By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
I often describe the president and his movement as
“postliberal,” but it’s a misnomer. They’re not postliberal. They’re preliberal.
A truly postliberal politics would differ meaningfully
not just from liberalism but from what preceded it.
Donald Trump’s politics do not. Might makes right,
loyalty above all, rampant self-enrichment, punishing one’s enemies: There’s
nothing novel or innovative about how the president wields public power that
distinguishes it from the way state business was done before the Enlightenment.
He and his fans don’t pretend otherwise. MAGA has always
defined itself as backward-looking, from the vague
nostalgia of “making America great again” to dopes with Roman-statue
avatars on social media clamoring for the West to “RETVRN.” It’s atavistic to
its marrow.
The biggest tell about the president’s preliberalism is
his attraction to the trappings of royalty. He’s gilded the Oval Office, put
his name on buildings
and currency, obsessed over a palatial new ballroom and victory arch, and will soon host the closest thing modern
America has to gladiatorial combat on the White House grounds. He
palpably yearns for monarchy and has undertaken to get as close as America’s
fragile constitutional order will let him.
And monarchies, you may have heard, are hereditary.
Our uncrowned king has behaved accordingly in both public
and private life, involving his children in the Trump Organization, enlisting
them in his presidential campaigns, and even making some of them White House
advisers. As I write this, his daughter’s husband is preparing to try to broker peace
with Iran for the United States.
From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow
preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing,
family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than
non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat
kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging
power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to
the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the
next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.
Yesterday at The Bulwark, Jonathan
Last took the president’s monarchical aspirations to their logical
conclusion. Forget J.D. Vance, he wrote: Isn’t Donald Trump Jr. the likeliest
Republican nominee in 2028?
I’m going to make the case against thinking so. But
honestly, I kind of agree.
The case for Junior.
You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to
explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because
the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively
has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a
prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.
Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last
notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of
State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The
vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption
that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if
Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his
father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well.
Dramatically.
In fact, if the president started talking up his son as a
potential candidate, my guess is that Vance would concoct an
excuse not to run in 2028. “A [Trump Jr.] candidacy would carry the
explicit endorsement of Trump the Father, making it impossible for the vice
president or secretary of state to contest the race without becoming
unpersoned,” Last writes. “Challenging Don Jr. would turn them into enemies of
the people.”
Indeed. Why would J.D Vance, who’ll still be in his 40s
in 2032, want to destroy his political future by challenging Junior in 2028 and
antagonizing the Trump monarchy? He’d almost certainly lose the primary, and if
he didn’t his “disloyalty” would nonetheless fatally alienate some MAGA
fanatics whose votes he’d need to win the general election.
Depending upon how unfavorable the political environment
is to Republicans in the next cycle, the VP might even prefer to step aside. If
the GOP nominee is doomed to lose, better that it be Junior. Vance would then
be set up for a comeback four years later in which he’d argue that only
Trumpism without a Trump can prevail in a Trump-weary America.
The Republican establishment might favor a candidacy by
the younger Trump for similar reasons. A resounding defeat for Junior in a
Democrat-friendly 2028 cycle would give party apparatchiks an opening at last
to say that Trumpism has run its course and it’s time to try something
different. Losing with Vance risks having the opposite effect, convincing
grassroots cultists that the GOP needs a Trump atop the ballot to win.
The president also has reasons to prefer his son to Vance
as nominee.
It’s not a pure matter of ensuring that his gene pool
controls the Republican Party for the indefinite future, although it is of
course partly that. Getting Junior elected president is the closest Donald
Trump is likely to come to remaining in charge himself.
His opinions in retirement would surely weigh heavily on
Vance, but the VP will need to separate himself from Trump on some unpopular
issues if he runs in 2028, beginning with the Iran war. The unstated premise of
his candidacy will inevitably end up being something like “Trumpism but minus
the crazy bits” that voters dislike. “I’m my own man,” he’ll say when asked
whether he intends to do his former running mate’s bidding.
By contrast, the implicit promise of a Trump Jr. campaign
will be that he isn’t his own man. He will do the bidding of his
father, giving his dad the extra term that the 22nd Amendment and
the, ahem, election-riggers in 2020 cruelly denied him. If the president wants
to maximize his power over the GOP in retirement—and maximizing one’s power is
what preliberalism is all about—then Junior is the purest, most reliable
instrument for doing so.
But lay aside those political implications. Last has
another all-but-insuperable argument for why both Donald Trumps will be keen to
have someone from the family on the ballot in 2028. It’s the only way to make
sure that the gravy train keeps rolling:
In just cash and gifts, the Trump
family’s total take [during the president’s second term] is already more than
$2 billion (and that doesn’t include Jared and Ivanka or Barron Trump). That’s
a hard number, not a paper value. If the Trump family no longer occupies the
White House and relinquishes its claim on the Republican party—thereby removing
the possibility that it could return to the White House—does that money keep
flowing based on the business genius of Don, Eric, Barron, and Jared?
Probably not.
The Trump family will continue to cash in on its
influence even in a GOP run by J.D. Vance, but there’s no question that Vance’s
political interests would diverge from their financial interests in a way that
Donald Trump Jr.’s political interests would not. Having converted a political
party into a racket that’s made them filthy (well, filthier) rich, why would
they now just … hand it over to the Hillbilly Elegy guy?
That would be a remarkable act of generosity. And
racketeers aren’t known to be generous.
The case against Junior.
The argument that Trump Jr. remains an unlikely nominee
in 2028 despite dad’s monarchical pretensions is as straightforward as the
argument for believing he’s the favorite. Two words: Trump fatigue.
In five of the last 10 polls tracked by RealClearPolitics, the president has been under 40
percent approval. The worst of them, from Reuters, has him as low as 36 percent. At this point it’s
easier to imagine how that might get worse than how it might get better. The
Iran war resumes; the shocks to the global oil supply persist; inflation rises;
a manic Trump tries to interfere aggressively in the midterms; many, many more
tweets raising questions about his sanity ensue.
Fifteen months into Trump’s second term, we’ve already
reached the point where Tucker Carlson is delivering introspective monologues
about his culpability in helping to return the president to power. “I do think
it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences,” he told his brother during a podcast conversation this week.
“You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to
say I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional.”
“Tormented” with buyer’s remorse with 33 months still to
go: Does that sound like a promising posture for Republicans to nominate
another guy named Donald Trump in 2028?
Perceptions that Junior’s presidency would be a de facto
third term for his unpopular father are such an obvious electoral disaster in
the making for the GOP that I suspect all but the most ardent MAGA cultists
would worry about it. Even some cultists might think twice: Unbound to the
president’s son by the charisma and celebrity that they found captivating in
his dad, they might reasonably prioritize maximizing the right’s chances of
winning by nominating someone else over loyalty to the Trump offspring.
Junior also has potential vulnerabilities that J.D. Vance
does not. He and his siblings cashing in on the presidency will surely be a
target of corruption inquiries next year if Democrats flip the House. He’ll
also feel obliged out of family loyalty (or filial expectations) to defend the
Iran war, a subject which Vance and his allies have worked hard to distance the vice president from. And he’ll
face rumors about his, ah, energetic
public appearances that the more docile Vance will not.
Then there are what we might call the “known unknowns” of
2028.
I would not bet against anyone whom Trump endorses as
nominee, but if the president were to pass away before making an endorsement
then his son’s chances would drop to near-zero. Republicans would not want to
weaken President Vance with a primary challenge in what looks to be a tough
general election climate. And without Trump Sr. commanding the GOP base to back
his son, I’m not sure that his name alone would create a meaningful
constituency for Junior. My guess is that his support would top out roughly where
it is now, at around 15 percent in primary polls. In all likelihood, he would
opt to stay out of the race.
Conceivably, he might not run even if his father is still
alive, kicking, and willing to endorse him. It’s the same argument I made
earlier for why Vance might prefer not to challenge Junior in 2028 but in
reverse: If Democrats are a prohibitive favorite in the next cycle due to Trump
fatigue, better that some other Republican serve as the party’s sacrificial
lamb for voters. Trump Jr. might choose to back Vance, expecting him to be
crushed, and then run on a “Trumpism is back!” platform in 2032.
As for the Trump family’s gravy train, it’s true that
Trump Jr. as party leader would be more willing to let that continue than Vance
would—but it’s barely true. The vice president is so insecure about his
support on the right that he pulls
his punches even when denouncing bigots who insult his wife; he wouldn’t
dare ask the Republican base to choose between him and the Trumps by moving
against their corruption. Especially not as long as Trump Sr. is alive.
A three-man race.
I think Jonathan Last is mostly right about what the 2028
primary will look like if in fact the president designates his son as heir
apparent.
Vance and Rubio will decline to run, concluding that they
have too much to lose by trying and failing to depose the Trump royal family.
They’ll endorse Junior and quietly hope for a GOP wipeout that fall, paving the
way for them to run in 2032.
But Trump Jr. surely will get a challenge from the
“America First” cohort that feels betrayed by his father. Carlson is the
obvious candidate, having seemingly burned his bridges to the president with
his comments about being “tormented” by his part in reelecting him. By
challenging Junior he would be playing the same sort of role, ironically, that
Trump himself played in 2016 by attacking the Bushes. We can’t win unless we
repudiate the mistakes made by a man we all voted for, he’ll say to
Republicans. No more Trumps.
A Junior-versus-Tucker primary in 2028 feels like the
logical endgame given the trajectory this garbage party is on. No technocrats,
no policymakers, no governing experience, just a loudmouth online troll who’s
spent his life getting rich off of daddy’s name versus a conspiratorial
postliberal propagandist who seems to think America’s core problem is that it
isn’t more like Russia.
“I promise you that if the choice was Tucker or [Trump
Jr.], Fox and the Wall Street Journal editorial page would make their
peace with Junior,” Last writes. That’s true, and many other traditional
Republicans would do the same. Conservatism can only be saved by nominating
Donald Trump’s obnoxious son is precisely the conclusion that the last 10
disgraceful years of right-wing politics have been leading up to.
But I don’t think we’d end up with a two-man race.
A comparatively normal candidate with less to lose than
Vance or Rubio by jumping in would want to test his luck with an electorate
torn between two problematic populist chuds. “Tucker and Junior will split the
Trumpists,” that candidate might calculate, “and I’ll clean up with the
plurality that wants off the crazy train.”
Ted Cruz is an obvious possibility. He wants to run, he has a beef with Carlson, and he won’t have the same prestige as
Vance or Rubio in 2032 if he stands aside in the next cycle and waits for a
better opportunity. I think he’d get in and hope that the base divides roughly
equally between the three candidates, then start pounding the point that Trump
and Carlson are too kooky and repellent to win a general election.
But even if he miscalculated and became an also-ran, he
could still salvage something useful from the campaign by pivoting to becoming
an attack dog against Tucker for Junior. That would earn him the Trump family’s
gratitude and potentially a Cabinet position in the unlikely scenario that
Junior ends up as president.
In the end, though, the monarchy will likely get what it
wants, as monarchies tend to do. That’s the sort of party Republican voters
want to belong to and increasingly the form of government under which they want
to live, so it’s Trump Jr.’s nomination if he wants it. Probably.
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