A major Republican donor who poured more than $100 million into the last election has broken with Vice President JD Vance and is now backing Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the 2028 presidential race, delivering a significant setback to Vance’s White House ambitions.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager who founded and runs Citadel, revealed his intentions during the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, telling financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin he was “predisposed” to support Rubio, whom he backed in the 2016 GOP primary. The decision comes as Vance has experienced a string of high-profile embarrassments, including troubled negotiations for peace with Iran that he helmed and fumbled initially.
Republican insiders have spoken of a “shadow” effort to get Rubio elected since early this year, driven in part by the secretary of state’s favorable press relative to Vance’s.
The President’s Reported Choice
The donor split emerges against the backdrop of earlier White House chatter suggesting President Donald Trump had effectively settled on Vance as his preferred successor. Anonymous sources told Axios on July 6, 2026, that Trump was choosing the vice president over Rubio in the informal competition to inherit the MAGA mantle ahead of 2028.
One White House insider said, “POTUS isn’t asking, ‘JD or Marco?’ anymore,” and that Trump has shifted to telling people in his orbit, “JD looks great, right?” The claim followed months of Trump publicly dangling the prospect of a Vance-versus-Rubio showdown.
Yet Trump has dodged direct queries on the subject for months. As recently as June 3, he told the New York Post that Vance and Rubio are “both great” and that there is “a long time left” before 2028 becomes a live question. Some political analysts have suggested he has strong incentives to keep the race open; a definitively anointed heir could, in theory, begin to overshadow Trump within his own administration.
Vance’s Aggressive Profile
The reported behind-the-scenes endorsement arrived as Vance assembled an unusually aggressive public profile for a sitting vice president. In June 2026, he published a new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” while simultaneously raising roughly $70 million for the Republican National Committee.
Over that same stretch, Vance sat down for more than 30 interviews and began a book tour spanning several weeks. On June 26, reporting surfaced that Vance had pulled in $4.2 million at a single dinner in Silicon Valley — a figure explicitly tied by sources to an anticipated 2028 presidential run. For a vice president still nearly two years from a potential campaign launch, the pace of activity has been striking.
Vance’s foreign-policy resume also got a lift in June, when he joined Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner in hammering out a preliminary framework to de-escalate the conflict with Iran. Allies have cited it as proof Vance can hold his own on the world stage, though skeptics note it’s a provisional understanding rather than a formal ceasefire — and that an earlier round of talks Vance took part in fell apart entirely.
Rubio’s Strategic Position
Even those in Rubio’s corner appear to concede that the secretary of state is at a structural disadvantage. One White House source told Axios, “JD is earning it, and Trump sees it,” while a separate insider acknowledged that Rubio “wasn’t planning to run anyway, and he’d be even less likely to do so now” — echoing Rubio’s own repeated public statements that he’d defer to Vance if the vice president runs.
The dynamic between the two men got a public airing on the BBC’s “Americast” podcast in a May 11 episode, which noted Trump had been privately sounding out advisors on whether they preferred “JD or Marco.”
“Americast” hosts Justin Webb and Anthony Zurcher broke down the matchup: Vance holds the edge in national name recognition, while Rubio’s background could help the GOP make inroads with Latino voters, a bloc that was pivotal to Trump’s 2024 win. Speculation over the 2028 field had already been building before that episode aired, fueled in part by a viral clip involving Rubio weeks earlier.
Vulnerabilities and Political Headwinds
Vance isn’t free of political risk, either. Trump’s patience with commentator Tucker Carlson — a MAGA-world heavyweight who’s turned increasingly critical of the administration’s Middle East approach — has worn thin, a friction point that could strain Vance’s standing with that wing of conservative media. Some pro-Israel conservatives have soured on Vance too, unhappy with his part in the Iran talks and comments he made that read as critical of Israel’s right flank. This isn’t the first time: similar reporting in February suggested Trump was cooling on Vance, an assessment five sources pushed back on at the time.
Democrats, meanwhile, have their own problems heading into November. Court losses in Virginia and Louisiana, handed down within 10 days of each other, dealt what analysts called a serious blow to the party’s chances of flipping the House. In Maine, Democratic candidate Graham Platner withdrew from his race against Sen. Susan Collins after he was accused of rape by a former girlfriend. The state party has since set a July 25 nominating convention to pick his replacement, with Democrats facing a July 27 deadline to fill the vacancy and candidates including former state Senate President Troy Jackson, former Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Nirav Shah, and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows already in the running.
Whether Trump’s preference hardens into an official blessing remains to be seen. For now, the whisper campaign appears more complicated than earlier reports suggested, with influential Republican money flowing toward Rubio even as White House insiders signal support for Vance.