Ben Shapiro Casts Doubt on JD Vance’s ‘Uneasy’ Coalition and 2028 Chances
LEFT: Ben Shapiro (Screenshot) RIGHT: JD Vance (Press Association via AP Images)
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro expressed his doubts about Vice President JD Vance’s political coalition and chances of winning the presidency in 2028 during a recent interview with Dana Loesch.
“Who do you see as the leader of the Republican Party after Trump is out? Because I was talking to some folks at an event over the past week and I was telling them, I think the biggest threat to the future of the Republican Party is if the party has an inability to move past personality, and refocus on issues, and why we all do what we do in the first place. Can we get-, is that something we’re gonna be able to get past?” Loesch asked Shapiro. “Because I don’t know who can take that place of Trump. I mean, he’s like kind of like a once in a lifetime candidate, love him or hate him. No one is like him. Who, how do we, how, what does it look like, if you look in your crystal ball, what do you see in the next election?”
“I think you asked why this was happening right now, I think the reason is because there’s already a battle going on for what comes next after Trump and there’s a conspiratorial wing of the Republican Party that says they actually want to seize away from Trump, his own movement. They say that Trump betrayed himself by attacking Iran, for example, or that Trump has betrayed himself by siding with Israel against Hamas. That part of the movement wants to grab control. This is people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker [Carlson], some of these folks. And then you have folks who are sort of more libertarian-minded like Elon [Musk], right, who are trying to grab control of the movement and move it in that direction,” observed Shapiro. “Because Trump is such a huge personality, and because he’s so famous and he’s so kind of gigantic, he’s able to contain multitudes within him and then, and then sort of build a coalition underneath him. I don’t see anybody on the horizon who’s like that. And so I think that we’re going to have to go through a bit of a fight here to determine what ideas lead the coalition.”
He continued:
I think everybody’s sort of tapping JD Vance on the shoulder as the heir apparent, and maybe that’s true. I mean, just statistically speaking, the vice president is very frequently the next nominee of the party. But the idea that JD can somehow just pick up the Trump coalition and then carry it across the finish line, that is almost never true in politics. It was not true for Hillary Clinton about Barack Obama. It was really not true about George H.W. Bush about Ronald Reagan. Every politician has to have their own coalition. And there are some uneasy seams inside, for example, the JD Vance coalition between sort of the [Peter] Thiel libertarians and the Tucker isolationists, and kind of big government’s Appalachia types. You know, so it’s going to be hard, I think, for the Republican Party to replace somebody like Trump in the same way it’s been impossible for the Democrats to replace someone like Barack Obama, which means, as you say, we’re going to need to go back to some first principles and decide what are our actual ideas. It can’t just be, we don’t like the Democrats. It’s got to be like, what are we actually about here?
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