The Post-Trump Republican Party
June 3, 2025 | 960 words | Politics
On the theory that this too shall pass, I am starting to wonder who will lead the Republican Party once Donald Trump leaves the White House.
Democrats are lining up in droves to seek their party’s presidential nomination in 2028. Okay, that may be slightly overstating the case. But it does seem as though every Democrat with any sort of national profile is already feeling out their prospects for a potential presidential run, even if ever so coyly.
There is no such activity on the Republican side as of yet, so dominant is the Trump brand at the moment. And there probably won’t be the slightest whisper about the next standard-bearer for quite a while, maybe not until after the congressional mid-term elections of 2026.
Or should I say the slightest whisper about anyone other than J.D. Vance, who in some circles is already being touted as the person best suited to carry the MAGA mantle forward, once Mr. Trump shuffles off the stage.
A few things mitigate against Mr. Vance in my mind, such as his is relative youth and inexperience. He will only be 44 years old in 2028. Barack Obama may have made the leap into the presidency at 48 after a short stint in the U.S. Senate. But he spent time in the Illinois State House before starting as a community organizer in Chicago. And that was considered a very thin resume at the time.
J.D. Vance, on the other hand, has gone from being a best-selling author to an apprentice venture capitalist to a U.S. Senator, where he put in whopping eighteen months on the job before being tapped to run as Mr. Trump’s vice president.
No doubt he will learn a thing or two over the course of the next 3-1/2 years. But unless something drastic happens in that time I will remain convinced that Vance needs much more seasoning before he could be considered the right person to lead the post-Trump Republican Party.
When I say “seasoning” I mean Mr. Vance should continue to develop and refine his thinking, in hopes of realizing the MAGA movement as presently constituted is not the best vehicle for his oft-expressed concern for the common good.
While we wait for J.D. Vance to figure things out and put the pieces together, there are other people on the Republican side who are further along in their intellectual development, and thus would have something of value to offer a broad constituency once 2028 rolls around.
Ben Sasse might be one of those people. His resume is easy to find so I won’t bother to recount it here. Other than to point out that he served as one of Nebraska’s two senators from 2015 to 2023, and was the first sitting senator to announce early in the 2016 primary season that he would not support Donald Trump should he win the Republican nomination.
Also worth noting is that in February 2021, Sasse was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Donald Trump of incitement of insurrection in his second impeachment trial.
A concise example of Mr. Sasse’s mental acuity and leadership chops is on display in the May 31-June 1 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, where his “Can Trump Force Harvard to Improve?” opinion piece appears.
Having served as president of the University of Florida from February 2023 to July 2024, the need for reform in higher education is something he has experienced at close range. He believes the best course would be to for that reform to come from within our universities themselves, but he recognizes a growing share of the public doesn’t trust that to happen.
His detailed WSJ essay looks at Donald Trump’s current war on Harvard from every possible angle, giving each side its due while providing clear-eyed analysis.
“These punishments fall along a continuum of tightly connected to tangentially connected to unrelated to the school’s alleged misdeeds. But the most invested observers seem either strongly against Harvard or strongly against Mr. Trump, and thus relatively uninterested in proportionality or due process.
“The administration speaks of Harvard as an undifferentiated monolith. In reality, large universities are like cities filled with different neighborhoods, projects and ventures, rather than a single-purpose organization with one set of books reporting through an identifiable structure to an identifiable boss. A college president is more like a mayor than a company CEO.
“… The public’s biggest gripes about top universities center on the politicalization of the humanities and the lack of accountability in the teaching enterprise amid skyrocketing expenditures, whereas the easiest government leverage to deploy against a place like Harvard is turning off the federal research funding spigot. But what does the cutting-edge biomedical researcher or computer scientist have to do with woke orientation staff foisting racial division into every corner of freshman arrival week? Not much.
“…The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge norms as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This ‘choice’ between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false.”
You may not agree with every nook and cranny of Mr. Sasse’s thought process here, but it is still possible to admire his grasp of and willingness to tackle a complex social issue, and the leveled-headed, largely by-partisan approach he takes in the attempt.
I have no idea what he is doing at the moment, or whether he would be the least bit interested in getting back into electoral politics. But when the Republican Party finally gets around to considering its post-Trump future, it could do a lot worse that having Ben Sasse atop its presidential ticket in 2028.
Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr.
bobcavjr@gmail.com