Republican vice presidential nominee U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) introduces U.S. Republican Presidential nominee former President Donald Trump during a rally at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center on July 27, 2024 in St Cloud, Minnesota.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
President Donald Trump told a group of Oval Office donors roughly two weeks ago that he wants Vice President JD Vance to win the 2028 presidential election, The Washington Post reported Thursday — a private signal that pierces months of carefully maintained public suspense and reveals that Trump’s theatrical ambiguity between Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has served a specific management purpose: keeping both men loyal, attentive, and competing for his favor. A source independently confirmed Trump’s exact words to Fox News Digital Thursday morning, making that day’s report among the most consequential leaks in the early 2028 succession contest.
Trump’s private remark — “At the end of the day, we need to elect JD” — contrasts sharply with more than a year of public theater in which he praised both men, suggested they form an “unstoppable” joint ticket, and declined to state who should lead it. That theater, according to advisers who spoke to the Post, is not over: even as Trump buoyed Vance to donors inside the Oval Office, he questioned White House staff aboard Marine One in late July about who they preferred — Vance or Rubio. One adviser told the Post that Trump has privately resolved on Vance as the Republican heir; six other advisers and allies said they were not convinced he had made up his mind and noted that he gives different signals to different audiences.
That pattern is not indecision. It is a classic exercise of lame-duck presidential power. By maintaining public uncertainty — letting each man believe the endorsement is still in play — Trump preserves leverage over both Vance and Rubio for the remainder of his term, ensuring neither can afford to step out of line. The private donor remark, whether a deliberate signal or an inadvertent one, is a leak into Vance’s key donor constituency without surrendering the public theater Trump uses to hold the field together.
Year of Staged Suspense
For most of 2025 and into 2026, Trump treated the succession question as a parlor game, staging moments of ambiguity that generated headlines and kept both men auditioning. In May 2025 he mentioned Rubio first — before Vance — in a Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker, which prompted days of commentary about whether the VP’s status was slipping. In October 2025, he invited Rupert Murdoch to dinner at a table that also included both Vance and Rubio, then asked Murdoch to compare the two men — Murdoch was reportedly more enthusiastic about Rubio, reflecting his known reservations about Vance dating to the 2024 vice-presidential selection, according to Haberman and Swan’s Regime Change book. At a Rose Garden dinner in May 2026, Trump held an informal applause vote for the two men as a succession test, the book also reports.
Trump has simultaneously praised Rubio as potentially the greatest secretary of state in history — according to Fox News Digital — while telling donors Vance is the man he wants to win. On Wednesday night — the evening before the Washington Post story dropped — Trump spoke at a Las Vegas donor event, mentioning Vance only once: the war on fraud led by “our great Vice President JD Vance.” The studied restraint in that public setting, against the backdrop of his private Oval Office remarks two weeks earlier, captures the gap exactly.
Why Vance’s Position Has Hardened
The succession clock shifted in concrete ways in July. On July 19, Usha Vance gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, a boy named Alec Neel Vance — the first child born to a sitting vice president in more than 150 years, confirmed by Fox News Digital,. People close to Vance had consistently told the Post that he intended to wait until after the birth before seriously contemplating a campaign. That personal milestone has now passed.
Vance is also the first sitting vice president to serve as the Republican National Committee’s finance chair, a role that has given him direct access to major GOP donors across the country while raising what RNC Chairman Joe Gruters described as “a record amount of money for a vice president.” By mid-2026, the RNC held approximately $128 million in cash on hand, according to the party’s June Federal Election Commission filing, giving Vance structural fundraising credibility beyond any rival before a single primary vote is cast.
Polling data reinforces the structural advantage. In a Big Data Poll conducted June 26-28, 2026, Vance led the 2028 field with 35.4 percent support, more than double Rubio’s second-place showing of 16.5 percent. A Verasight national survey from April 2026 found nearly four in ten Republicans and Republican-leaning voters preferred Vance, with no other candidate reaching 20 percent. A Zogby Analytics poll from July 1-4, 2026, found Vance ahead of both Democrats — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom — by approximately seven points in hypothetical general election matchups. Though Rubio has closed the gap somewhat, Vance has not relinquished his lead in any major poll this cycle.
What the Regime Change Book Reveals
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump — published June 23, 2026, by Simon and Schuster, based on more than 1,000 interviews — provides the fullest portrait yet of Vance’s position inside the administration. Jonathan Swan characterized the picture in a PBS NewsHour interview: Vance is “ideologically more consistent than Trump and feels more passionately about the MAGA issues than Donald Trump himself does.” The book’s most politically consequential revelation about Vance is that he was the only senior official to openly oppose the Iran war inside the Oval Office — and that his opposition cost him with the president.
That detail matters for the succession contest. It suggests Vance is not simply a loyalist performing proximity — he is an ideological actor with genuine beliefs that will occasionally conflict with Trump’s instincts. Whether that makes him more or less electable in a 2028 field that will require both MAGA enthusiasm and some distance from the second-term record is the central question that the midterms, and whatever follows, will begin to answer.
The Rubio Factor and What He Would Run On
Rubio has repeatedly said he would back Vance if the vice president enters the race. “I think JD Vance would be a great nominee. If he decides he wants to do that. He’s a close friend and I hope he intends to do it,” Rubio told Fox News’ Lara Trump show He has otherwise maintained that he is focused on his current role — serving simultaneously as Secretary of State and former acting National Security Adviser, making him the first person since Henry Kissinger to hold both positions at once.
But Rubio’s trajectory has complicated the public story. His popularity at CPAC surged from 3 percent in the 2025 straw poll to 35 percent in March 2026, driven in part by his visibility during the Venezuela operation and the Iran war. According to Fox News reporting, a group of GOP donors backing Rubio is quietly working on ways to boost his political profile — to the irritation of Trump’s inner circle. The Washington Post reported that Rubio has grown so fatigued by constant 2028 speculation that he pulled back from some media availability to avoid facing more questions about it.
What a Vance Presidency Would Mean for AI and Technology Policy
For a TechTimes audience, the succession contest is not only a political drama — it is a preview of how the United States government will approach artificial intelligence, data privacy, and technology regulation for the decade beginning in 2029.
Vance has the most clearly articulated AI policy footprint of any plausible 2028 candidate. As his first foreign trip as vice president, he led the US delegation to the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, where he called for a deregulatory AI policy to emerge from the conference, warned against “excessive regulation” that could hamper transformative technology, and declared that “American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.” At Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Summit in March 2025, he elaborated a four-pillar AI doctrine: American AI as the global gold standard; domestic and international deregulation; preventing AI from becoming an instrument of authoritarian censorship; and a “pro-worker growth path for AI.” His alignment with the Silicon Valley wing of the MAGA coalition, including investors associated with Andreessen Horowitz, has been a consistent feature of his political positioning.
Rubio’s technology record is older and more defense-oriented. In 2019, he introduced the American Data Dissemination Act, which would have required the FTC to set federal data privacy standards — a proposal that garnered bipartisan interest but never passed. In 2024, he sponsored the Artificial Intelligence Acquisitions Act, which would have prohibited US government agencies and their contractors from using AI products developed in China, Russia, or other adversarial nations. His AI posture is national-security-first rather than industry-first, a meaningful distinction for companies that will be writing the rules under either administration.
The difference is not incidental: a Vance White House would likely accelerate the deregulatory AI agenda already set in motion by Trump’s January 2025 executive order rescinding Biden’s AI safety framework, while a Rubio White House might impose more security-oriented constraints on foreign AI while keeping domestic industry relatively free. Either way, 2028 is a technology election — and for the first time, the major candidates have documented records that technology voters can evaluate.
What the Midterms Change
The contours of the 2028 race may shift substantially depending on November’s results. Republican losses in the House or Senate would embolden potential alternative candidates — from DeSantis to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump Jr. — to enter the field and make it easier to criticize the administration’s record without incurring Trump’s displeasure. A strong Republican performance would tighten Trump’s grip on the succession outcome and make his private preference for Vance that much more difficult to challenge.
Vance is acutely aware of the stakes. He has headlined fundraisers in Florida, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas as RNC Finance Chair, building personal relationships with major donors in every region while structuring the midterm financial apparatus. Republican strategists note that Vance’s access to Trump’s network and his incumbency advantage inside the donor class gives him a structural head start no rival without a current government title can easily match.
For now, Thursday’s Washington Post story has changed the terms of the contest, even if Trump has not made a formal endorsement and aides caution that his stated private preferences are not binding. A private lean is not a public commitment, and Trump has reversed himself before. But the leak — confirmed by Fox News Digital from a separate source — has signaled to the donor class that the Oval Office furniture is beginning to point in one direction, even while the man at the desk keeps asking everyone around him which way they think it should face.
Frequently Asked QuestionsDid Trump formally endorse JD Vance for 2028?
No. As of August 6, 2026, Trump has made no public endorsement and multiple advisers emphasize that his stated private preference is not final. One adviser told The Washington Post that Trump has privately resolved on Vance; six others expressed skepticism, noting that Trump gives different signals to different audiences and has delayed any formal endorsement partly to preserve his own influence for the remainder of his term. The Washington Post story, confirmed by Fox News Digital, is the first report of a direct private statement of preference — not a formal announcement.
Why does Trump maintain public ambiguity if he has privately chosen Vance?
This is the central question the donor remark forces into the open. Political scientists and presidential historians have documented that term-limited presidents routinely use succession ambiguity as a management tool — keeping both potential heirs loyal and attentive rather than allowing a presumptive frontrunner to build independence from the incumbent. Trump’s pattern in 2025 and 2026 — praising Rubio effusively, suggesting a joint ticket, staging informal votes — is consistent with deliberate theater rather than genuine indecision. His aides broadly expect him to delay any formal endorsement specifically to avoid diminishing his own influence during the remainder of his presidency, Fox News Digital reported.
What is JD Vance’s position on artificial intelligence regulation?
Vance has been the Trump administration’s most visible AI spokesperson and the country’s most prominent deregulatory voice on the technology. At the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, he called for a “deregulatory flavor” in AI governance, warned against “excessive regulation,” and argued that American AI must remain free of “ideological bias.” At Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism Summit the following month, he detailed a four-pillar AI doctrine built around US dominance, deregulation, prevention of authoritarian censorship, and a “pro-worker” adoption framework. A Vance presidency in 2029 would almost certainly continue and deepen the deregulatory AI posture established by Trump’s January 2025 executive order.
How does Marco Rubio’s technology policy record differ from Vance’s?
Where Vance has led with domestic AI deregulation and US industry dominance, Rubio’s technology record is more rooted in national security. His 2024 Artificial Intelligence Acquisitions Act — which would have prohibited US government agencies and contractors from using Chinese or Russian AI products — reflects a security-oriented framework that treats adversarial AI as a defense threat rather than primarily a competitiveness concern. His 2019 American Data Dissemination Act also proposed federal privacy standards the Trump administration has not pursued. The distinction matters for technology companies: a Rubio administration might impose more supply-chain and procurement restrictions on foreign AI while keeping domestic regulation relatively light, while a Vance administration would likely prioritize removing domestic friction over managing foreign AI risk.