Trump official quietly positioning himself as successor while JD Vance stumbles

While the MAGA movement has spent a decade as a cult of personality surrounding President Donald Trump, with the 79 year old lame duck president approaching the end of his political career, his followers have begun searching for a new leader to take up the red hat. For a time, many suspected that it would be Vice President JD Vance, but according to the iPaper, his recent stumbles have political forecasters turning an eye to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

While Rubio may seem like a surprising successor for Trump considering the antagonistic beginning to their association during the 2016 election, since joining the president’s second administration, his appeal has grown both with Trump and Republicans in general. Trump used to mock Rubio with some of his signature disparaging nicknames, but these days “Little Marco” holds oversized sway in the White House, serving not only as Secretary of State, but as acting national security adviser and acting director of the US Agency for International Development. TIME named Marco to its 2026 list of influential people as his polls have climbed among Republicans, whereas presidential hopeful Vance was passed over by TIME and has seen his numbers drop.

The war with Iran and resulting negotiations provide evidence of the ascent of Rubio and the decline of Vance. While the former is technically the war hawk while the latter has spoken against foreign entanglements, Rubio has avoided the spotlight in relation to the war while Vance has suffered high-profile failures at the head of the negotiating table. “I’m blaming JD Vance,” said the president himself when asked who would be at fault if the talks failed.

According to John Mark Hansen, a US politics expert from the University of Chicago, Rubio “is positioning himself to put some deniability between him and anything that would go wrong.”

Another strike against Vance that could work in Rubio’s favor is the vice president’s association with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s failed bid for reelection, which many analysts have interpreted as a major blow to MAGA and far-right movements around the world.

At the same time, Rubio is perceived as having scored several foreign policy successes that are popular among MAGA voters. An architect of the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and key supporter of the administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats, those on the right like what they’ve seen of his performance. As ardent Trump supporter and far-right provocateur Laura Loomer asserted earlier in the year, “How could someone not support Marco Rubio? He is doing a fantastic job… He is going to be president someday. Mark my word.”

As Hansen explains, Rubio also may appeal to those whom Vance could never win, people “who might look at Rubio and say that ‘he’s not nuts’.” While Vance may not have the same raging temperament as Trump, he does have a tendency to cosign on some of the president’s more bizarre statements.

All of that being said, Vance does have his strengths. Not only does he have strong connections to influential figures like Donald Trump Jr., Elon Musk, and Pete Thiel, but he has a strong network throughout the GOP and is still outperforming Rubio in the polls. In a recent survey, Vance took 40 percent in a hypothetical 2028 primary versus Rubio’s 16 percent. And while a poll of attendees at the last CPAC showed Rubio’s support had shot up from 3 to 35 percent in one year’s time, the same poll showed Vance getting 53 percent.

According to Michael Berkman, a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University, Rubio could still draw Trump’s ire, as the president has made it clear that he has no qualms with dumping officials who fall out of his good graces. Berkman says that it could turn out that Rubio simply isn’t MAGA enough for movement loyalists, and that a “much more MAGA” candidate from outside the administration could still emerge.

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