Semafor reporter Burgess Everett joined Springfield's Morning News to discuss JD Vance's 2028 moves, trouble for Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin's future.
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Thought we'd bring in Burgess Everett from Semaphore who wrote that piece. Burgess, good morning. How are you? Hey, good morning, Patrick. Thanks for taking some time. So let's talk J.D. Vance because I find few people as villainous in American politics as J.D. Vance right now. For a guy who sounded like me as an anti-Trump conservative in 2020 or 2016, how has he become the most famous MAGA bootlicker there is?

Well, I probably wouldn't put it in those terms, Patrick. You're nicer than me. That's fair. But I mean, look, like I think it all started, honestly, with him deciding to run for Senate and trying to win the Trump nomination and winning that Trump nomination. And what went into that was refuting a lot of the stuff that he said before, aligning himself both temperamentally and policy slash ideology wise to the extent that Trump has,

any ideology with the president and doing so kind of like intuitively, like not waiting for the president to do things, but also like proactively doing things. And what do I mean by that? Well, there was an oil

chemical spill in his home state right after he became senator. He reacted to that not by taking a typical Republican position of deregulation, but taking a more like pro-populist sort of Trump era, like, hey, the government failed you, we need more regulation, which caused a lot of ruffled feathers in the Republican Party. And that bill didn't end up passing. But I think it was a good example of this sort of symbiosis between them, because he got Trump to endorse this.

legislation. Then he also got Trump to endorse Bernie Moreno in the Senate race in 2024. So he's been working behind the scenes on this for a long time. And what's happened is most people who follow politics on a daily basis, J.D. Vance's past comments are kind of baked in and they're old news.

As, as he's, I mean, he has shown himself to be in line with Trump on, on every issue at this point. Certainly, certainly in a way that Mike Pence wasn't at times, you know, Pence, Pence was very deferential, but then there were times when he, uh, even outside of January 6th, he kind of went with the more normie Republican angle, trying to, trying to center Trump, uh,

vance vance isn't doing that i mean vance is showing himself to that there's there's zero room between he and trump on issues right yeah and um the 2028 elections in my opinion probably a big part of that like um when pence was trump's vice president they were heading into a re-election campaign um so the dynamics were totally different there and what eventually um

Trump separated Pence from Trump, obviously, it was January 6th, but that occurred after the election. So now the dynamic's really different. Trump is a lame duck. He has a lot of time left in his presidency, and he has a lot of power left, but he's not running for re-election. And so that puts J.D. Vance in a spot where he immediately needs, if he wants to be president, which it appears that he does, he immediately needs to kind of capture Trump's base and

box out anybody that might run against him. And you've watched politics for a long time, Patrick. You've seen how many presidential candidates that the Senate can produce. It can be a lot. And so that's probably job number one is to make sure none of his former colleagues run against him. I can't guarantee that somebody like Ted Cruz wouldn't jump into the race. A lot of people don't make a secret that they want to be president. Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, Josh Hawley. I mean, the list goes on, right? If there's any weakness there, right?

Correct. But those folks won't do that if they think they have no chance. And the way they would have no chance is if J.D. Vance has Trump's endorsement locked up. That hasn't happened yet. Trump was already asked about this. That was sort of the genesis of this story because Trump sort of said nice things about J.D. Vance but didn't

explicitly endorse him as his successor. And so what's happened since then is the sort of MAGA influencer slash, you know, the more populous leaning senators like Jim Banks and Steve Daines are endorsing Vance essentially ahead of time and trying to create that momentum in the case that Trump eventually joins in. Now, I don't expect Trump to make that step for a long time. It would give up a lot of his flexibility and power. He likes the competition between people.

But I would be surprised if he endorsed somebody other than J.D. Vance for the 2028 nomination. Where does Don Jr. fit in the mix? Well...

There was a story in Mediaite. I'm not sure if your listeners are aware of that outlet, but it stated that Don Jr. was preparing to run his own presidential campaign. And he very strongly in explicit language refuted that report by saying, why would I expend all this political capital on J.D. Vance if that's what I wanted to do? And so if you go back a little bit – Because he helped engineer J.D. Vance for VP, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the Veep stakes, I was surprised, frankly, that they picked J.D. Vance because traditionally you pick somebody to balance out your ticket in some way, either ideologically, geographically, whatever, something like that. That's not what happened here at all. And people like Don Jr. and Jim Banks were pushing this idea.

J.D. Vance ascension because it would be a smoother transition and sort of like kill the old Republican Party for good. I think you could argue that's sort of already happened. But this would be I do think like, you know, you hear Chuck Schumer talking about, well, the old Republican Party might come back. So I do think there are some people in politics that still think that Trumpism is a

a blip for the Republican Party. And if J.D. Vance were to win the nomination, I think that would be pretty clearly not the case. Do you think, and maybe it's more of, do people have a concern that MAGA voters will see through J.D. Vance? I mean, they overlooked the stuff he said in 2016 anyway, but I

And maybe I'm just being a cynic here, but you can tell that none of this is authentic. Right. And and and at some point, somebody is going to see through that in a primary, at least some voter, some group of voters will somewhere. Is that a risk for him moving forward? Is just that he looks so looks and sounds so completely inauthentic.

Only if you are somehow able to match him up with somebody who hasn't said something bad about Trump. And if you look throughout the Republican Party for the most prominent politicians and rising stars there, most of them have said bad things about Donald Trump. It might have been a long time ago, but

The whole party is littered with former critics turned turned Trump allies. So it's hard for me to see that just because I think everybody has a little bit of mud on their hands in terms of criticizing Trump, Trump in the past.

I was surrounded by conservatives in 2016, my fellow conservatives who were like, this guy is not for real. And now I'm like, I'm the guy on the island, right? I am lonely island at this point. Yeah, and a lot of people, I think, in your position have said,

increasingly gravitated towards the Democrats, right? Because they feel like there's no future for them and the Republican Party. But that doesn't describe everyone. And hopefully you don't feel too alone out there. Oh, no, I'm adrift. I'm cast away at this point. I'm Tom Hanks in a volleyball. Burgess Everett from Semaphore joins us. Before we let you go, Burgess, you usually spend a bunch of your time in the Senate. How bad is it for Chuck Schumer right now?

I think it's probably in his eight years as leader, probably his lowest point, but not that much lower than some of the early Trump year stuff. When someone like his former spokesman, Brian Fallon, was attacking him for cutting deals on judges. So, you know, I think we in the media love to to rush to conclusions. We like to quote House members saying the Senate leader must go forward.

You know, that to me doesn't necessarily shake the confidence of Senate Democrats and Chuck Schumer. I think to some extent he made himself the fall guy. So his caucus didn't have to get a bunch of crap. And I think he wants to just reload and move on to the next election.

leverage point, which is probably the debt ceiling or the next funding fight and fight this tax cuts bill. So he's running kind of a throwback campaign against Trumpism. He thinks Trump is going to screw up. People are going to care about that more and they can run against the tax cuts. History says that's not a bad bet. We just don't know if politics has changed so much that that won't work. So I do think like if they have a bad 2026,

um, and underperform in the Senate races, you could, you could see this sort of bubbling up and have a handful of people vote against him. The next time there's a leader campaign. And that's usually how the, that's how the last two leaders have been taken down. So he needs to stave off those defections now. Before we let you go, Burgess, uh, any, any, any word in, in DC or any rumors in DC on Dick Durbin's future? I think the, the widespread assumption is that he's not going to run again. Um,

He hasn't said that, so I never try to put words in people's mouths, but I would be super surprised if he were to run again, especially given the way that Gene Shaheen, Gary Peters, and Tina Smith, all his colleagues who are younger than him, decided not to run for re-election. Burgess Everett covers Congress for Semaphore. Find his stuff at semaphore.com, S-E-M-A-F-O-R. Burgess, thanks so much for taking time. We appreciate it. Have a good one. Thank you, Patrick.