MILWAUKEE — Candidates, start your engines. With plausible deniability, of course.
The 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee is officially a gathering to Propel Donald Trump to a Third Consecutive Nomination. A parade of loyal lieutenants, including many former Trump primary rivals, took the stage to pay tribute to the former and potential future president, making clear how deeply the Trump brand is ingrained in the collective Republican soul.
But beyond the primetime pep rallies for thousands of delegates — and Trump — the same cadre of executives who represent the GOP’s next tier of power and prestige are fighting for something that seems unthinkable: a post-Trump Republican Party.
Welcome to the 2028 presidential election preliminary rounds.
“As soon as Trump became the nominee, and you could even say as soon as Trump won the Iowa caucuses so overwhelmingly in January, it started,” said Jeff Kaufmann, chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. The state that will host the nation’s traditional, first-in-the-nation GOP primary in about 42 months is the start of the process.
Candidate for Vice President JD Vance made the most obvious leap On Wednesday evening, a speech of thanks combined praise for Trump with his introduction in the US as the ideal successor to Trumpian populism.
Being Trump’s running mate is no guarantee of future political success. Former Vice President Mike Pence years of loyalty to Trump were erased in the eyes of many Republican voters when he refused to accede to Trump’s demands that he try to stop the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. When Pence participated in the 2024 nominationhe often drew bloodless audiences and boos from Trump supporters who branded him a traitor. He fallen out months before the Iowa caucuses.
The 39-year-old Vance now starts as a potentially seamless understudy. But he has plenty of company among Republicans banking on a wide-open primary in 2028, because Trump will either be a term-limited president or an 82-year-old who won’t run for re-election.
Some of the maneuvering this week was subtle: Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has not yet declared his candidacy, stopped by the Iowa delegation’s congressional floor chairs to make the rounds. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who ran in 2016 and was a finalist for the 2024 ticket before Trump chose Vance, texted Kaufmann and asked him to share “greetings” with the Iowa delegates.
And then there’s the obvious: Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and 2024 presidential candidate who has been a ubiquitous presence on television networks, at impromptu press conferences and at state delegation meetings this week.
And then there’s Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who finished a disappointing second to Trump in the 2024 primaries and then dropped out. At a luncheon for the Iowa delegation, he sounded like the same politician who spent a year courting the state’s conservative caucusgoers, bragging about his policy achievements and Florida’s remarkable shift to the right. As he had done on the convention stage the night before, DeSantis praised “good leadership.” Translation: His leadership.
There was no talk of another White House chase, but there didn’t need to be.
And then there are the middlemen, figures who maintain or raise their profile to secure their future options.
Governors Brian Kemp of Georgia and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia are Republicans who have raised their profiles in bipartisan states without seamlessly aligning themselves with Trump.
Youngkin, who spoke in primetime on opening night, hosted one of the week’s larger afterparties, with invitations sent far beyond Virginia’s delegation. Youngkin, a wealthy venture capitalist before running for governor in a Democratic-leaning state, is popular among the GOP’s old guard, the Chamber of Commerce cohort uncomfortable with Trump’s and now Vance’s brand of populism. But Youngkin has carefully avoided criticizing Trump, joining the former president in his box on the floor Wednesday night.
Kemp, who drew Trump’s ire in 2020 by refusing to overturn Trump’s Georgia loss based on false theories of voter fraud, he was denied an invitation to speak. He didn’t necessarily want one, having weathered Trump’s criticism — and a Trump-backed primary rival — en route to a commanding reelection victory in 2022.
However, Kemp, who will chair the Republican Governors Association for the 2026 elections, did interviews along the media grid and interacted extensively with spokespeople for the mainstream media, which many conservatives openly criticize and shun.
Like most potential national candidates, Kemp dodged questions about his possible future, whether it’s a Senate race in 2026 or the presidential race two years later. “I always keep all doors open,” he said during a roundtable discussion with two dozen national reporters and editors.
However, he did believe that a certain type of elected official would be suited to national leadership.
“I’m a big fan of Republican governors running for the White House,” he said, arguing that “they know how to govern.”
Trump’s final 2024 rival, Nikki Haley, endured the week’s most public tightrope act. The former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations was audibly boos as she took the stage to offer Trump her “strong support” and thank him for a kind invitation. But she did her utmost to thread the needle for the sake of party unity and, perhaps, self-preservation: “I haven’t always agreed with Trump, but we agree more often than we disagree. … You don’t have to agree with Trump 100 percent of the time to vote for him.”
Another governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, had no such needle to thread. Sanders was Trump’s most enduring of several White House press officers and in the process became an endearing figure to Trump’s core voters.
During a Politico roundtable, she gave the safe answer that she was focused solely on Trump’s election and then her own reelection in 2026. Onstage at the party convention, however, Sanders beamed as a hushed room hung on every word of her speech, laughed at her anecdotes and roared at her praise for her old boss — demonstrating a connection to the party’s grassroots and standard-bearer that few others can match.
Cole Trower, a Virginia delegate who helped organize community events for Youngkin’s 2021 campaign, said it’s a natural part of a convention to take stock of the Republican bench, even with the party so completely dominated by a figure like Trump.
“Four years, eight years, that’s a long time, and there’s a lot of good people,” he said, comparing the process to maintaining a successful sports franchise. “You always have to have new recruits. They come in, go through training camp, get tackled or injured and say, man, this is tough. Politics is tough. But then they go into that weight room and they come out an All-Star.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a former presidential candidate turned conservative now older, issued a warning to prospective candidates.
“JD is the frontrunner,” said Gingrich, a Trump ally who regularly speaks with the former president.
Trump, Gingrich said, did not select Vance to appease some stray faction of the party — because he didn’t have to. If Trump wins in November, he said, Vance will be the heir apparent.
“Whoever stands next to the president for eight years, or in this case four years, simply has a tremendous psychological advantage,” Gingrich said, especially if he offers what the party’s base already embraces. “Now they have a simple challenge: deliver.”
Simple. But not easy.
Just ask Pence.
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Adriana Gomez Licon, an Associated Press reporter in Milwaukee, contributed to this report.