Even as Elon Musk has drawn enormous attention for his slash-and-burn assault on the federal bureaucracy and his partnership with President Trump in the opening weeks of the new administration, quieter efforts are underway to position Vice President JD Vance as Mr. Trump’s eventual successor.
Mr. Vance is expected to lead some of the legislative battles over Mr. Trump’s agenda, as he is viewed inside the White House as the administration’s chief lobbyist in the Senate.
He has also been assigned to help oversee the potential sale of TikTok — a reward, according to one person briefed on the matter, for working on a plan, including one night until after 2 a.m. before the inauguration, that postponed a ban on the app that was set to take effect.
Mr. Vance and those around him have also applied a 2028 lens in early jockeying within the administration.
When Mr. Trump was toying with the idea of a cabinet post for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, three top advisers pulled Mr. Vance aside and argued that he should oppose such an appointment for a possible rival for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, according to three people briefed on the private discussions who insisted on anonymity. Mr. Vance disagreed, saying he saw some political upside from bringing Mr. DeSantis into the fold: It would make it harder for him to attack Mr. Vance from the right.
That debate was defused when Mr. Trump moved on from the notion of bringing on Mr. DeSantis. But the early speculation about the future of Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again movement — and, specifically, of Mr. Vance’s potential to be Mr. Trump’s political heir — is not limited to those around the vice president.
Just one month into Mr. Trump’s new term, ebullient right-wing activists who gathered outside Washington for this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference were abuzz with talk of retaining the presidency for consecutive terms. And many appeared enamored of Mr. Vance.
“It’s not enough to rest on our laurels to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got the 47th president of the United States,’” Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump social media personality, told a crowd at the conference on Wednesday. “We just got word that the 48th president of the United States, JD Vance, will also be speaking.”
This was also the first time in nearly a decade that the annual conference’s straw poll of attendees featured a ballot without Mr. Trump’s name listed as a choice to be the next Republican presidential nominee. The names included those of Mr. Vance and Mr. DeSantis as well as Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks, along with the Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas.
But it was Mr. Vance, who took the stage for a softball question-and-answer session to start Thursday’s program, who seemed top of mind.
“The most important thing is who will carry on Trump’s vision, because MAGA is here forever,” said Suzanne Rocci, a Virginia retiree attending the conference for the third time. “I think that’s JD Vance. He’ll learn from Trump for four years, and then we’ll have him for the next eight.”
Mr. Vance is certainly getting experience.
He used a speech last week at the Munich Security Conference to rebuke European allies for what he said were shortcomings in their efforts to protect free speech. The speech, which he defended at CPAC, set off a week’s worth of media attention.
Still, Mr. Trump recently demurred when asked on Fox News if he saw Mr. Vance as his successor. Instead, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Vance’s performance as vice president but said there were “a lot of very capable people” in the party.
Those remarks prompted Mr. Vance, who was told about the interview before it was broadcast, to seek and receive reassurances that all was well, including at a private meeting between the two men on Wednesday morning, according to one White House aide.
At the CPAC gathering, in Oxon Hill, Md., not everyone was entranced by Mr. Vance, or even looking ahead to 2028.
Couy Griffin, a former county commissioner from New Mexico who was convicted of trespassing on the Capitol grounds during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and then pardoned by Mr. Trump, was enjoying the celebratory atmosphere, but also grappling with the fact that Mr. Trump had serious economic problems to solve.
While Mr. Trump heralded the start of a “golden age of America” during his inauguration last month, Mr. Griffin said, “As far as day-to-day life goes, it really hasn’t changed.”
“It doesn’t matter what the president says,” Mr. Griffin said. “What matters is the actual physical changes that begin to happen in our communities, and we haven’t seen that yet.”
To that point, some allies at CPAC, including Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, are pushing the new administration to focus on delivering tangible benefits to working-class Americans.
Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Thursday that Mr. Trump should abandon tax cuts for the wealthy unless Elon Musk, the billionaire overseeing the White House’s cost-cutting program, finds $1 trillion in budget reductions and Congress eliminates enough spending to balance the federal budget.
“The future of the movement is going to be decided not by talk but by the actions that are taken over the next year,” Mr. Bannon said.
Mr. Bannon’s own name was also included on the conference’s straw poll for 2028. He declined to say in the interview who he thought should lead the party after Mr. Trump.
But a few hours later, speaking from the conference stage, he riled up the crowd by calling not for Mr. Vance or another Trump loyalist to take up the president’s banner, but for Mr. Trump to shatter the two-term limit, a notion Mr. Bannon has long floated but that would be unconstitutional.
“We want Trump in ’28,” he said. “That’s what they can’t stand: A man like Trump comes along only once or twice in the country’s history. We want Trump!”
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