TRUMP ON 2028 GOP FIELD: “YOU HAVE A LOT OF PEOPLE.” Over the last year or so, President Donald Trump has sometimes pointed to Vice President JD Vance as his preference for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. Sometimes he has spoken favorably of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and sometimes of a Vance-Rubio “dream team.” Every now and then, Trump has referred to unspecified others who might emerge.
Lately we’ve had reports that two others, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and War Secretary Pete Hegseth, might be considering a move in 2028. (Cruz has said he is thinking about it, while Hegseth has denied any such intentions.) And now, Trump has said he expects there will be other candidates as well.
In the Oval Office Monday, Trump was asked whether he had seen reports that Hegseth is considering a run. “Could you see yourself supporting him?” a reporter asked. Trump praised the war secretary but stayed noncommittal on any presidential race.
“I think he’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump said of Hegseth. “But it’s very early to talk about that. We have to get through the midterms first. I think he’s a very good guy, but I’ll bet there’s a lot of people considering it that you don’t know about. You probably have — you have a lot of people.”
Trump did not elaborate. Was he saying that he knew of a lot of people considering it — information the public did not currently have? Or was he just guessing that there are a lot of possible candidates? In any event, it was quite clear that Trump envisions a 2028 Republican race that expands beyond JD Vance, or Marco Rubio, or JD Vance and Marco Rubio.
“It’s no secret that I want to be president,” Cruz said on a podcast last week. The Texas Republican described presidential ambition as “a bug that history has proved is rarely ended” and suggested that he has a permanent case of it. Last week, without offering any support, Trump said of a Cruz run, “I think he might do that. He’s a talented guy.”
Political veterans will remember that Cruz ran for the GOP nomination in 2016, when he ran into a brick wall named Donald J. Trump. Cruz lasted the longest of any of Trump’s GOP opponents and ended his campaign with a bitter tirade against Trump. He then pointedly refused to endorse the nominee at the Republican convention. Still, the voters have a way of turning a politician’s head around, and Cruz became a prominent supporter of President Trump, and has been so for the last decade.
For his part, Hegseth denied the NBC News report that he “has told close friends and associates that he is considering a run for president in 2028.” NBC said that Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, “have floated the idea of a presidential run for the past few months, believing he has some of the same attributes that have made Donald Trump popular with the MAGA movement.”
“100 percent false,” Hegseth wrote on X. “We told NBC that, but they just lie with anonymous ‘sources.’” NBC attributed some of the story to buzz surrounding Hegseth’s trip to Iowa to campaign for Republican midterm candidates. Hegseth, of course, has never run for anything, but neither had Donald Trump before jumping into the 2016 race.
As Trump said, it’s very early. But it’s not too early to see that potential GOP candidates might view 2028 as 1) an enormously important race to define at least the initial post-Trump direction of the Republican Party, and 2) a race that should include more than one or two candidates.
That doesn’t mean any other candidate beyond Vance or Rubio can gain traction. Perhaps they can’t. But at this point, who knows? The party isn’t locked into anything. If you can’t imagine the race moving beyond two men, perhaps you’re not imagining enough.