JD Vance’s 2028 chances are not looking great due to one candidate in particular, The View’s lone Republican host argued on Wednesday.
Co-host and Donald Trump’s former White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin said that Vance looks worse as a Trump successor every time Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks.
“I think that every time Marco Rubio speaks, JD Vance is kind of in the fetal position,” Griffin said as the hosts discussed the ongoing war and Rubio’s new role as fill-in press secretary during Karoline Leavitt’s maternity leave. “Because that is a much more formidable Republican candidate.”
She explained, “Republcians are really, really zeroed in on what will likely be the Republican battle—JD Vance versus Marco Rubio—and, while Marco Rubio did not convince me there’s a strategy on the war, I am reminded when he speaks, what it sounds like to have somebody who has more than a 100-word vocabulary, somebody who’s not talking about Hannibal Lecter and then weaving over here to lord knows what.”
Griffin isn’t the only one who sees Vance disappearing behind Rubio’s shadow. Trump has repeatedly sidestepped opportunities to endorse Vance, opting instead to praise Rubio.
The public’s response to Rubio appears stronger as well, as in April, Vance was left off Time’s Most Influential People list for 2026, which named Trump, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine as “Leaders” of the world.
According to CNN, Trump has pitted the two men against one another for the top job. The divide also showed itself earlier this month when Rubio, not Vance, was selected to meet with the pope, despite Vance’s conversion to Catholicism.
As Rubio had just described Iranian officials as “insane in the brain” at a White House press briefing, in reference to the 1993 Cypress Hill song, co-host Sunny Hostin replied to Griffin, “I’m not really interested in a candidate that’s quoting to me 90s hip-hop.”
The more important question, Hostin declared, is “What is the result of the war? And the result is nothing. We are out tens of billions of dollars. There is no regime change.”
Griffin insisted when Hostin was done, however, “I’m going to be watching for after the midterms, if it goes the way we expect, which is that democrats are going to do extremely well—does someone like Marco Rubio stick around, or does he step aside from this role? Because it’s a lot harder to run in 2028 when you have to defend the direction a lot of things are going.”
