Today, Explained - Vance vs. Rubio 2028

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

The Republican front-runners for the 2028 presidential nomination represent two competing visions for post-Trump conservatism. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Astead Herndon. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House. Photo by Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Donald Trump's second term, there's basically only like five guys who really matter. Steve Wickoff, Scott Besson, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance. And those last two, they really matter, considering they're the ones who best represent Trump's beliefs. And they're basically the only Republicans who are floated for president in 2028. Vance is out with a new book recently. And he's walked back that Catholic. lady comment, making it pretty clear that he's planning to run for president come next year. But considering how much of Trump's second term has Marco Rubio's fingerprints all over it,

who's really the heir apparent to the throne of Donald Trump? And what does that version of Maga look like? That's coming up on Today Explain from Vox. I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. But home projects, I second-guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage?

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When you talk about the inner workings of Trump world, there are few better than Maggie Haberman. Maggie is a New York Times reporter and recently co-authored the book Regime Change with Jonathan Swan. It's a bestseller and it digs in to everything Trump-related, including the question of his 2028 endorsement

and how he feels about people like Vance and Rubio. So I started by asking her about this incredible scene in the book where Rupert Murdoch is at the White House with Donald Trump, and Trump essentially turns to him and asks him, Vance 2028 or Rubio 2028?

So it's October of last year. And by this point, Trump is suing Robert Murdoch over the Wall Street Journal's Jeffrey Epstein reporting, and specifically about that birthday card that Trump insists he didn't write that has a very Trumpy-looking signature on a female body. It's not my signature, and it's not the way I speak. And anybody that's covered me for a long time, no, that's not my language. It's nonsense. And Murdoch comes to dinner with a bunch of News Corp executives from his UK holdings and from the U.S.

And so there's New York Post folks there. And it's in the blue room at the White House, a very formal dinner. Also there is J.D. Vance and Ushabance. And Marka Rubio. And Trump is very solicitous of Murdoch. I mean, you would think that nothing has happened. But in the course of this conversation, he says, you know, what do you think of JD? And Murdoch says, well, J.D. has the potential to be great.

And Vance, who knows full well that Murdoch had tried very hard to keep Trump from picking Vance. Murdoch does not like Vance's worldview. I mean, you know, Vance, he does not believe in the intervention skepticism. So Vance says, you know, thanks a lot, Rupert, thanks a lot. And then Trump says, well, what about Marco? And Murdoch says, just very flatly, Marco was brilliant. And it was uncomfortable at this table, according to all of our reporting. I also want to make clear that we have no reporting that Marco Rubio is running.

In fact, quite the opposite. Now, he could obviously scale up very quickly. He has run for president before. But everything we know of right now is that Rubio is going to support Mance. And it would take some tremendously, you know, unforeseen circumstance to change that. Yeah, I mean, that's partly what made it so interesting. You know, Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., the turning points groups have all made very clear that they feel like they're lining up behind vans as Trump's successor. It would seem as if it would take something extraordinary to knock off that path.

And yet you have Trump there seemingly dangling his whispered competition in front of him. Is that just sport for the president? Like, how does he view his own succession? Well, look, I mean, as you know, he, because you've watched him, long time, too. He loves pitting people against each other. Yeah. He doesn't at the State of the Union, you know? You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself. Yes, well, and it's, he did this in 2016 when he was debating between Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, and Mike Pence for a VP. You know, he would poll people at fundraisers. Who do you like?

Bye. There is something a little different going on here, which is number one, and we write about this in the book. Trump just has a better person. with Rubio for whatever reason, which is shocking if you think about 2016. Yeah. And what that looked like. Little Marco. Little Marco.

It was so insulting. It was kind of personal. It felt as if sometimes he was stepping on them, even after Rubio kind of deferred. There were dick jokes on, you know, on stage. And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them. You can't trust them.

But for whatever reason they do better together. Trump likes being around Rubio. being around Rubio. He likes talking to Rubio. I think he'll go down as the greatest secretary of state in the history of our country. I really believe that, Marco, I wouldn't say it. Marco Rubio, I wouldn't say it. Maybe I would. He also is a pretty calm presence around Trump. The age gap between Vance and Trump is a real thing.

I mean, that has come up repeatedly. Just like different generations? Or it's just a harder vibe to make work? I think it's just a harder vibe to make work. I also think that, you know, as much as we think of Donald Trump is extremely online, He's extremely online in a specific way. Vance really is extremely online in sort of a generational way. And everyone around him would acknowledge that.

But Trump, you said the successor thing, Trump doesn't want to see the stage to anybody. I mean, the second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance, even though he's never going to allow himself to be irrelevant. And it's really hard to think of a world where that happens. but there is nothing in his history that suggests that he's just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush. Yeah, I wanted to ask about this specific scene, I think it's most memorable with Vance, which I think is that Oval Office kind of ambush of Zelensky in 2025. You're gambling with millions of people. You're gambling with World War III.

Which read to me as just such a set play performance for the president. How was that received by Trump? So it's interesting. Our reporting was that it was not actually an ambush. It wasn't a setup, but it did flow pretty naturally from Trump dislikes Zelensky enormously. Vance dislikes Zelensky immensely. Have you said thank you once? It's a lot of times.

No, in this entire meeting, have you said thank you? And so Vance certainly saw an opportunity, but it was not, there's nothing in our reporting that suggested this was a pre-planned, you know, tennis match between Trump and Vance. It just flows from their natural kind of shared dislike of the guy. Correct. And then, but what also flows naturally is Trump's saying at the very end. This is going to be great television. I will say that. Because everything is sort of through the lens of the box and the performance and the attention economy.

It is one of many things that we would not have seen in Trump, Term 1. It is one of the many ways this term is so radically unrecognizable to Term 1. You know, the book lays out areas of daylight between Trump and Vance that are also super important. These are the fault lines that come up in our reporting also. Epstein Fowse, the Iran War, and both Vance ends up on the different side than the president. I guess since Donald Trump still went through with said decisions, how significant were these disagreements and how much did it shift their relationship? It's a good question. I don't know that I could say shift the relationship.

I can certainly say that there have been irritation points over a number of issues, including the ones, you just described, but there's nothing more consequential that a president does than take the country to war. And so we got very deep inside situation room meetings about what that was going to look like. There was nobody in Trump's orbit who thought that going, the closest would be Hegg Seth, but they thought that this regime change potential effort was wise. John Radcliffe, CIA director, Marco Rubio, Dan Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hegsteth was in the room, as I just said, you know, Susie Wiles, J.D. Vance. Vance was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president in those rooms against it.

And it cost him with Trump. Trump got very irritated. And there was some lingering irritation over that. In terms of Epstein, he just did not want to talk about it, kept calling it a Democratic hoax. However, there were members of the administration, including Vance, who had been talking about the need for transparency for many years. Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to, a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking rink, and then that guy died mysteriously in a jail, and now we just don't talk about it? Vance argued for releasing everything,

including uncorroborated information, including uncorroborated information about Donald Trump. And there's this incredible meeting in mid-August of last year where they're having this conversation about a planned website, like a public-facing DOJ-created, Jeffrey Epstein filed. Here it all is. But an aide had looked up Trump's name

in this beta version of this website prior to this meeting. And the first thing that came up was this secondhand uncorroborated and by the way, already public, unsealed a year and a half earlier in a civil case, the allegation that Trump had abused some woman's nipples.

And, you know, this person in the meeting raises this and says this is out there. And Vance argues for releasing it and says that, you know, he doesn't think the president would mind. He's been accused of worse. And that White House Chief of Staff very quickly says, no, actually, he would mind. And there were other aspects of this discussion. But the website thing goes away. So it doesn't help a case that Vance is especially powerful with Trump that on these two issues, he was on the other side of him and was not listened to. Right. In some ways, it feels like one vision of the world

has won a policy battle while Vance has set him up for the kind of political battle to come. But I guess I just wanted to ask the question more clearly, like, how has Vance navigated his America first position in a White House that's increasingly feels non-America first? Like, is there a risk? Do we think that that drags him down with him? I don't think it's totally black and white. I think that there's a nuance there. Rubio really has had a foreign policy conversion over many years. He has really pulled back from his far more interventionist view.

far more hawkish view. In terms of Vance, there were moments during the 12-day war where Trump was not happy that Vance didn't say obliterated. We obliterated the nuclear sites. And so that was an example where, you know, Vance was sort of walking this line where he then went back out on TV and was much clearer. We feel very confident that the Ford-O nuclear site

was substantially set back, and that was our goal. He's also aware that he is the vice president. And the president sets the policy. And so Vance was against this war is quite well known. Yeah. And so to be the person who was trying to negotiate an end to a war that you didn't believe in in the first place, I don't think that's personally a bad political position for Vance to be in. And people around Vance are very dismissive of the idea that this is somehow bad for Vance.

And I think they have a compelling argument as to why that is. I hear that. It's a no lose for Vance. that one. I guess my last question would be kind of the brass tax one. Like, Vance has spent the whole term working to stay and kind of walking in this line as we talked about. When his

2028 campaign launches, do you think he can count on the Trump endorsement? I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump's anything often ends up pretty disappointed. But I also think that Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right

now, and it's hard for me to see who else that could be. And so well, I don't think that Trump wants to anoint anyone, and I think he's going to torture Vance and make it very difficult for him as we lay out in the book. If Vance is the likely nominee, it's also hard for me to see Trump being the person who undermines that completely

because it's still something he can take credit for. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, the book, is regime change. Coming up, Marco Rubio hasn't said he's running for president in 2028, but could he? And would he beat Vans? in the nomination if you wanted it. Support for the show today comes from AG1.

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You can't trust them. All right, Matt Lewis is a conservative columnist at notice, but also has been someone who's been following changes on the right for the last decade and plus. And I would say particularly since 2016, a lot of the changes that Donald Trump has introduced. Matt, thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. We spent the first half of the show talking about. J.D. Vance, and we were focusing on him because all the stars have aligned for a Republican

party that seems set to coronate him after Donald Trump leaves office in 2027, 2008. And there's not necessarily any factual reporting that Marco Rubio's interested in running or that he's making plans to run. But we also seem like we're somewhat in a Rubio moment. He seems to be growing some power in the White House. And there are folks who are increasingly calling for him to re-emerge as maybe a Republican Party voice for the post-Trump era. I wanted to know, are you one of those folks? Sort of. I've had a long love-hate relationship with Marco Rubio.

I went from being a fanboy to being very disenchanted with him more recently. And now that we are facing the possibility that he could emerge as the Republican Standard Bearer. I'm Marco curious again. Well, let's start at the beginning. When you said you were a Marco fanboy, where does that begin? So Marco Rubio runs for Senate in 2010, and I was working at the now defunct AOL Politics Daily at the time. Charlie Chris was the sitting governor of Florida. He was wildly popular, believe it or not, and Rubio was going to run against him in the Republican Senate primary.

And Rubio just couldn't get any traction. So his team decided instead of trying to get media attention, in Florida, we will go national and we will force the local media to cover us. And it really worked. But I was one of the beneficiaries of that as a youngish conservative blogger and columnist. I had a lot of access all of a sudden with this young, charismatic, up-and-coming politician, Marco Rubio. Of course, he goes on to win that race. Thank you.

I'm glad you didn't say polo. That would have thrown us all off. And I may have been the first person to write. one of those really wildly naive and premature Marco Rubio for president pieces way back in 20, maybe even 2010, possibly 2011. But I also thought Rubio was maybe just a once-in-a-generation talent. His ability was incredibly eloquent. He gave a great, probably the best pro-life speech I've ever heard in my life.

I think it was in 2012 at the Susan B. Anthony List Gala. All life in a planet where life is increasingly not valued. and a planet where people are summarily discarded, all life is worthy of protection, and all life enjoys God's love. He was young, kind of Kennedy-esque, boyish, you know, charm, good looks, my brand of optimistic Reaganite conservatism,

and the fact that he was also fluid in Spanish, I thought could possibly open some doors to communicating the conservative message to a broader audience than we had done up until that point. And I think that was certainly the Rubio logic. Well, you know, obviously this runs up against the buzzsaw that is Donald Trump. As a Rubio fan boy, so or at least self-described, at least initially. Self-described, yeah.

I mean, how did your feelings change about him in that first term of Trump? I think that Rubio very early on realized, I think that he was shocked that he, not only that he lost the primary for president, the 2016 primary, but that Trump went on to win. A lot of us were. So I think it really created a almost an identity crisis for a lot of us. And it chastened us. Like maybe we don't quite understand this party. Maybe we don't quite understand this country. And that led to like a lot of soul searching. I mean, you know, think of it this way. The Republican primary electorate had a golden opportunity to nominate a young, optimistic, eloquent, inspiring Hispanic. And instead they chose a thrice-married casino magnate reality show star.

I mean, that tells you all that there is about it. And so I think Rubio kind of went back and reverse engineered some parts of his, not just the way he communicates, but his philosophy. He's become more populist. He's become, you know, more nationalist. You know, the other issue that comes to mind when we think about kind of what defined Rubio was initially his openness to immigration reform and leading the gang of eight and initial congressional discussions around a comprehensive immigration bill. I think we need to be honest with ourselves about how important immigration is for our economy,

for agriculture, for guest workers and other laborers, and for those who are already here now that are making contributions towards our future. Donald Trump fundamentally changed the Republican positioning on some of those issues. Like, if we think about the larger lane of Republicans that that version of Rubio represented, is there a version of Republicans that, in the kind of looking forward that you think get back to that kind of openness to a pathway to citizenship or a non-Steven Miller version of immigration reform? Not for a long time. even people like Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry was even attacked in the 2012 race for being two pro-immigration. People like Michelle Bachman and even Mitt Romney, believe it or not, would attack Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for being for amnesty.

But people forget how close Marco was to making this happen. In fact, there was a point where like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were basically saying, I guess we need to do this now. We need to do immigration and reform. I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here. You don't say you've got to go home. And that is in a position that I've evolved on. And the grassroots rebelled.

You do not want to touch that rail. And so I do not think we will be seeing anybody trying that again for a long, long time in the Republican Party. One thing that is clear is Marco Rubio's influence policy-wise in this second term. of Donald Trump. But this also feels like a term that is defined more by the scope of their policy ambitions rather than the kind of guardrails that may have been in place for the first term of Trump's administration. For the Rubio fans, like, does he get credit for adult in the room?

Or should he be blamed? Because there seems to be fewer adults in the room. This is the real big question, right, about him right now. You know, I think you could argue that, just being affiliated with Trump should be a disqualification. That says something about your character, that is it as qualifier. That's one argument. I think there's another argument that says, we want him on that wall.

We need him on that wall. Like that Rubio is, A, able to sort of mitigate some of the bad things that might otherwise happen. And then B, he's staying in the game and possibly could emerge as, you know, as, you know, the next Republican president. And to me, there's a lot of worse possibilities. We could get Candace Owens in there. I mean, that's not a hundred percent implausible. And here's the other thing, too.

I know there's some people out there who be saying, like, a pox on all their houses. Here's the thing. Once you become the nominee of a political party, you've got a chance to become president. So even if you're a Democrat listening or a progressive and you hate all the Republicans, you still probably should have some rooting interest in the least bad option being the nominee because it almost is a jump ball. All you have to do is look at recent history

in Donald Trump in 2016. When you think about the broader Republican electorate, obviously the never-Trump wing has had, frankly, a math problem that the majority of Republicans have supported or at least followed along with Donald Trump and his chosen candidates. What is your level of confidence that enough non-Trump of Republican votes still exist? Enough non-America-first Republican votes still exist.

So I think you're entirely right. I don't think that the never-Trumpers constitute a large enough segment of the electorate to matter much. I do think, though, he can cobble together, as long as he stays in Trump's good graces, a large enough coalition that he could win. Well, let me just ask about Vance also. I guess it's the same question a different way. What does Rubio have over J.D. Vance? What is the kind of America First of J.D. Vance that does not appeal to you?

J.D. Vance has been all over the map. And I think J.D. Vance comes across as what the kids today call cringe. I love Wisconsin, or as you guys say, Wisconsin. Love Wisconsin. It's like Ron DeSantis had the same problem, but I think Marco Rubio has the eloquence. And I think he's gotten better. I mean, think of it this way. Rubio has been through the ringer, okay?

And I think he's grown and matured. And he's got experience. He's got knowledge. J.D. Vance, actually, and I know he's written a best-selling book, to be sure. But J.D. Vance is a guy who barely got elected in Ohio. he underperformed the Republican vote in Ohio. Yeah. And then he gets sort of plucked to be the running mate of Trump because, I don't know if you remember this part, apparently my old boss, Tucker Carlson warned Donald Trump that if Trump were to pick Rubio as his running mate, that Trump may be assassinated because of that.

Because I don't know if the deep state or whoever would want Rubio to be elevated. I guess I wanted to ask, though, about the kind of establishment candidates in general, because Donald Trump rises as pitching himself as outsider broadly. Being an outsider is fine. Embrace the label because it's the outsiders who change the world and who make a real and lasting difference. Isn't that something that seems like it could consume Vance and Rubio? Like, is the distinction we should be talking about, not these two people in the administration? but basically whether the Republican grassroots might once again pill something out of the Tucker

Carlson's, of the folks who are kind of running in a full outsider game. It could totally happen. It absolutely could. I mean, look, we have lived through what happened with Trump, where, you know, again, this reality TV star that frankly, we all thought initially was kind of a joke. It could happen. And look, I think my old boss, Tucker Carlson, is very smart. It's not crazy. I think also we can't forget Donald Trump Jr. Ivanka Trump.

I know this sounds insane, but it is not entirely implausible. You can read Matt Lewis at Notice. That's N-O-T-U-S. This episode of Today Explained was produced by Avashai Artsy, edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Donatov and engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore. I'm Ashth Herndon, and you can catch me on Saturdays, hosting America Actually. For an upcoming episode, we want to hear from you. How old is too old to be an elected official or to run for office?

Send us a voicemail at 844-453-4448. That's 844-453-44-48 with your answer. also give us your name, age, and where you live. This week on the show, I'll be talking to Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayette. Check it out here or on YouTube.