President Donald Trump says that he doesn’t necessarily see Vice President JD Vance as his automatic successor in the 2028 presidential election.
Trump revealed his thoughts on his vice president in an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier filmed ahead of Super Bowl Sunday.
“Do you view Vice President JD Vance as your successor, the Republican nominee in 2028?” Baier asked.
“No, but he's very capable,” Trump responded. “I mean, I don't think that it, you know, I think you have a lot of very capable people. So far, I think he's doing a fantastic job. It’s too early, we're just starting.”
Vance wouldn’t be the first vice president in recent history to vie for the presidency. Joe Biden, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush and Walter F. Mondale all won their party’s presidential primary races after serving as vice president, with Biden and Bush both securing the presidency afterward.
Meanwhile, Vance is on his first foreign trip as vice president, attending an AI summit in Paris and the Munich Security Conference.
“At the AI Summit, the main reason I’m going is actually to have some private conversations with the world leaders who are also going to be there,” the vice president told Breitbart last week. “I think there’s a lot that some of the leaders who are present at the AI summit could do to, frankly, bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, help us diplomatically there.”
Vance is also set to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen and Vice President Kaja Kallas, Politico reports.
The vice president is also reportedly “quarterbacking” a deal to save TikTok alongside National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, Punchbowl News reports.
This means Vance and Waltz are hammering out an arrangement while examining the tech, diplomatic and national security issues behind such a deal. They are also in charge of figuring out who will own TikTok or if the U.S. ban on the Chinese-owned app should go into effect in April.
This comes after Congress passed a bill last year to remove TikTok from U.S. app stores, citing national security concerns, unless its Chinese owners sold it to a U.S. company. The deadline for the law to take effect was January 19, a day before Trump’s inauguration.
While ByteDance didn’t sell, former President Joe Biden said he would not be enforcing the ban — and Trump later signed an executive order extending the deadline to sell by 75 days. As a result, the app went dark for a matter of hours before coming back online. TikTok displayed a message to users once it was available again crediting “President Trump’s efforts” for its return.
