Key Republican Delegates Crown JD Vance as Trump’s Successor

Republicans are reportedly leaning toward Vice President JD Vance as their pick for 2028.

While attending a closed-door breakfast at the Republican midterm convention Thursday, Vance was met with cheers of “forty-eight” from the crowd of delegates from key battleground states, four people who were in the room told Politico. 

Ahead of Vance’s scheduled address Thursday night, the breakfast served as reassurance that the vice president is favored by party members to eventually replace Donald Trump. Vance is currently leading the most recent Republican presidential primary polls, ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

Even Trump seems to have settled on Vance as his successor—though he still jokes about running for a third term.  

Things weren’t always so peachy for Vance. Earlier this summer, the vice president was the target of online attacks from within the GOP after his involvement in a now-collapsed ceasefire agreement with Iran. Vance’s allies tried to spin the criticism, claiming that coordinated opposition from “establishment” and “neoconservative” Republicans could actually help him in 2028. 

We’re still a long way from 2028, and Vance may get stuck in yet another fissure forming in the Republican Party: between the MAGA cultists and Charlie Kirk fans.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao reportedly admitted that the Iranian military “blew the hell” out of the U.S. naval base in Bahrain—a shocking claim that contradicts the Trump administration’s narrative of total destruction of Iran’s attack capabilities.

While the damage to the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain in a February 28 drone attack has been well documented, Cao’s Thursday comment to a reporter at the conservative outlet The Epoch Times is perhaps the most vivid, sober analysis of the situation from an individual of his ranking.

Cao also told The Epoch Times’ Ryan Morgan that Iran’s attack left American forces unable to “pull in” the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that was at sea for months and ravaged by reports of poor conditions and low morale.

“This is a pretty stunning admission by the Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, whose nomination is hung up in Congress, about how Iranian forces ‘blew the hell out of (U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet base in) Bahrain,’” Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin wrote. “Haven’t heard a senior U.S. official admit this on the record until now.”

Others noted the Iranian military capacity does not seem to be as depleted as Trump claims.

“A clear and particularly stark pattern we see in the war with Iran is that the Iranians are inflicting tremendous STRATEGIC damage with their missiles, but that the USG denies this at first and only admits it weeks, if not months, later. This creates a PROLONGED false impression that the war is going much better than it actually is and that strategic setbacks are not taking place at all,” wrote Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute. “The media narrative was that Tehran was utterly failing. In reality, Tehran was showcasing capabilities that the official Western narrative ensured were underestimated.”

When asked about any plans to return to the U.S. base in Bahrain, Cao told the Times, “I have a task force that’s looking at that.” That’s not what you want to hear in an expensive war that’s going very poorly.

President Donald Trump is blaming Democrats for why he’ll never give those $5,000 handouts.

Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Thursday, Trump offered a baffling excuse for why he couldn’t distribute the $5,000 dividends he’d promised the night before.

“Why not just give the money now? If you have the money, why not give it now?” Ingraham asked.

“Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it, because with them it’s negative growth,” Trump said. “With us, it’s so positive.”

In reality, Republicans are simply not on board. Even Fox News hosts balked at the hypothetical handouts’ estimated $1.3 trillion total price tag. If Republicans were the least bit interested in moving forward with these checks, then they already control Congress. They could just make it happen.

Trump also claimed Thursday that he’d give $500 rebate checks to about one million people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act in 30 states, claiming they were overcharged by the Biden administration.

It’s increasingly clear that Trump is hoping he can pay Republicans’ way through the midterm elections by dangling cash in front of voters. But the president has promised to deliver cash payments multiple times, including $2,000 stimulus checks of tariff revenue and $5,000 stimulus checks for the bygone “DOGE dividend.”

President Trump says he’ll give $500 rebate checks to about one million people enrolled in the Affordable Care Act in 30 states, claiming they were overcharged by the Biden administration.

“The relief begins with refunding everyone who was overcharged, and the rebates are going out in just a few weeks,” Trump said in a video message posted to the White House X account Thursday morning.

Trump accused President Biden of collecting insurance company fees that were passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums, but didn’t provide any evidence for the claim. But perhaps more concerning: Trump didn’t say where the money would be coming from or who exactly would be receiving the checks.

The White House later released a fact sheet online saying that the rebates would be disbursed beginning in October. The sheet did not specify exactly how much ACA enrollees were supposedly overcharged or if the proposal would require approval from Congress.

The timing of Trump’s plan is suspiciously less than two months before November’s midterm elections, and comes just hours after the president announced at the Republican midterm convention that he would send $5,000 checks to every American adult if Republicans keep control of the House and Senate.

“Only I can make this promise to you.… If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000,” Trump said Wednesday night. “Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders, or like last year when I gave our great members of the military $1,776, remember?”

That plan has been called a bribe, even attracting skepticism from Trump’s MAGA base. Trump has made similar promises before, like $5,000 DOGE checks that never came to fruition or the $2,000 dividend from tariffs that never materialized nearly a year later. Republicans also currently control Congress and the White House, and could theoretically send checks to the American people at any time. It seems that Trump is hoping that a little cash goes a long way toward making Americans forget how hard he has made their lives.

“Trump-a-palooza” is already tearing MAGA apart.

Top brass at Turning Point USA were “livid” that Donald Trump’s ramshackle midterm convention in Dallas was scheduled for Thursday, the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death, two people familiar with the group told Politico’s Playbook. Many of TPUSA’s senior leaders have chosen to skip the convention altogether, including Kirk’s right-hand man Andrew Kolvet.

“I personally made the decision,” Kolvet told Playbook. “I want to remember Charlie here, inside his studio and on the campus that he built. I want our influencers and our contributors to come here and be a part of remembering Charlie.”

One person close to the White House told Playbook that the midterm convention was a “huge missed opportunity.”

“This week we should be laser focused on two things: commemorating the run-up to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and hammering the Democrats in the run-up to 9/11 … not a half-assed convention,” the person said.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance both scrambled to maintain their grip around this increasingly alienated faction of conservatives.

Delivering a keynote address Wednesday, Trump thanked Erika Kirk for attending his self-obsessed convention on the anniversary of her husband’s death.

“She has put up with something, boy,” Trump said. “Oh, boy. What she’s had to go through and, the most beautiful family. It’s just terrible. But love, tough life, tough life. Can’t let it happen. From the very beginning of this journey, I’ve not stopped fighting and I never will stop fighting to protect you, your family.”

Vance called in to The Charlie Kirk Show Thursday hoping to demonstrate that the president’s massive ego hadn’t gotten in the way of his mourning. “All of us, I think, have this hole that we’re all trying to fill,” Vance said.

This week, Vance will be filling that hole by hosting an expensive and sparsely attended publicity event in order to satisfy his boss’s dream of being the center of attention.