MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump Jr. predicted Tuesday there is a “very high chance” that JD Vance will be elected president in 2028, adding that he himself would “never throw his hat in the ring” to be an elected official.
“I think there would be a very high chance, right?” Trump Jr. said of the running mate of his father, who wouldn’t be able to run for president again in 2028 if he wins another four-year term in the White House in November.
“He’s the one guy in that movement that’s a politician that’s out there that actually really speaks to the America-first people and isn’t sort of, ‘We’ll be right back to the establishment,’ ” Trump Jr. said of Vance at an Axios event.
Vance, at 39, is half of former President Donald Trump’s age. If elected into office as Trump’s vice president, he will be the second-youngest veep in history.
Trump Jr. had pushed for Vance to be Trump’s running mate for months. Their friendship led some to believe he could be angling for a political relationship with the Ohio senator, but the younger Trump refuted those claims Tuesday.
“I could never throw my hat in the ring or anything like that,” he said.
Instead, Trump Jr. said he would want to be an adviser for his dad and have the power to “block” anyone from working with him.
“All I want to do is block the guys that would be a disaster. Right? I want to block the liars. I want to block the guys that are pretending they’re with you,” he said, adding that he wants a “veto power” to cut out those people from being in the administration.
He spoke about having wanted Vance or TV politics host Tucker Carlson as his father’s veep but knows that Carlson did not “want a day job.”
Trump Jr. also said a VP debate pitting Vance against Dem Vice President Kamala Harris would be “ugly” and that the senator can “destroy someone with facts.”
He praised Vance for his ability to win over the Rust Belt, too, with his experience growing up impoverished in Ohio.
Trump Jr. also described what it was like for him and his family in the hours after the Saturday assassination attempt on his father.
He said “it was a very heavy moment” to watch his father enter onto the Republican National Convention floor Monday night with a bandage on his ear because of the events that had happened 48 hours before, when Trump was grazed by a bullet.
Trump Jr. said there were about “90 minutes” before he knew if his father was alive Saturday. The former president was shot in the ear while giving remarks at a Pennsylvania rally and was quickly whisked away to a local hospital in Butler.
After the assassination attempt, the former president completely changed his vision for his RNC speech, Trump Jr. said.
On Friday, the prepared speech was “hot,” but after the shooting, his camp has tried to “deescalate some of that rhetoric now.”
Trump has said he changed his RNC speech after the shooting to focus more on “unity.”
Trump’s son added that he would “love” to see an endorsement for his father from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The independent, whose father Bobby Kennedy and uncle President John F. Kennedy were both killed by assassins in the 1960s, had spoken to Trump after the shooting. Trump Jr. said they are “obviously having conversations” and that Kennedy and Trump could even work together in the future.
