Since Donald Trump took office on January 20, there has been no scoop to match the Atlantic’s sensational report that its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been invited on to a Signal group chat to discuss secret plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen.
And if you listened closely to all the consequent clamour, you would have been able to pick out a sharp and unexpected noise: the starter’s pistol being fired for the 2028 Republican presidential race.
This was primarily a defensive matter. So idiotic did these very senior members of the Trump administration now look that it was essential for those with higher political ambitions to get busy with instant repair work.
Take JD Vance: suddenly, the vice-president was insistent that he should go to Greenland, on a trip that was originally to be led by his wife, Usha, accompanied by one of their sons, to see the island’s national dog sledding championship. This alone would have been diplomatically risky, given the Greenlanders’ angry reaction to the claim that they are soon to be colonised by the US (“one way or the other,” as Trump so charmingly puts it).
With her husband now involved, the trip was guaranteed to be an international relations disaster. And so it proved. Vance declared, in a typically incisive observation, that “it’s cold as shit here”, before warning Greenlanders that annexation was necessary because “our friends in Denmark have not done their job in keeping this area safe”.
Resembling Jerry Lundegaard, William H Macy’s hapless character in Fargo (1996), as he stumbled around in his big parka, the vice-president was back doing what he does best: insulting foreigners, as he did at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, and in his notorious exchange with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office a fortnight later.
This generated hostile headlines in the mainstream media; but also – conveniently – distracted attention from Vance’s complicity in “Signalgate”.
His enthusiastic denigration of non-Americans is exactly what endears him to the MAGA base. This was a smash-the-glass way of reminding his core supporters that his wheelhouse is still xenophobia, natalism, isolationism and deportation; rather than damn-fool security breaches.
And – if the Signal chat had to leak – at least he was on-brand with his reported objection to the raid: “I just hate bailing Europe out again”. This made no sense at all (it is not Europe, but Israel that has been encouraging the US to take action against the Houthis), but reflected hardcore MAGA values: namely, that, other things being equal, it is always certain that Europe is somehow ripping off America.
Since his nomination as Trump’s running mate in July, Vance has been the presumptive frontrunner to be the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2028. At this stage of the electoral cycle, such calculations have only limited worth. Look back to April 2021: Trump was widely assumed to be destined for prison, and Vance was not yet a senator.
Still, there is a reason why so many fought so hard to be running mate to the Big Orange. On Sunday, he told NBC News that he was “not joking” when he said he was exploring ways of staying in office after January 20, 2029. But (assuming he does, after all, respect the 22nd amendment) this will be his second and final term.
This, in turn, meant that his vice-presidential pick was, by definition, going to be well-placed for their own run at the top job. And Trump knew this. According to Michael Wolff’s All or Nothing, he enjoyed keeping Vance on tenterhooks: “What would you think of me picking [Tennessee senator Bill] Hagerty for VP?” Trump asked Vance… as though it were a serious request for consultation, instead of a taunt”.
What the vice-president does understand is that the 2028 nominee will not be an old-fashioned establishment Republican. Those who imagine that (for example) Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN and Trump’s last opponent standing in the 2024 primaries, will storm back to reclaim the party have not been paying attention to the great realignments in American and global politics.
In Mad House, a fine new book on the 118th Congress by Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater, Chuck Schumer, now the senate minority leader, says that Trump is “an evil sorcerer” but that “when the Republican Party expels the turd… it will go back to being the old Republican Party”.
This is self-deception on a grand scale. Whatever MAGA becomes after Trump – and how great a role he continues to play – it will survive his exit in some shape or form.
Vance represents one version of that future: a movement led by a smug Ivy League graduate who looks like Jack Black’s unlovable brother and believes that “[w]e need an offensive conservatism, not merely one that tries to prevent the left from doing things we don’t like”. It is, he says, “time to circle the wagons and load the muskets” – metaphorically, of course.
Yet he is far from ideal. For a start, he does not exude the menacing primal strength that Trump displayed when he was shot at Butler, Pennsylvania, last July: bellowing “Fight, fight, fight!” as he pumped his fist in the air. Nor is the vice-president particularly – or even slightly – entertaining.
He cites Latin theological terms, which may be appealing to theologians but is less so to the so-called “deplorables”. He has a grating desire to be the cleverest in class, as was clear from his showdown with Zelensky. This signals desperation, which is usually, in the end, the kiss of death to political ambition.
Which is one reason that Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, believes he will be the next president. No, really. Long before he was appointed to run the Pentagon and the most terrifying war machine in human history, Hegseth was sure of his own manifest destiny as an American leader.
Here’s a taste of his 2020 masterpiece, American Crusade: “The call never comes at the right time. Life always gets into the way. Your cape will get caught in the door. The enemy is often more vicious than you thought… But if you persist, if you insist, and if you show courage, there is no force on Earth – especially the Left – that can hold you back. See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help we will save America.”
The ravings of a maniac? Yes, clearly; but also alarmingly aligned with the instincts of MAGA voters, and especially the evangelical nationalists who share Hegseth’s contempt for the woke, the weak, the feminised and anything remotely connected to Islam. His politics is more theocratic than constitutional.
As one of 21 Fox News presenters or contributors already recruited to this administration, he also personifies the lantern-jawed, gormless virility of which the populist right approves; a militarism that is aesthetic rather than operational, that speaks of national temperament and strength rather than global commitment and entanglement. His offer to the faithful is precisely that he is more superficial than Vance – and he has the hardcore Christian tattoos to prove it (not the sort that get you deported to the Salvadoran gulag).
Which helps to explain why he is so popular with the foot-soldiers of the regime. Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Trump, describes him as “kind of a madman – but hey, you need that” (do we?) When Republican senator Joni Ernst of Iowa suggested that she might vote against Hegseth’s appointment, she was mobbed online and threatened with a primary challenge. Before long she capitulated and offered her support.
Most revealing was the vigour with which Trump defended him as the Signal story gathered steam. In normal times, a defense secretary who was shown to have used an insecure channel to discuss battle plans would have resigned immediately. But normal times are long gone.
The president was content for Mike Waltz, the national security advisor, to be criticised over the security disaster. But not Hegseth.
Asked last Wednesday whether the defense secretary should consider his position, Trump reacted sharply: “Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this. How do you bring Hegseth into it?… Look, look – it’s all a witch-hunt”.
It takes only a moment’s reflection to realise why the president would be so protective. A former TV host, accused in the past of sexual assault, multiple infidelities and financial misconduct? Of course Trump likes Hegseth.
Naturally, it is much too early to say whether, three years from now, either Vance or Hegseth will be viable candidates. So let me suggest another contender who – at minimum – is certainly testing the ground.
On the day after the Atlantic’s scoop, the talk show host and podcast star Megyn Kelly announced the launch of MK Media, a new audio and video network. In the Before Times, this would have been an interesting media and business story. But, in 2025, it represents much more.
A lawyer by training, Kelly achieved fame as a Fox News presenter, and particularly for calling out Trump for his past treatment of women in a primary debate in Cleveland, Ohio, in August 2015. In retaliation, he launched a series of grotesquely misogynist attacks upon her, saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever”.
In due course, however, presenter and candidate patched up their feud and, later, became friends. Having left Fox and then NBC, Kelly reinvented herself as the host of a daily show on Sirius XM that now has more than 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube.
She also became radicalised: against gender ideology, vaccine mandates, undocumented migrants. Crucially, she decided to support Trump at his rallies as well as on her show.
On November 4, at an eve-of-election event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she told the crowd: “President Trump gets it. He will not look at our boys like they are second-class citizens. What I don’t want and what I don’t think you want is the left’s version of masculinity”.
At the Capitol One Arena in Washington DC, the night before the inauguration, Kelly was even more outspoken: “The goodness that is about to rain down on us after Trump is inaugurated is already starting. And I’ve got to tell you, I am so pumped up about it. Things are already happening in anticipation of Trump being sworn in, like Facebook and McDonald’s getting rid of their DEI programs”.
Such appearances are now becoming routine: indeed, if I were Tucker Carlson, Trump’s established media cheerleader-in-chief, I might be feeling a little threatened. At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, in February, Kelly riffed on the Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni legal feud as a way of getting into the media and political gaslighting of decent Americans, letting rip about the Democrats’ alleged control-freakery. At times, her shaggy-dog delivery echoed Trump’s “weave”.
“They want to tell us what we can eat,” she said, “they want to tell us what we can drink, they want to tell us how fast the water can come out of our showers, what we can drive, what we can put in the tank… what we can think, what we can feel, where we can pray, what we have to put in our arms, what we have to put in our children’s arms, our babies’ arms… we’re tired of their games!”
Can Kelly really call herself a journalist any longer? In an interview with the New York Times podcast, The Daily, posted on Saturday, she talked about her role in independent media. “If you really want to make it in this lane… there has to be a connection between your audience and you. Otherwise, what’s the point?” She added: “I’m in this new ecosystem where the old rules don’t apply… but what’s most important in my business now is authenticity”.
That’s certainly true. But it is increasingly clear that her “business” is not reporting the news but the pursuit of power. In the days of credentialism and conventional politics, a presidential candidacy required years of preparation, an exploratory committee, the squaring away of the party bosses. In the post-2016 world, campaigns can take many forms.
At the extreme, Trump won a second term by – unbelievably – making the court cases against him the basis of his claim to the presidency. But he has also shown how the annexation of popular culture, pageantry, comedy and sport can be a route to the top. The 2024 race was the podcast election. And it is through this lens that Kelly’s new media company should be understood.
When the Daily’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked her if Trump had offered a job, her response was revealing: “No comment. Let’s just say I’m happy doing what I’m doing”. Garcia-Navarro pressed her. “Look, if I thought I could be really helpful to the president, you know, it’s not that I would never consider it…”
That’s pretty clear, I’d say. When Kelly was on stage at CPAC, a heckler shouted “48!” He meant: “48th president”. Kelly laughed and replied: “I think you mean JD Vance!” The crowd came back: “49!” The idea of President Kelly is already in the MAGA bloodstream.
And, when you think about it, of course it is. Telegenic, opinionated, articulate, famous, MAGA-friendly, at the helm of her own brand and now her own company: if she decided to run, she’d be a strong contender for the GOP nomination – and could go all the way.
What a plot twist that would be: if the first female president turned out to be a disciple of Donald Trump.
