popped open because this was a candidate who I have been talking about as the logical heir to Maga for two, three, four years. and people had always laughed at me. And so I just wanted to take this opportunity to lay down a marker for when it happens

because I want people to be able to look back and be like, wow, I can't believe that guy was so early on this. Now's the moment if any of you guys are, you know, big into games and things. Yes, exactly. It's Nikki Haley. Everybody pause the video. Do five seconds of thinking right now.

Predict who JVL is going to proclaim name as his dark horse for 2028, because we're about to talk about him right now. And JVL, who is it? I mean, we all know the big names, and I guess it's not really a surprise per se, but talk us through this, talk us through this fella who has sort of emerged as an actual no-foolin possibility for 2028 here. Donald J. Trump Jr., DJ, T.J. I know what you're thinking. He makes his father look qualified and serious? Kind of, I guess. And it sounds preposterous until you start to think about it for a couple minutes.

And the first thing is that in the polls since January, in polling since January, whenever he is included on the ballot, he finished his second or third, which is crazy. And he is routinely beating Marco Rubio when he's included on the ballot. But he's routinely in the mid-tie teens. And some of that is artifact of just name ID. But on the other hand, he's not out there. Like, J.D. Vance and Marco Ruby are in the news every day. They're real politicians.

People talk about them running for president. DJTJ is just this mascot for a lifestyle brand. And he is off doing World Liberty Financial or whatever crazy amazingly smart genius business. are that he is doing because he is such a great businessman. And he's showing up. And this tells you, I think, that people are interested in it, right? It isn't, this isn't preposterous like saying Eric Trump or Ivanka Trump, right? I mean, there would actually be no viability there.

But there is a viability for DJTJ. And my thesis is that the more you think about it, the more A, it makes sense for him to want to run. even though so far he's mostly demurred. I was able to find one clip where he was like, well, maybe someday I'd think about the White House. But he's mostly not talked about it. And if you think about it, it makes sense as to why he would want to run. And also it makes sense why if he would decide to run, I think he's the nominee. Like really, the only thing which prevents him from winning the nomination is him deciding not to seek it.

And so I just having run the traps on this, and we can talk about it if you like, my thesis is that if Donald J. Trump Jr. chooses to run for president, he will be the Republican nominee. And I am so happy to just put that out into the universe because they say you should, you should never put horrible ideas out into the universe. I laugh at that. The thing that that you said there that is most striking to me is the sort of like empty vessel MAGA lifestyle brand thing, right? Because I mean, this has been like an ongoing thing all through the Trump years is people have always wanted and, you know, various factions on the right have always wanted to kind of imbue Trumpism with like ideological content that just isn't there. Right. And you could see that, you know,

for some of these other guys who are, you know, seen as the top runners for 2028, you know, JD Vance might come along and paint himself as the heir apparent to MAGA in a way that's more isolationist and more sort of like wonky, you know, in these various sort of like really online right-wing ways about, you know, Stephen Miller immigration policy and industrial policy to sort of like revolutionize the Rust Belt and all these sorts of things. Or you might have Marco Rubio come along and be like, no, you know, MAGA is actually just sort of like a sort of retooled version of the conservatism that came before it, that's matter at the media

and more muscular, throws more elbows around, is less afraid of wielding state power, but it's basically the same thing. And alternatively to any of those things, because these have all been kind of wishcasting projects, right? Like, it's never actually been true that the beating heart of MAGA is any of these things.

The beating heart of MAGA has been the person of Donald Trump and this sort of loose lattice of grievances against different groups. elites in general, you know, the media, coastal people, public health, you know, like, you can kind of go down the list. But like anybody that they kind of perceive to be sort of looking down on them is sort of the catch-all thing. And Donald Trump Jr. is a great inheritor for that because he really does not actually have any of these pre-existing

commitments. His commitments are to enriching the Trump family and talking up his father, the president. And that's kind of all you need. I guess I'm, I'm curious. Can we just talk a little bit because you go through in the triad today, sort of how Donald Trump, Jr., getting into the race, would sort of complicate the paths of these other guys who are seen as the top contender. So can you just kind of talk through your thinking of, like, what a Vance run and what a Rubio run look like

if they're trying to get out from under Don the Sun? So I don't think they can run. So I think if Don Jr. is going to run, it will be clear reasonably early that he's going to. And here's the other thing. Get to understand, Donald Trump Sr., the current president of the United States, keeps publicly toying with the idea of running for a third term, which prohibits anybody who works in his administration from beginning the processes of running for president

until he explicitly says, I won't do this thing that's against the Constitution. So the field is effectively frozen in place until he's ready to unfreeze it. and if he decides to wait and not unfreeze it until he lays hands and anoints his only beloved, not his only, but his beloved son, you wind up having the legs cut out from anybody in the administration, especially J.D. Vans and Marco Rubio, because I don't think they can actually run. I mean, how can you be the sitting vice president, the guy who is like Donald Trump is our superhero, he's my everything, I trust him, I'm his serving vice president. also, how dare he do this terrible thing? His son is a bum, choose me instead. I don't think

it's possible. And same thing for Marco Rubio. So if that happens, I think the field is cleared of anybody who is currently in the administration and really is cleared of anybody who wants to stay within Maga and is not afraid of being cast into the outer darkness. That would leave, there are still people on the outside. I think Tucker Carlson is the obvious choice there. Although by all reports, he and Don Jr. are close. And maybe Tucker thinks that he could work with Don Jr. Maybe he thinks he doesn't want to challenge him. But if he were to, right? I mean, if you had a split where Tucker ran is like more populist, in a weird way, again, all of Don Jr.'s empty vessel stuff winds up helping him because I promise you the Wall Street Journal editorial page

in a in a contest where they had to choose between Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson would choose Jr. Right. Because they would look at him and be like, oh, well, we can work with that. He's transactional. He doesn't believe any of the crazy stuff. He does all the lib triggering. And the last thing he does is he punts the big Goddard Damarung showdown between the various. Maga factions. Right now there are some factions within Maga and they do care about what comes after Trump. And none of them really think they have the goods to take control of the movement or control of the party. If you just stick with the dynastic guy and you say, oh, we'll just stay in the family, that means that you're not settling any of those ideological disputes now. And it gives everybody more

time to jockey. So I just think, again, it makes all the sense in the world. And I have trouble thinking of somebody who could run on the Republican side who could beat Don Jr. If he decided to swing for the fences here. I mean, do you agree? How would you see it working if somebody were to try to take him down? What Work Takes is sponsored by Shopify. Here's the thing about shopping on the internet. You might be doing it when you're tired, right before you head to bed. If your credit card, isn't lying around, it's very easy to just switch tabs and never follow through on the purchase you intended. That is no good if you're a business trying to convert customers in your online

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with Shopify. and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash bulwark takes. Go to Shopify.com slash bulwark takes. That's Shopify.com slash bulwark takes. Yeah, I mean, I sort of struggle with this because I think there are two pressures that kind of move different directions. And the one pressure is that the Republican Party has spent, you know, the last decade

building itself into the kind of machine that almost cannot but, proceed along exactly the lines that you're laying out here where like when when Trump says something it like basically doesn't matter nothing else basically matters you you cannot you can you can try to sort of like you know like like like sail crosswise across the winds of you know Trump's senior's utterances and try to kind of like finagle in in different ways the the way that he pronounces things into being to your advantage and use those in sort of like like to get little advantages against your various oblique positional opponents on different things. But if he sets himself straight against you,

I mean, Ron DeSantis had this problem in 2024, right? If he sets himself straight against you, you're just stuck. You just can't do it. There's there's nowhere to go. But on the other side of it, the cross pressure to this is that despite all of that still holding true, basically, within the Republican Party of today, the whole movement is much smaller and just shaking. and worse off than it was even a year ago, you know, like he's just losing a lot of supporters, right? Not within the Republican Party, though. No, sure, sure, but let me, let me finish laying this out because I think you're totally right. Like, like within the core of the core, it's, they're all still with them, you know, ride or die till judgment day. And if that does hold together, 100% it is

enough to carry a Republican primary. And yet, like, I can't help but wonder, like, whether, whether this whole weird trap that they're all in, where like, nobody can win MAGA except a Trump, but the Trumps are looking really shaky right now. And again, we're still years away. Who knows what other nonsense will have been forced to endure, what other kind of factional cracks will appear. So, like, part of me wonders if it's, if it's none of these guys, you know, if it's, if it's, if it's neither J.D. nor Marco, nor Jr., nor Tucker. And, like, we're just sailing toward, like, biggest sort of like party collapse and and sort of like vacuum of power for like any random schmo to kind of catch. And I mean, do you actually think that MAGA in its current configuration is durable enough to to nominate the next Republican presidential contender?

I guess is my question. Yes. I think absolutely it is. If you are going to take over the party from MAGA, it isn't that Donald Trump Jr. is unbeatable. It's that you can't beat him in an election. So what you have to do is to convince him not to run. And so that would be the task of somebody like JD, right? Like, J.D. will win or lose the fight for the nomination just based on who decides to run.

What he has to do is keep people out of the field. He has to keep Tucker from running, convince Tucker not to worry that, like, I'll do everything you want to do. He's got to convince Don Jr. Don't worry. I'll take care of everything. You don't want the hassle. you can keep making money, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how you do that.

If Junior decides not to run, I think somebody like JD could hold the party together for an election, I don't know, long term. I think it becomes harder. I think somebody like Tucker could hold the party together, at least in the short term, you know, for one election. But so what I started asking myself then was, okay, so if the way to get to get past Don Jr. is to convince him not to run, well, how would you do that?

From his perspective, why would Don Jr. want to run? And what I came up with is like actually, by the logic of how the Trump family operates, it makes all the sense in the world that, of course, he would want to run. And the answers are our friends in the Center for American Progress have what they call the Trump tracker, where they keep track of. all of the ways and what the Trump family has enriched themselves, and they believe that the Trump net worth was at about $2.9 billion. I want to say $2.9 billion when he took office this last time, and now it's at $6.2 billion, that he has been just sort of given in like hard, tangible assets, about $2 billion worth of, like, gifts and stuff.

And this is not paper value. this is like stuff that he has already realized the gains of. And why has he gotten that? Why has the Trump family gotten it? And the answer is because they hold power of the United States government. If they don't hold power of the United States government, a lot of that goes away. There will be some grift. Like you can sell Trump watches to stupid people.

But in order to have like Middle Eastern kingdoms, thinking it's worth their while to bribe you to the tune of like hundreds of millions of dollars, they're not going to do that if you don't have either a hold on the White House or the potential to retake the White House in the future. And so if you're the Trump family and you're trying to figure out, well, how do we preserve access to that revenue stream? The answer is one of you, either the sitting president or his son, has to be the party's nominee in 2020.

And in a weird way, it might be preferable if it was junior, because if junior runs in 2028 and loses, so long as he won the nomination, even if he loses the general election, for the next four years, he's the presumed frontrunner for 2032. And so now you're looking at like six more years where you're able to plausibly represent to other parties that it is worth their while to pay you. You are uttering the most unspeakable sentences right now, JVL. What do you mean? Is it wrong? No, I'm not, I'm not ready to sit here. It's just grim. It's just really grim to hear that.

It is kind of fun to contemplate. It just has a logical of its own, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, 100%. But I like the idea of Don Jr. and Don Senior, basically switching roles. You know, you have Junior going to the White House, and then it's senior who just gets to sort of schmooze all over, you know, Qatar and the UAE and sort of rake in, rake in the deals. He runs the Board of Peace and he and maybe the Iranians do a lot of work on their

toll booth and see if they can get some of the, that proceeds. Because I mean, I just assume that the end of this war comes when Iran realizes that all they have to do is say, we're proposing a $2 million toll and we split it with you, Mr. Trump. Like, I am sorry, whatever else they want to do if they propose that deal to Donald Trump, he's going to take it. Right? Let me return really quickly to the structural question of the nomination. I'm going too far out there even for you.

I just don't want to even think these thoughts right now. You know, it's Monday. Save it for the middle of the week or something. But I just wanted to ask about, because there's two other things about the nominee. I feel like you've basically convinced me that if he's, wants it, he has an absolute straight shot to the MAGA lane in this primary, which is, you know, until proven otherwise, the winning lane. But I did want to just kind of kick around the two other possible types of candidate that you could see, which is, you know, the kind that we got

in 2024, which was, you know, the sort of like fossilized old Republican Party kind of kicking up Nikki Haley to be like, eh, you know, let's see if she can do anything. And, and And obviously she never posed a challenge, but she did, you know, when it was finally just her and Trump, you know, she was still pulling what, like 25, 30 percent in a bunch of primaries. So there's some energy there, right? And then the other potential faction is the castoffs from MAGA, you know, the exiles, the people who have been cutting bait over various actual policy things who are unlike JD in or unlike JD vance in the sense that while JD looks at something like the war in Iran and his privately horrified, but, you know, has absolutely no choice, but to sort of stick with it. You have people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Candace Owens and, like you said, Tucker Carlson, who potentially represent, you know, a sort of breakaway faction to the more nativist side, to the more isolationist side, to the more sort of conspiracy brand crank side. And people like this are plainly sort of gathering steam to actually make some noise in Republican

primaries from here on out, you know, Nick Fuentes and and guys like guys like this. So you could see a world where, where, you know, this, this MAGA faction, which is locked down if he wants it by Donald Trump Jr., it has to deal with these two flanking pressures on both sides. I mean, do you see that as an actual problem if he gets there? Or is this just going to be another situation where it's like 20%, 20%,

60%, he's the nominee? I mean, I got to say, so, you know, we often joke that never Trumpers, the Republicans who refuse to get on board with Trump, represented a vanishingly small percentage of the population, right? I think the MAGA defectors are going to wind up being smaller as a percentage than the never Trumpers. Like, I just, how many are they going to be? Is it going to be Marjorie Taylor Green and who else?

I mean, Tucker will be back on side. Joe Rogan is back on side already. The number of magas who will really stay off of this, maybe it'll change. I have a hard time believing that, though. There's just too much power there. There's, I don't know. Again, I'd have to really see that to believe that that is more than like 7%, 10% tops,

like absolute tops. And I think that having a guy like Trump Jr. allows everybody to believe what they want to believe, right? The Wall Street Journal can believe that, you know, he's not old and addled like his dad was. He won't do the tariff stuff. He'll understand how important it is to keep the stock market going. The crypto bros will be like he gets us. He's one of us.

The people who love lib triggering will be like, he's the greatest lib triggerer ever. Look how much all the libs and the anti-Trumpers hate this guy. And all of the nativists will be able to be like, you know what? His dad was always just saying it to keep us on board, but Junior really believes it. And I don't think there's anything in his background to disprove anybody's belief of these things. Like, everybody, everything just project what they want onto him. And he's safe. And also, again, the personal cost of choosing to run against him for anybody who thinks they want a future.

Just they all they have to do is look at what happened, Rhonda Santis and Nikki Haley. and Mike Pence and Chris Christie and say, do I want to become one of those guys? Because those guys are roadkill. Like, we now understand that if you run against the Trump family, you become political roadkill. It was untested before 2024. We just thought it would be that way. The thing that happened to Ron DeSantis in particular. Yes. There should be a huge deterrent effect in here, I think. We're going to keep following all this along, you know. Putting it out into the world, Andrew. As 2028 gets closer and closer, we will unfortunately have to talk about all of this stuff more and more. But we can leave it there for now. We have already, like I said, put enough unsettling

thoughts out there into the world for our people to sort of become poisoned by. I find it almost too horrible, even to think, like this idea that you're putting forward that, like, we may end up in a world where five consecutive presidential elections have a Trump as the Republican nominee, you know, dating from 2016, what it was it, 16, 20, 24, 28, and 32. So, but, but it's, you know, I'm, I'm poking at different parts of the logic train, and I'm coming up empty so far. So we'll come back to it. I'll try to think of some good reasons why this should not keep me up at night from now until 2032.

Tell us in the comments. If you can find any holes in it, I want to hear it. Thanks, JVL for coming and talking through your early handicapping of the 28 contest. Obviously, there's also plenty of other private. problems, you know, more immediate things. You know, we have to deal with the straight of four moose and, and 96 other, you know, more pressing authoritarian issues. So maybe we can just, maybe those will just sort of shove all of this out of our brains for, for a little while yet before we really have to swallow the bitter pill and really start thinking about it. But thanks,

JBL for coming on and talking about it. Thanks to you guys all out there for watching. Hope you subscribe to the channel on YouTube or on Substack, wherever you are. Go, go subscribe to the triad. JBL wrote this stuff down and it's lovely. It's great newsletter. So that That's over at the bulwark.com. But thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you soon. Being an American right now is a wild ride. Donald Trump and his administration keep testing the limits of American democracy. From ICE deportations to environmental rollbacks to sweeping tariffs.

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