From JD Vance’s Heir Apparent Status to Spencer Pratt’s L.A. Insurgency
As the 2028 presidential election draws closer, the question of who will be Donald Trump’s heir looms. When Trump exits the national political stage on January 20, 2029, at the age of 82, his successor may already have been sworn in that day as the 48th President of the United States. Despite possible fallout from the war in Iran and what looks to be a difficult midterm, all signs point to Vice President JD Vance.
Trump himself this week touted Vance-Rubio as the “dream team,” a ticket that has been rising in popularity on X and also in conservative political circles. Though Marco Rubio has been garnering interest among some in foreign policy circles and elsewhere to make a presidential run of his own, he’s already pledged not to enter the race should Vance decide to run. And that would be a wise move.
Rubio is a talented and shrewd political operator, which is why he’ll likely wait until Vance exits national politics to run for president himself. He’s shown an ability to move on from past political mistakes and anticipate where the party might be headed, as he did in rejecting the typical GOP rhetoric on economics years ago.
As a Floridian, he watched Ron DeSantis hurt himself with the Republican base by running against Trump in the 2024 primaries. (Only now does DeSantis seem to be getting his mojo back through an aggressive redistricting effort and his active and quirky X account.) Running against a Trump-endorsed Vance would be a political error of similar magnitude.
Though an AtlasIntel poll shows Rubio in the lead for the Republican nomination, most polls show Vance at the top, perhaps matching up against the loser of the 2024 election, Kamala Harris. Another possibility for the Democrats—one I think is more likely—is running California Governor Gavin Newsom, a dangerous and ruthless political operator who seems incapable of being embarrassed.
But what about the whispers that Vance will be forgoing the 2028 race altogether? It seems illusory; though politics is unpredictable and black swan events do happen, Vance is the most logical choice to be the Republican nominee. Though he will have to navigate the weaknesses of the second Trump administration, all indications point to him running for president in 2028.
Vance’s second memoir, this time focusing on the cross-partisan topic of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, will be released in June. Also, key members of his staff are leaving to do the necessary groundwork for a presidential run.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that Vance is a savvy political operator himself, with immense communication talents and the cultural background to connect to constituencies—both the working class and upper-class strivers—Republicans need to win a national political campaign and cement a generational advantage. And what Vance lacks in natural political skills compared to Trump will be rendered moot once he no longer shares the same stage with the 47th president. With Rubio out of the presidential picture for now, no other national Republican comes close to Vance’s name recognition and political abilities.
Given that Vance is Trump’s heir apparent, especially if—and increasingly when—Trump publicly endorses him, what about the question of Trumpism after Trump? Or is such a thing impossible, and will Vance necessarily guide the party in a different direction because he is a different man?
Part of this question revolves around what made Trump a historic political force in the first place.
The president’s success is owed not merely to the main pillars of his three campaigns—immigration, foreign policy, and trade—but also to his personality, charisma, and straight talk. He received over 220 million combined votes in his three presidential races because he dared to discuss the basic realities that many Americans were noticing but were afraid to voice in public for fear of reprisal.
A nation whose population is gradually replaced by immigrants is no longer the same nation. The foreign policy consensus before Trump produced one abject failure after another. Trade policies since at least the Clinton era hollowed out the heartland under the guise of the “free market.”
Americans didn’t vote for Trump’s vices but because he dared to stand up against a hardened political establishment in both parties that offered mostly post hoc rationalizations for decline, with a side of moral hectoring.
So while there cannot be Trumpism without Trump in the sense that anyone who follows Trump will be his own man, Vance and the broader Right can take various lessons from Trump that will serve them well.
Spencer Pratt, the reality TV star turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate, seems to be providing such an example. Instead of repeating Trump’s message regardless of the local political scene or becoming a caricature of the president, Pratt has put a heavy focus on quality-of-life issues, including getting homeless people and drugs off the streets and targeting the corruption of the California Democratic Party machine represented by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom, and the system that spawned them.
As Michael Anton has discussed in his book The Stakes and elsewhere, California has quickly declined over the last couple of decades. Like Europe, if America returns to both formal and informal leftist rule in 2028, the dysfunction of California’s political machine is a picture of what the country as a whole will become.
Evidence of California’s rampant political corruption is not hard to find. Eileen Wang, the former mayor of Arcadia, a town of 55,000, recently pleaded guilty to working covertly for the Chinese. She now faces up to 10 years in prison for running a website that helped boost CCP propaganda. Former U.S. House member Eric Swalwell, who had been mounting a run for California governor, resigned from Congress in mid-April after evidence of his rampant sexual misconduct was released. Pratt can point to these examples, along with many more, as evidence that the California political class needs to be thoroughly cleaned out, from top to bottom.
Another important aspect of Pratt’s campaign is a lack of attention on extremely online topics such as Jeffrey Epstein and a tunnel-vision focus on Israel. This distinguishes him from failed candidates like Casey Putsch, whom Vivek Ramaswamy recently crushed in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary. Instead, Pratt has clearly imbibed the reasons for Donald Trump’s success and is applying them to his own context rather than trying to court online influencers across America and in other countries.
Pratt is giving voice to grave concerns that many Californians have about L.A.’s political leadership. In a recent ad, he highlights the devastation caused by the Palisades fires as he stands in front of a trailer that sits in front of the burned-out husk of his former house. Pratt’s also sounding the Trumpian theme of law and order. He said on the All-In podcast that after a short “grace period,” he’d begin enforcing the law across the board: “No more nakedness, no more drug use, no more robbing, no more dog abuse.” “Then once we start enforcing laws, boom, streets will be back.”
Pratt will likely get enough votes in the June 2 runoff to qualify for the general election in November against Karen Bass. The Democratic establishment already seems to view him as their chief opponent, as Pratt is facing a combination of attacks from the powerful alliances of public sector unions like the SEIU, the Democrats, and the media.
In a recent attack ad, a voice-over actor notes how outside of the Democratic mainstream Pratt is, calling attention to his shocking ideas that massive amounts of taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be spent to build new houses for the “unhoused” or that public unions shouldn’t be used as cutouts to send public money to the Democrats. But to most Americans, this is simply common sense. That shows how far to the left California has moved since 2008, when voters in the state approved Proposition 8, which affirmed what marriage has always been.
Peachy Keenan, a lifelong California resident, puts the choice starkly: “Either we continue to get chased out of our own neighborhoods by gangs, fentanyl zombies, and robbed by the city’s corrupt homeless-NGO elite, or we put a stop to it. We either get the tents off our streets, or we never will. We either keep on dying, or we start living.”
California is a microcosm of the choice that remains before American voters at large. Will we return to the failed policies of the past, or will we continue traversing a better path, one that harks back to the best of the American tradition?
