The Official Republican 2028 Presidential Power Rankings

Looking at the most likely regime successors as political calamity approaches for the right

Ever since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I have refrained from engaging with any of the rampant speculation about the supposed fight for the future of the MAGA movement. To me, simply saying that it had already been sewn up has been the only defensible take. For all of the hype about MAGA’s oh-so-interesting factional splits, the party’s primary voters had been staunchly loyal to Trump during each of three runs and have remained solidly behind his latest Vice President ever since the big man himself was constitutionally barred from consideration. Not only has JD Vance never trailed in a single 2028 primary poll conducted since his selection as Trump’s running mate in July 2024, but his numbers have hardly ever wavered. Even today, after months of everyone from online gamblers to the D.C. press corps to the president himself swooning over Marco Rubio, JD is still holding on to the same ~45% primary vote share he has enjoyed in the polls since January of last year. For now and for the forseeable future, it remains true that if he wants the nomination, he is going to get the nomination.

So, why am I writing about the 2028 Republican primary now? If conservatives are still as slavishly loyal as ever to the people in power, what’s changed by so much as to finally allow for some legitimate intrigue? The answer is practically everything. While Trump 2.0 has been ailing politically for well over a year now, the President’s recent pivot to unabashed warmongering has introduced genuinely unprecedented levels of political risk to the MAGA project. Even before the effects of an imminent energy crisis have truly kicked in, the unpopularity of just the very concept of his Iran War has already been enough to drive his disapproval rating to near all-time highs. The door has been opened for a genuine blue tsunami in 2026—one so vast that just the prospect of it has already been enough to make even the most ambitious Republican presidential aspirants rethink what a nomination in 2028 might mean for them.

Want proof? Read the news. Citing his “recent private conversations” and other statements from “people close to Vance,” the Washington Post recently worked on the Vice President’s behalf to put out his first feelers for punting on 2028. While the official justification is that he and Usha are simply waiting to see how another baby this summer will affect their lives, the tell is in the rest of the article, which goes into painstaking detail about how he has oh-so-reasonable reservations about the war but is also oh-so-reasonably loyal to his president. In other words: while Vance is still trying to find a way to square the circle, our ideological Houdini is now well and truly afraid that he may have finally run out of tricks. Even though it may have been fine for him to change everything from his views to his last name on a dime when he was a no-name pundit, he now has far too many eyes on him to credibly flip-flop once again, and he knows it. Now, as he struggles to square his now-established “realist” brand with Trump’s full conversion to Markism-Levinism, he is putting it out as a serious possibility that he might do the wise thing by bowing out with some dignity intact and letting some other chump be the face of this administration when the reckoning comes.

It is in this possibility that we get the first intrigue of any kind about Republican presidential politics since 2016. While the Republican field is still far too narrow for me to do anything resembling the top ten lists that I have been regularly making for the Democratic field, there is still enough variance to make a solid top five. So, who are the top five most well-positioned Republican politicians to take—or be made to take—the nomination in 2028? Is Vance still in the pole position even in the face of his own doubts and a MAGA movement that’s completely moved away from him ideologically? Will Marco Rubio—now being cast by the media as the official Republican Savior for the third presidential election of his career—finally be able to live up to all of those decades of hype? And if it’s neither of those two, who else remains in the wreckage of what was once the right-wing populist coalition to take their place?

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Tucker Carlson (and the Slopulist Right)

Before we get on with this list, I want to use this section to establish something very important about the Republican Party. When most pundits—especially pundits on the left—write about a potential split within the GOP that casts Vance out, they’re thinking about it in one way and only way only: the loser stooge JD being rejected as a Jew-loving faux-populist by a rabid Groyperized MAGA base. It is in accordance with this narrative that nearly any and all rightists to criticize Trump from a “populist” perspective over the past year have received wall-to-wall coverage and intense discussion about their future as a presidential contender. While I may have specifically mentioned Tucker Carlson in the headline for this section, he’s really just a stand-in for a large cast of politicians and public figures to receive this treatment over the past year, from Majorie Taylor Greene to Steve Bannon to Thomas Massie. All of these politicians have been talked up as 2028 dark horses at one point or the other, with potential futures as populist heroes returning from exile to restore the MAGA movement and do to Trump what Trump did to the old GOP.

Well, I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s not going to happen. When Vance hints at sitting out 2028, it’s not because he’s afraid that someone like Tucker will swoop in and destroy him for not being anti-war enough. It’s because he knows that he himself has been too anti-war to run a dignified campaign as the standard-bearer for this Republican Party. The White House is indeed right about one thing they’ve been saying a lot over the past few weeks: that there is no actual “realist” faction within the actually existing MAGA movement. Not only do upwards of 90% of self-identified MAGA Republicans currently support the war, but a full 100% of them currently approve of Trump’s job in office. The political angle that Tucker and co. are going for—that of a far-right MAGA loyalist who disapproves of Trump from his right—isn’t just a weak one. It’s one that has literally no constituency within the GOP as it actually exists.

Sen. Lindsey Graham

With everything said about the woes of the populist right, I will grant them one thing: they haven’t had absolutely zero impact on the course of history. While they may have completely failed at finding any meaningful constituencies, building any institutions, or establishing any degree of independence at all from Trump’s whims, they were undeniably successful at two things: sucking up to Trump personally and taking up media space. This has had a real impact on their hawkish opponents, if only by forcing them into the political shadows for an extended period of time. As the slopulists were allowed to run free and write the public definitions of their out-of-power movement, their war-hungry opponents were left in a state of arrested development, deprived of a new generation of politicians and pundits willing to carry the banner for their side.

As such, the future of our once-again-openly-hawkish GOP is thoroughly defined by political throwbacks. Because there are no proudly neocon versions of Tucker, MTG, or even Josh Hawley, the rising Republican stars for 2028 are essentially the same as the rising Republican stars of 2016. The only question left to be asked about these political resurrections is where the line will be drawn, and it is there that we find Lindsey Graham. While I did give South Carolina’s senior senator some real consideration for the top five of this list—anyone high enough to serve as Trump’s co-president deserves nothing less—it’s just too hard for me to find a serious path for him to put him in it. The only world where Graham will ever have a chance will be one where the field where all the top contenders are out, which will definitionally be one where the GOP has been totally devastated in 2026. There, the right will be fully preoccupied with trying to explain its losses, and it’s very hard to imagine any of them looking at Lindsey—elderly, always-so-factional Lindsey—as someone with the qualities that they previously lacked. Even if they remain completely loyal to his vision of MAGAism, they’re still going to want someone special—someone who they believe can rally the “silent majority” of 2024 without making any real sacrifices.

In short: they’re going to want a myth.

The Top Five

#5: Erika Kirk

Credit: Gage Skidmore