Mitt Romney has revealed who he believes will be the leader of MAGA after Donald Trump.
On CNN’s State of the Union, the senator who is retiring shared his thoughts on his political career and the transformations within the GOP since his run as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012.
‘MAGA is the Republican party, and Donald Trump is the Republican party today,’ the Utah lawmaker said.
‘If you were to ask me who the nominee would be in 2028, I think it will be J.D. Vance,’ Romney said.
But Vance will have to remain on the president-elect’s good side, unlike his previous VP Mike Pence.
Trump, 78, is term-limited, so the MAGA movement, unless they are able to amend the U.S. Constitution, will need to find a new standard bearer in the next presidential election.
Romney, 77, called the Vice President-elect ‘smart, well-spoken, part of the MAGA movement.’
It’s a sharp turn for Romney, who once told The Atlantic when the vice president-elect was running for Senate that he did not know if he could ‘disrespect someone more than JD Vance.’
‘It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?’ Romney said of Vance at the time.
Now Vance, who was once a fierce Trump critic before completely changing his tune to run for the Senate in 2022, is about to be first in line for the presidency.
When asked about his harsh past criticism of Vance on CNN, Romney dismissed the remarks as ‘long ago’ and said they’ve worked together in the Senate since then.
Romney is not alone in his 2028 prediction. An Emerson College poll after the election found Vance is the clear frontrunner for the Republican ticket in 2028 with 30 percent among GOP voters.
While he was the potential candidate with the most support, a whopping 51 percent were still undecided.
For now, Vance is helping Trump Cabinet nominees navigate Senate introductions as they prepare for potentially brutal confirmation hearings next year.
But he will have to walk a fine line to remain on Trump’s good side during his next four years in the White House, or Vance could go the way of the president-elect’s first Vice President Mike Pence who the Republican president viciously turned on in the end.
As for Romney, he believes it is the Democratic party that is in trouble, not the Republican one looking ahead.
The senator argued the Republican party has become the one of the ‘working class, middle class voter’ and gave Trump some credit for doing that. He also said Democrats pushed them out.
The GOP senator who was the Republican nominee in 2012 but lost the general election questioned how Democrats misread the country’s mood so badly.
Romney was a fierce Trump critic and voted to impeach him after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
But the outgoing senator signaled he is willing to give the president-elect the benefit of the doubt heading into his second term.
‘I’m not a supporter of President Trump’s. I didn’t support him in this election, didn’t the last time he ran either, largely for matters of character, and I hope we see better in the coming years,’ Romney said on Sunday.
While Romney won’t be in the Senate to help confirm Trump’s Cabinet nominees, he encouraged his colleagues to take their role in the process seriously.
‘The Senate has a responsibility to make sure that these people are legitimate, that there’s no skeleton that could be an embarrassment to them or the country and also determine if they’re qualified for the position that they’ve been nominated to,’ he said.
‘I expect them to carry out that responsibility with conscious and diligence,’ he added.
Romney once said he wrote his wife Ann’s name in for president in 2016, but he declined to share who he voted for in 2024.
