President Donald Trump‘s Venezuelan intervention will likely have a significant effect on determining the GOP nominee for the 2028 presidential election.
For months, Trump has hinted at his desire to see a ticket featuring both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, though the president himself hasn’t necessarily clarified which man he’d want to succeed him as president.
“I’m not sure if anybody would run against us. I think if they ever formed a group, it would be unstoppable,” he told reporters onboard Air Force One in late October, with Rubio standing off his left shoulder.
The secretary of state, for his part, has previously said that if Vance ran for president in 2028, he would be “one of the first people to support him.”
Still, Rubio, one of the most hawkish members of Trump’s second Cabinet, stands to gain far more than Vance from United States’s action in Caracas. While the vice president remains the overwhelming favorite to win the 2028 nomination, according to betting market Polymarket, the secretary of state’s chances have virtually doubled since early Delta Force operators captured former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro Saturday morning.
Sources close to the White House tell the Washington Examiner that the president’s efforts to oust Maduro began during his first term in office, though members of the Cabinet convinced Trump at the time not to forcibly remove the dictator from power.
But two former Trump White House officials added that Rubio was responsible for Trump revisiting the issue during his second term, as well as the president’s expanded focus on policing Latin America.
Rubio was among the close group of Cabinet officials who watched the Maduro raid in real time alongside the president at Mar-a-Lago, a group that also included Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. The same group joined Trump at a press conference Saturday afternoon to deliver additional details on the mission, where Rubio and Trump’s close relationship was put on full display for the country.
Rubio has, since the spring, been pulling double duty at both the State Department and as Trump’s national security adviser, a fact he routinely jokes about in public appearances with the president. At Saturday’s press conference, he earned another laugh from Trump by mentioning that the administration “saved $50 million,” the massive reward the government had offered for information leading to Maduro’s arrest, by simply using U.S. forces to detain him.
“Don’t let anybody claim it,” the president chuckled. “Nobody deserves it but us.”
Trump specifically singled out Rubio on Saturday as one of the administration officials who would help “run” Venezuela “for a period of time,” and coordinate the military defense of American oil energy companies as they take over Venezuela’s oil industry.
On the other hand, Vance did not view the raid at Mar-a-Lago with the president, nor did he speak at the press conference Saturday afternoon.
A spokesperson for Vance’s office told the Washington Examiner that the vice president instead viewed the raid from a remote location and participated in “several late-night meetings via secure video conference with National Security principals leading up to the operation.”
“The vice president was not at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, as the National Security team was concerned a late-night motorcade movement by the Vice President while the operation was getting underway may tip off the Venezuelans,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Due to increased security concerns, the Administration has aimed to limit the frequency and duration of the Vice President and President being co-located away from the White House.”
White House officials declined to comment on the president’s thinking on both Venezuela and the 2028 Republican presidential primary.
Trump dispatched Vance on several high-profile foreign trips in 2025, including a March visit to an American military facility in Greenland, despite the vice president’s repeated arguments last year for keeping America out of foreign entanglements. Those positions are at least partially responsible for Vance’s massive popularity among young Republican voters, who won Turning Point USA’s pre-Christmas straw poll by a nearly 80-point margin over Rubio.
One former Trump White House official suggested to the Washington Examiner that Vance not viewing the raid alongside the president and Rubio was an effort “to keep himself out of Democrat attack ads if this thing goes tits up down the road.”
“I think it’s way too early to tell if Venezuela will be Iraq 2.0 or if the president can somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat,” that person, who voiced displeasure for the “nation-building ramifications” of Trump’s plans for the Latin American country, assessed. “But if it goes how we’re all kind of expecting it to, who’s going to end up holding the bag? The famous isolationist Vance, or Little Marco, the guy whispering in the president’s ear to knock off Venezuela, and then Cuba, and then Colombia?”
Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis for Defense Priorities, told the Washington Examiner that the long-term risks associated with the United States’s involvement in Venezuela mirror those of President George W. Bush’s actions in the Middle East.
“With this commitment, the Trump administration enters very dangerous territory. This affair sounds very similar to the plans for Iraq, with the United States removing a leader they deemed a threat to U.S. interests and then planning to temporarily govern the country,” she explained. “We all know how that turned out.”
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