Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show beloved by President Donald Trump, is emerging as the nexus of an “anybody but JD Vance” campaign for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination.
Co-hosts Brian Kilmeade, Ainsley Earhardt, Lawrence Jones, and their guests have spent the days since the GOP’s crushing midterms defeat savaging the vice president’s presumed forthcoming effort to succeed Trump — and propping up alternative candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Trump has a well-chronicled obsession with Fox & Friends, which provides the relentlessly supportive coverage of his presidency he expects from all media. He has credited the program for his political success, watches its programming religiously, frequently responds to statements from its hosts and guests on social media in near-real time, and turns suggestions from its on-air talent into federal policy.
But the co-hosts’ zealous support for Trump does not carry over to his vice president, whose involvement in negotiating a memorandum of understanding with Iran in June triggered sustained criticism on Fox & Friends. On one occasion, after Jones suggested Vance had been breaking with Trump’s message on Iran, the president appeared to chime in on the co-host’s side.
The trio recognize the sway they can have over the White House. Their daily drumbeat of Vance criticism seems tailor-made to appeal directly to the president by focusing on what they describe as the vice president’s disloyalty to Trump in blaming the Iran war for Republicans’ midterm losses. And the denunciations may be having an impact — in an interview aired Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes, the president suggested he might not endorse a candidate for president in 2028 and said pointedly that Vance’s public critique of the Iran war had not addressed the question, “If you had it to do again, would you do it?”
Kilmeade, the longest-tenured resident of Fox & Friends’ Curvy Couch (and thus the one with the most extensive relationship with Trump), is also the loudest and most consistent critic of Vance’s potential bid for the GOP nomination. An Iran hawk who urged on Trump’s decision to launch U.S. military strikes on the country and has repeatedly called for risky escalations over the months since, Kilmeade has argued that Vance’s summer diplomacy prevented U.S. victory and thus led to the Republican election defeats.
But Earhardt and Jones have also been quick to argue that the nomination should not be a coronation and to praise Vance’s potential competitors.
Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of Fox & Friends’ campaign against Vance since the midterms.
Wednesday: “I think this is wide open now”
Kilmeade declared on the morning after Election Day that the generational defeats Republicans had suffered meant that the 2028 nomination was not “a done deal.”
“If the president had prevailed strongly and was on a roll from '24 to '26, JD Vance would have probably been — money rallies around and he gets through,” Kilmeade said. “I think this is wide open now.”
Kilmeade name-checked Cruz, DeSantis, and Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) as potential candidates, adding that Rubio “is the most popular, but he won't do it out of respect for JD.”
Neither of Kilmeade’s colleagues apparently disagreed with his assessment, with Jones chiming in that the nominee would be a “candidate that can gravitate their own audience, that doesn't use the president's coattails.”
Thursday: Post-election “wildcatting” by Vance “hurts the country” while DeSantis was “great”
Dueling 2026 postmortems by Vance and DeSantis were a key concern of the broadcast, which opened with Jones declaring, “The midterms are over, which means that the road to 2028 starts right now, as Republicans debate what went wrong and where the party goes next.”
The trio quickly made it clear which explanation of the past and vision for the future they favored, lavishing the Florida governor with praise while casting aspersions at the vice president.
Kilmeade touted DeSantis as “looking pretty good today, one of the few … Republicans to come out looking stronger” after the elections and noted he had been “sharing Florida’s lessons for defying the blue wave.”
Likewise, Earhardt said of DeSantis’ remarks, “Wasn't that great? He was so honest.” She agreed with Kilmeade that he “is one of the ones that came out looking so good” after the elections, touting the governor’s political strategy record and adding, “I applaud him for being so honest about it.”
Kilmeade noted that “him and the president get along great, and it’s not just window-dressing. Just like Rubio, whatever tension they had running against each other is gone.”
Jones, meanwhile, took issue with Vance’s singular focus on the Iran war as an election explanation, arguing that it “may serve the vice president's interest to launch his presidential campaign” to say so, but the war is “not the total reason why the Republican Party lost.”
Kilmeade chimed in that “the vice president's job is to support the president” and contrasted his views of how previous vice presidents served in that position with Vance’s performance: “One day after the midterms, you come out and say one of the president's titanic decisions, to go to war in Iran, is the reason why we lost, basically blaming the president?”
Later in the program, Kilmeade again criticized what he termed Vance’s “sensationalistic” effort to “distance himself” from the president to boost his own campaign, adding: “The person who did the most damage to the war effort was the one that initiated the MOU that gave money, unfroze funds, and opened up the strait without any concessions for Iran, which they quickly violated. But that was his deal, and that stopped the president from finishing the war.”
Earhardt immediately responded by again touting DeSantis’ response to the elections.
“I understand people may be uncomfortable with having this public launch, but this needs to happen,” Jones offered, saying that Vance “needs to put out what he truly believes.” While Jones said, “I tend to agree with Ron DeSantis on his vision,” he argued that it would be unwise to “coronate” any nominee. “Let Rubio get in, let JD, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis. Duke it out. Have people on the stage for what their vision is going to be.”
Kilmeade responded by again shivving Vance. “Your first job is vice president of the United States,” he said. “That's your job. You back the president. Until you declare that you are going to run, and then you might even want to say to him, Mr. President, I'm going to have to not be vice president anymore. Maybe you want to do that. But you’re doing damage to the administration, because I care about the country.”
“The vice president is there to support the president, and when you go wildcatting like this, I think it hurts the country,” he concluded.
Friday: DeSantis “back on the map,” and “can’t forget about Cruz,” does Vance “agree with DSA”?
Earhardt and Kilmeade each touted potential presidential candidates who aren’t Vance.
“I think after the midterms and we saw what happened in Florida that they held a lot of the red seats and really went well for the conservatives and for Republicans in Florida,” Earhardt said. “That's when Ron Desantis was back on the map. People are starting to talk about him again.”
She added that she had also “heard a lot of talk about Marco Rubio.”
“Can't forget about Ted Cruz,” Kilmeade added. “He’s got that successful podcast, and he was blasting away. … Right away he was talking positive last night. He said, I'm going to make Texas red again.”
Monday: “Timing is perfect” for Rubio and DeSantis and conservatives “like both of them”
Kilmeade tied Trump’s comments on 60 Minutes about potentially not endorsing a 2028 candidate directly to Vance’s statement on the election before praising Rubio and DeSantis as potential opponents.
“With the president of the United States … after that letter written last week after the election, he says basically the word is he's not looking to endorse anyone,” Kilmeade said. “Marco Rubio made two major defenses of the president’s policies on Iran, just impromptu, over the weekend. Extremely impressive, and you wonder, why didn't JD Vance try to balance that out. And then Gov. Ron DeSantis has never looked stronger just by his track record, not even trying, and there’s guys like Chris Christie and others that want to get in the race, as well as Josh Hawley.”
“Politics is so interesting because … it has to be the right time,” Earhardt later added. “We've seen Ron DeSantis and we’ve seen Marco Rubio run for office before, and they weren’t successful, obviously, but now there is a path for them, and the timing is perfect for them. At least if you talk to conservatives, they like both of them.”
Tuesday: A respite for the Veep
Today’s Fox & Friends was notable as the first show since the election they didn’t find time to dump on Vance.
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