For Vance and Rubio, the road to 2028 takes a turn through the White House briefing room

WASHINGTON (AP) — The earliest signals of a presidential race normally involve such subtle and behind-the-scenes positioning from candidates that it’s been dubbed in political circles as the “shadow primary.”

But the early Republican race to succeed President Donald Trump in just over two years’ time seems to be already playing out in one of the most public forums possible: the White House press briefing room.

Vice President JD Vance, who is seen as one of the GOP’s strongest potential candidates for president in 2028, stepped up to the lectern on Tuesday, holding the spotlight for 54 minutes as he took questions from reporters.

It was five minutes longer than the turn taken two weeks ago by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the person currently seen as Vance’s possible chief rival — or running mate — in 2028.

Vance and Rubio were tapped to fill in as temporary replacements for White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who is on maternity leave. The chance to parry questions before news cameras on a wide range of subjects was a high-profile opportunity to reintroduce themselves to the public and try to make a nascent case that they should be elected commander-in-chief.

But most importantly for any Republican seeking to run for office these days, it was a chance to try to perform well on television, a skill prized by Trump, whose endorsement can still make or break a candidate in a GOP primary.

Trump has yet to publicly anoint a successor and has seemed to enjoy the prospect of a competition.

For now, Vance and Rubio maintain that they’re good friends and have both demurred about whether they’ll seek the White House in the next presidential race.

In his briefing on Tuesday, Vance seized a moment to suggest he wasn’t thinking about his future as a “potential future candidate,” taking issue with a reporter who referred to him that way.

“I’m not a potential future candidate. I’m a vice president,” Vance said.

They don’t want to talk about it. But Trump does

Even if they don’t want to talk about it, Trump does. He’s repeatedly brought up both men’s names when asked about a potential successor to his Make America Great Again political movement.

At a White House event last week with visiting law enforcement officials, Trump polled the audience about whether they’d prefer to see Rubio or Vance as the party’s next presidential nominee.

“Who’s it gonna be? Is it gonna be JD? Is it gonna be somebody else? I don’t know,” Trump said in his remarks.

“Who likes JD Vance?” Trump said, surveying the crowd before asking, “Who likes Marco Rubio?”

Both drew applause, though Vance appeared to get a louder response.

“Sounds like a good ticket,” Trump said, calling them “a dream team.”

For the president, testing Vance versus Rubio as 2028 standard-bearer seems to be playing out like a live version of “The Apprentice,” the reality show Trump hosted for years before launching his presidential campaign.

Vance, when asked a few days later about Trump’s very public musing about his prospects as a presidential candidate, cracked a joke alluding to the show.

“I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice,” he told reporters.

Beyond his history as a television star, Trump is known to be a prolific watcher of television and puts a premium on the way politicians perform on cable news, giving reviews on social media and praising those who he feels do well.

As he weighed who to choose as a running mate in his 2024 campaign, Trump evaluated how the contenders did on television, and one of the key reasons Vance was chosen was because of his debating skills.

Vance is known for being pugnacious

The vice president’s style tends to be more confrontational than Rubio’s, and that has showed up in his past appearances in the White House briefing room. Back in January, a fiery Vance blamed a federal immigration officer’s fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis on Democrats and on the protester who was killed, and said journalists should be ashamed of their coverage of protests over immigration enforcement.

But on Tuesday, Vance kept things more jocular with reporters, seemingly mirroring Rubio’s playful appearance a week earlier.

Both men even made similar jokes.

Rubio told a reporter: “You can ask me two questions. I’ll give you one answer.”

Vance’s version? “If you ask two questions, I can only guarantee that I’ll answer one. In fact, I’m a politician. Maybe I won’t even answer the one that you asked, but I will try at least to answer one question.”

They both said that they’d been provided a seating chart by the White House and both joked that they’d been told which reporters to call on and not call on.

And they each tried ribbing some of the reporters.

Rubio seemed a bit more freewheeling, at times adding to the chaos of the shouted questions with some interjections of his own. Vance seemed to seek a bit more order, at one point instructing reporters not to shout over each other.

In one of the last questions Vance took, the vice president leaned into his more aggressive style that Trump has prized. Vance took issue with a long preamble to a question, chiding the reporter by saying: “C’mon man. Have a little bit of objectivity in the way that you ask these questions.”

Rubio shared a clip on social media afterward

Rubio, who had sought the presidency back in 2016 in an unsuccessful campaign, got his own moment to shine toward the end of his recent White House briefing.

He was asked a lofty question about what his hope is for America, and had a lofty response at the ready. Rubio said that America continues “to be the place where anyone from anywhere can achieve anything, where you’re not limited by the circumstances of your birth, by the color of your skin, by your ethnicity, but frankly, it’s a place where you are able to overcome challenges and achieve your full potential.”

The next day, Rubio shared a video clip of his answer overlaid with videos of Trump, Rubio and former President Ronald Reagan, accompanied by the kind of soaring music that might be used for a presidential campaign.

Rubio shared the video clip on social media the next day, where it has received more than 4 million views.

One viewer with an outsized impact gave a glowing review.

“I think he’s outstanding,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One as he flew back from a trip to China.

“I thought he was great. I mean, I saw every word of it,” Trump said.

The president has not yet weighed in on Vance’s performance.