When President Donald Trump delivered a nearly hour-long address to world leaders last week at the United Nations General Assembly, he spoke with another, more select audience in mind: JD Vance, Marco Rubio and other potential successors.
Although Trump isn’t due to leave the White House until January 2029, the president is looking at much of his second term through the lens of a leader with a finite amount of time to leave his mark, be it remaking America’s approach to trade and its allies or redecorating the Oval Office. And he’s eager to cement a lasting legacy.
One reason he spoke for so long “was because he was explaining everything and clarifying to anyone who wants to come after him what kind of foreign policy positions they’re going to need to take,” said a senior White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the president’s thinking regarding the speech.
“Anyone who wants to take over his movement is going to need to talk about migration, energy policy and all of these things,” the White House official said. “That speech is going to serve as a reference point in 2028 and for long after.”
The GOP’s top 2028 prospects, and the party broadly, have largely fallen in line with Trump on foreign policy and everything else. But, however prescriptive Trump aims to be in offering a blueprint, the current level of deference to the president could crumble after he’s left office, especially with regard to a foreign policy that has caused some fissures within his own movement.
“If Trump is just as popular with the base in two years as he is today, he’ll pick his successor. And that person will 100 percent be in his mold on foreign policy,” said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist in Washington who worked on Rubio’s 2016 campaign.
“But once Trump leaves the scene, what Republican foreign policy looks like is going to be a big fight. Some more isolationist MAGA folks have been fairly critical of some of Trump’s foreign policy decisions. I’ve been kind of surprised, frankly, at how much Trump’s foreign policy resembles a typical Republican president, especially in the Middle East, with Ukraine.”
After beginning his UN address with ad-libbed grousing about busted escalators and teleprompters, boasting about America’s economic growth and his work to end wars around the world, Trump spoke at length in prepared remarks about a “double-tailed monster” of immigration and green energy that he said “will be the death of Western Europe.”
His dismissal of global warming as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated upon the world” was a pointed rebuke to the U.N. itself. And his admonishments— that mass migration was diluting the “heritage” of European countries and that transitioning from oil and gas development to green energy was costing those countries immense wealth — were presented both as a warning to other leaders and a guidepost for the future of the GOP.
“I’m telling you, that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail,” Trump said. “And if you don’t stop people that you’ve never seen before that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.”
Trump has signaled a preference for his vice president, Vance, while also praising Rubio, the secretary of State who, when asked about running 2028, has demurred and praised Vance. But when the race to succeed Trump becomes a reality, many Republicans are likely to compete for the MAGA torch.
Vance and Rubio both declined to comment.
To be sure, Trump’s foreign policy isn’t likely to always adhere to any one doctrine. If anything, he prizes maintaining optionality and keeping people guessing over consistent fealty to any ideology. He toggles from aspirations of peacemaking to bellicose threats and drastic actions against weaker nations, from bombing Iran’s nuclear sites this summer to taking out suspected Venezuelan drug boats with missile strikes. And his recent commitments to bail out Argentina’s economy and to defend Qatar in the event of a direct attack shows a willingness to deviate in practice from his “America First” rhetoric.
As much as Trump was laying out a policy template at the U.N., he incorporated his trademark brashness and bravado that will be impossible for a successor to fully replicate.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said that Trump’s “historic speech at UNGA sent a powerful message to the free world — stop crippling your countries with unfettered migration and regressive energy policies, or risk destruction at the hands of leftist ideology. Only this President has the courage to deliver hard truths right to the faces of globalists who have made America the defender of western civilization.”
No one will bring Trump’s decades of experience as a public character and reality TV star to the Oval Office, nor will they replicate his rhetorical and tonal shape-shifting from gruff and authoritarian one moment to sarcastic and self-deprecating the next.
But Vance, viewed inside the White House as one of the president’s most effective surrogates, has been trusted to lead the White House’s messaging blitz to increase support for the GOP’s tax and policy law; and on the first day of the government shutdown on Wednesday, the vice president served as the administration’s primary mouthpiece to batter Democrats and take several questions from reporters.
Vance and Rubio, serving as Trump’s secretary of State and national security director, have both been deeply involved in the president’s foreign policy decisions. Both have met with world leaders abroad in service of Trump’s diplomatic efforts pursuing ceasefire talks, expanding defense partnerships and holding high-level summits. And the two are often part of a small inner circle called to meet with chief of staff Susie Wiles to align on policy recommendations before meeting with the president, according to both White House officials.
“Trump has a very unified administration, which was not the case in his first term,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican operative in Washington. “And his foreign policy is cohesive — and some of his greatest successes have come in this area. So it makes sense that he sees his approach as something that’s working now and that can carry Republicans forward into the future.”
A Trump political ally outside the administration, also granted anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged that Vance and Rubio in particular appear to be moving in lockstep with him now.
But given their past criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy decisions before they joined his administration, “it’s not a bad thing to remind them that they’re in these positions because Donald Trump built a political movement around these ideas.”
