The Pretenders... 2028 GOP Wannabes Compete for Señor TACO’s Shadow— GOP Bench: All Talk, No Spine

Josh Hawley Raised a Fist… Then Waived a White Flag

Anyone notice a pattern?

If you go to the Wikipedia page for the 2028 presidential election, you’ll find the 16 names of the Republicans being talked about as possible GOP contenders:

• Greg Abbott

• Don Bacon

• Steve Bannon

• Tucker Carlson

• Ted Cruz

• Ron DeSantis

• Tulsi Gabbard

• Nikki Haley

• Josh Hawley

• Brian Kemp

• Kristi Noem

• Rand Paul

• Marco Rubio

• Eric Trump

• JD Vance

• Glenn Youngkin

On Monday morning, Frank Bruni focused on one of those names: Missouri Senator Josh Hawley— but not in a good way. Hawley was in the forefront of sticking up for working families in the lead-up to the vote on the Big Ugly Bill. He was all over the media opposing cuts to Medicaid and cuts to food stamps. He was the top GOP voice criticizing the Medicaid provider tax, which states use to fund their share of Medicaid costs, arguing vehemently that these reductions would harm rural hospitals, particularly in Missouri, by exacerbating funding shortages. He described the Senate’s plan to phase down the provider tax from 6% to 3.5% as “defunding of rural hospitals” and expressed significant concern about its impact on state budgets and healthcare access. Other than getting his name in the press, he accomplished nothing. And then he folded and, as Bruni noted, scurried away.

“For months before Hawley fell meekly in line last week,” wrote Bruni, “he sought and got enormous attention for being a holdout, a maverick, someone willing to tell the president uncomfortable truths and determined to prove that the MAGA movement really was looking out for the little people. His fist was once again clenched, his arm once again raised, this time in defense of the health insurance on which so many less privileged Americans depend. ‘We must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,’ he wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion in May. It was ‘must,’ not should. It was declarative, not ruminative. He explained that ‘slashing health insurance for the working poor’ would be ‘both morally wrong and politically suicidal.’ He sounded like a warrior— and a masculine one, at that!— manning the barricades. Which, inevitably, he abandoned. The arc of Republican lawmakers in the Trump era bends towards complete submission. That’s the posture in which Hawley and other Senate Republicans granted the president his financially reckless and needlessly cruel agenda.”

The contenders?

See this collage of potential nominees from yesterday’s Axios. Hawley’s not part of it. Alex Isenstadt’s essay on the state of the race, doesn’t mention him, even while including long shots that Wikipedia left off their own list, like Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.

“Trump has mentioned Vice President Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as possible successors,” wrote Isenstadt, “and they're widely seen as the early favorites for the 2028 nomination. Vance [fave of the tech-bro billionaires] has been using his perch as finance chair of the Republican National Committee to make inroads with donors, and has been crisscrossing the country raising money for the party.”

He didn’t mention that Rubio is a joke— he is— but did mention that “Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been raising her profile with a series of photo ops  with ICE agents during immigration raids, is also viewed as a possible 2028 contender.”

Isenstadt noted that even this early in the cycle, “Youngkin will visit Iowa— the traditional home of an early primary caucus— later this month for an event with state GOP chair Jeff Kaufmann. Next month, Youngkin will headline the annual fundraising dinner for the GOP in South Carolina, another key primary state. During the past year, he's appeared at state party functions in California, New York and North Carolina.”

Unlike Hawley, Rand Paul did vote against Trump’s Big Ugly Bill. Isenstadt doesn’t seem to think that killed his chances, even though he’s sure not going to ever win the Mar-a-Lago primary. He’s “staking out turf as a deficit hawk [something no-one cares about anymore but conservative Democrats] and forcefully opposed Trump's big tax and spending bill, which is projected to add more than $3 trillion to the nation's deficits. He was one of just three GOP senators to vote against the bill. The senator, who waged an unsuccessful bid for president in 2016, recently went to Iowa and South Carolina and plans to go to New Hampshire, another early primary state, this fall.”

Then there’s former Trump for turned asslicker, Ted Cruz who “was an outspoken supporter of Trump's airstrikes on Iran — including during an argument with Tucker Carlson— a move that endeared him to the party's hawkish donors. Cruz was the runner-up in the 2016 GOP primary, has a top-ranked podcast and a syndicated radio show. He's planning to host a donor retreat next year and has built a formidable small-dollar fundraising network.”

Aside from Huckabee Sanders and Tim Scott, he also mentioned Trump antagonist Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, chair of the Republican Governors Association.

Isenstadt concluded that “Most Republican voters want party figures focused on Trump's agenda rather than their own ambitions, some GOP strategists warn. Trump is likely to play an outsized role in determining the party's next nominee, and could push back if he perceives would-be candidates putting themselves ahead of his priorities.”

I asked 5 popular AI models to digest all the available data and  guess who the eventual nominee would be. None of them were happy with the question but these were the eventual answers I squeezed out of them:

• Grok- JD Vance

• Claude- Ron DeSantis

• Chat GPT- JD Vance

• Gemini- JD Vance

• H2O- Ron DeSantis