The Stillborn Post-Trump GOP

This is a post with two goals, sharply at odds with one another.

I’m interested in thinking through the question of how the Republican Party is likely to change once Donald Trump no longer has a future as the head of the GOP. The best way to explore that question in the present, I think, is to examine the factional rivalry between those who support Vice President JD Vance’s seemingly inevitable campaign for the presidency in 2028 and those loudly rallying around Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio.

That’s one goal. I’ll explore it in some depth below. But I also have another, divergent point to make—namely, that all such analysis is thoroughly hypothetical. All of it assumes a reality in which the wildest wild card in American political history has ceased to play his wild-card role while candidates are campaigning to succeed him. I’m talking, of course, about the 80-something Trump himself. If he has died or been rendered incapacitated by the start of 2028, then the reasoning I’ll lay out in my examination of the rivalrous Vance and Rubio factions may prove illuminating. But in the event that Trump remains (relatively) lucid and vital as a political force as we head into the 2028 primaries and general-election campaign, all bets are off. In that case, the post-Trump GOP may well end up stillborn.