Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday brushed off Donald Trump’s habit of polling friends, allies and dinner guests on whether he or Secretary of State Marco Rubio would make a better 2028 Republican presidential nominee, insisting at a press conference that the president was merely joking around.
Vance was speaking alongside Medicare and Medicaid administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz to detail the administration’s latest efforts to combat what they describe as an epidemic of public benefits fraud when he was asked about a Monday incident in which Trump conducted an informal straw poll of whether visiting law enforcement officials and other allies at a White House Rose Garden dinner preferred him or Rubio.
“I don’t know who’s it going to be — Is it going to be JD, is it going to be somebody else? I don’t know,” he said.
The president then turned to his guests for their views.
“OK, who likes JD Vance?”
After diners responded with tepid applause, Trump asked another question: “Who likes Marco Rubio?”
Asked about the incident, Vance responded with lighthearted sarcasm by referencing Trump’s time as a television reality show presenter.
“Well, I just don’t think it sounds like the President of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice. I just think that’s not at all what you would expect the President to do,” he said.
Vance added a caveat that Trump has “always been fascinated by politics” and said it was “natural for him to, you know, joke around with us a little bit, to play around with the idea.”
The vice president also expressed some discomfort at the idea of even thinking about a joint ticket with Rubio two years from now, telling reporters there were “few topics that I want to talk about less then what office I’m going to run for years down the road.”
But Vance also appeared to bend over backwards not to contradict Trump when pressed on the president’s claim that the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind as the months-long Iran war and impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continue to fuel surging inflation in the United States.
Asked about whether Americans’ pocketbooks were on his mind when considering what to do about the longstanding standoff, Trump told reporters: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation — I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
The exchange was made live on television as he departed the White House for China on Tuesday.
But a day later, Vance denied that Trump had said it at all when asked about the comments.
“Well, I don’t think the president said that,” he said. “I think that’s a misrepresentation of what the president said.”
