Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a preview of a post-Trump Republican Party on Tuesday at a gathering of many of those who in the coming years will be responsible for running it.
No one at the black-tie conservative gathering mentioned “2028,” though it was an unmistakable undercurrent as the two featured speakers, who both hope to carry the Trump legacy into the future, laid out their respective visions.
The Future Vision of the GOP
The affair was ostensibly a celebration of the brand of economic populism that’s taken hold in the Republican Party under President Donald Trump. But American Compass’ “New World Gala” at Washington’s National Building Museum was really a forum for laying the intellectual groundwork for a MAGA movement once the president leaves office.
“This is not a five, a 10 — this is a 20-year project to actually get America back to common-sense economic policy,” Vance said.
Rubio, who spoke first, noted that that the country was in the “midst of an important and long overdue realignment.”
Embracing America First Policies
“This is going to be the work of a generation,” he told the relatively young audience. “There’s still much work to be done.”
Vance and Rubio — who lavished praise on one another — offered similar assessments of the current state of the country and where they hope to take it. Both spoke of reindustrialization, of an America First approach to economic and foreign policy and the role the next generation will play.
The two men — who Trump has said would both make good successors — used their time to outline a break from the pre-Trump era they argued did not focus enough on middle-class needs and neglected the nation’s manufacturing sector, leaving the country reliant on foreign adversaries and vulnerable to national security risks.
Securing America’s Future
“You can never be secure as a nation unless you’re able to feed your people, and unless you’re able to make the things that your economy needs in order to function and ultimately to defend yourself,” Rubio said.
Vance said it’s why Trump was elected, adding that the president is the “first mainstream American politician to come along and say, ‘this isn’t working.’”
Building the America First Movement
Their remarks were filled with appeals to GOP voters who will in the coming years choose a new standard-bearer for the America First movement. And while the Republican candidates will likely embrace an era of conservatism shaped by Trump, they will spend the next several years working to bring long-lasting structure to the party and unity among intellectually diverse factions.
Neither mentioned the GOP megabill, the top legislative priority for the administration, some of which is at odds with the brand of economic populism espoused by American Compass.
The legislation, which already passed the House, could cause millions of low-income Americans to lose their health insurance and cut funding for food assistance programs. It also offers tax breaks to top earners, while American Compass and others in the movement have unsuccessfully urged the administration to raise rates on corporations and high-earners.
Unifying the Republican Party
Vance, who sat for a Q&A with Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, sought to unify intellectually diverse factions inside the Republican party, a feat of coalition building that has helped Trump win three successive nominations. Vance did much the same in March when he spoke at a high-profile gathering of right-leaning tech figures to bring together the tech right and the populist right.
And he leaned into populist rhetoric, as he said he wants “normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life.”
Reclaiming National Interests
Rubio’s speech had a more academic flare as he argued that the Cold War resulted in countries, including the United States, abandoning nationhood — across economic, immigration, and foreign policy.
“Every single nation-state we interact with prioritizes their national interest in their interactions with us,” Rubio said. “And we need to begin to do that again. And we’re beginning to do that again.”
The Future of the America First Movement
Vance is seen by many in the America First movement as the heir to MAGA, a position he’s solidified with his full-throated backing of the president and his policies. In the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual straw poll earlier this year, Vance captured over 60 percent of the vote. And in a YouGov poll from April, among Republicans, 69 percent said Vance was someone they would consider voting for in the 2028 primary. Rubio polled at 34 percent.
