Trump Jr. vs AOC in 2028?

This isn't a prediction, but it's worth pondering where the parties could be headed

So, whaddya think? Donald Trump Jr. versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the presidency in 2028? The president’s son, who has never held elective office, versus a not-yet-40-year-old Hispanic female who began her career identified as a Democratic Socialist?

Sure, I’m being provocative here. But only a little. Because while this matchup isn’t very likely to happen, it’s still more likely than you might think.

We’re living in a time, after all, when nearly anything is possible in politics. The old rules don’t seem to apply. Did you believe before 2008 that a relatively inexperienced Black man with an unusual name could win the presidency? In 2016, did you think Americans would vote for a reality television star with a boorish temperament and zero political experience? In 2024, did you think voters would restore to office a previously defeated president who had tried to violently overturn the results of the last election?

No, no, and no.

At least that’s how most of us would have answered a year or two before the start of the ‘08, ‘16, and ‘24 elections, never mind nearly four years ahead of time.

So the purpose of this post isn’t to make a prediction. Nor is it even to start handicapping the 2028 race. Rather, it’s another effort to do some bigger picture thinking about American politics.

A few months ago, I introduced a post about bigger picture politics by suggesting we might “need to expand our field of vision in order to better understand the era we’re living through.” That’s what this is: An effort to ponder where the major political parties may or may not be headed in the next four years. And to consider why a Trump Jr. versus AOC contest isn’t entirely impossible, no matter what you might be thinking at the moment.

The case for Donald Trump, Jr.

Before we make the case for the son, let’s consider the father.

We know the 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms, yet Trump keeps hinting and joking about the possibility of running again in 2028. His supporters claim he’s just joking to make liberal heads explode. However, as longtime Trump observer Maggie Haberman noted:

“Even when Mr. Trump presents something as a joke, the idea he suggests often becomes socialized by his supporters, both those in office and in the right-wing media. The concept then often takes on more weight, including for Mr. Trump. Recently, some Republicans have started pushing the idea of changing the Constitution for him.”

The president is also going around making statements like this:

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

And this:

Long live the king!

Yeah, he’s sounding an awful lot like a French monarch these days, though whether he seems more like Louis XIV or Napoleon, well, you can decide.

So would — or could — Trump run again in 2028? It seems unlikely. I mean, the Constitution is pretty crystal clear. But at some point, should we start paying attention to all the hints?

What if he did run, won the GOP nomination, and then went to court and said the Constitution couldn’t overturn the will of the people? Hell, I have no idea. There’s a lot I don’t understand or can’t predict about politics lately.

But if not Trump, well …

Who is the inheritor of the MAGA movement after Trump?

Let’s assume that Trump cannot actually run again. Or decides that, at 82 years old, he doesn’t want the hassle of trying to fight the Supreme Court over it. Vice President J.D. Vance is the obvious successor, and he did easily win the straw poll at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

But then, what if Trump himself wanted to maintain some level of power? What if he wanted to forge a dynasty by passing the torch to his family?

Don’t think it hasn’t crossed his mind. Here is what Trump said during a recent interview with Time magazine:

Q. Do you think there will be a Trump dynasty?

A. I think there could be, yeah.

And questioned by Fox News recently about whether he sees JD Vance as his natural successor, Trump declined to endorse his vice president. "No,” Trump said. “But he's very capable," while adding that there were also other capable people in the party.

And when Trump Jr. was asked last month about the possibility of running, he deflected with a non-answer. “No, no, no, don’t get me into trouble,” he said.

It’s true that Trump Jr. is close with Vance and advocated for him as his dad’s running mate, so that may preclude him from challenging the vice president. But what if President Trump decided a family dynasty might be kind of cool? There’s been growing acceptance on the right of authoritarianism, after all, and it’s not much of a leap from there to a family dynasty.

What if it looked like Trump Jr. could actually win? Do you think the MAGA base would go with the sitting vice president, or with another Trump? And if MAGA voters were cool with it, what would stop it from happening?

At that point, it’s all up to the voters. And, as it happens, we already have two polls out about 2028 preferences that give us some clues about what voters might be thinking. In one, Vance leads with 27% support, followed by Trump Jr. at 21%. In the other poll, Vance and Trump Jr. are tied for first place at 30% each. In both polls, no other Republican candidate even gets out of single digits.

A lot could change, obviously. Trump Jr. could decline interest. A rocky four years by the Trump administration could persuade voters to give other GOP candidates a look.

But at the moment, the truth is that it’s already a two-way race between Vance and Trump Jr. for 2028, with no other contender in site.

The case for AOC

This possibility may be unlikely not because of AOC but because — after seeing Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris lose close elections that were decided in part by a small but statistically significant reluctance of some voters to support a female president — Democrats may be gun shy about nominating another woman. And that might go double for an Hispanic woman who’ll still be just 39-years-old in 2028 and who began her career identified as a Democratic Socialist (even though, yes, she’s become more pragmatic in office and in 2024 the DSA party declined to endorse her).

Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. As I said above, the decision is made by voters, not party leaders. And in a crowded field, as Trump showed eight years ago, a candidate only needs a solid plurality. The enthusiastic commitment of one-third of primary voters can win a nomination.

So here are two reasons to think AOC could be a contender. One is a hypothetical, the other is quite real.

What if Trump provokes a more extreme reaction by Democrats?

The hypothetical is this: It’s possible that Trump’s presidency, in which he is upending every norm and overturning every rule, causes a percentage of Democratic voters to say: “Screw it! Enough with finding candidates who supposedly appeal to the middle.”

You could imagine a conversation that a Democratic primary voter might be having with him or herself: “You know what, Clinton was a moderate, Obama was a moderate, Biden was a moderate. The deficit increased less under these three presidencies than it did under Reagan, Bush, or Trump. Obama adopted Republican ideas on health care. Obama and Biden negotiated immigration deals that increased border security, only to see the GOP kill the bills. Clinton and Obama even both had initiatives to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in government. Heck, Kamala Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney! And what happened? The GOP still labeled every one of them a radical, leftist, Marxist who hated America.”

So is it crazy to think that Democratic voters might just decide to upend everything themselves? Instead of nominating a moderate who’s going to be tagged as a leftist no matter what, perhaps they choose to nominate someone who actually is more to the left.

I’m not saying this will happen, as Democratic primary voters have (for the most part, except in certain districts) been fairly pragmatic and moderate of late. They nominated Biden over the more liberal Sanders and Warren in 2020. Two members of The Squad lost primaries last year to more moderate Democrats (can you imagine a MAGA Republican losing a primary to a moderate?). The Mayor of San Francisco was similarly ousted by a moderate challenger of her own party.

But still. Even politics often follows Newton's Third Law of Motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction). As hard as Trump is pushing to upend politics and kick the legs out from government, it’s easy to imagine this provoking a reaction among voters on the other side of the aisle.

What really makes me sit up and take notice is when I see even David Brooks, the center-right New York Times columnist, suggesting this might be the direction in which Democrats need to move. He wrote:

I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

Politics is always a reaction to what came before. If even Brooks is thinking this may be the way for Democrats to defeat Trumpism, then this could well be where the party and country is headed.

AOC and the attention economy

Donald Trump is not a great orator, he is not a great debater, and he knows little about policy issues. And yet he’s the dominant political personality in America today. That’s because Trump knows one thing that may be more important than anything else in contemporary politics: He is a master at getting attention and driving a narrative.

The world we live in has changed beneath our feet in the past decade or two and many politicians have struggled to keep up. We now live in an attention economy. As sources of information and entertainment become more fragmented, there is a constant battle for our attention. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Trump gained political support as he figured out how to monopolize the attention of voters. As Ezra Klein noted recently:

Attention, not money, is now the fuel of American politics.

Think about that. Attention, not money, is now the fuel of American politics. It explains a lot, when you think about it.

Here is an interesting 3-minute clip in which Klein discusses the impact of the attention economy on politics with Chris Hayes, who himself just published a book called The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.

Which bring us to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

GQ called her “the political voice of a generation—and a cultural star whose power transcends politics.” It’s notable that Trump also came onto the scene with cultural influence and star power, but this alone can’t win you a national election. AOC’s potential derives more from the fact that she’s one of only a handful of politicians who also have Trump’s ability to attract headlines. Believe me, your run of the mill House member doesn’t have a following of nearly 9 million people on Instagram.

AOC’s style is not like Trump’s — not even close. What they do share, though, is an intuitive sense for how to get voters and the media to pay attention. This is what makes her a formidable political force. AOC is the most skilled communicator in the Democratic party today and, much like Trump, she knows how to bend the attention marketplace to her will.

She also, like Trump, knows how to connect with the working class. Crucially, three other Democrats who were also adept at communicating with the working class were Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. And three who were not as skilled were Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Al Gore. See a trend?

Time magazine has suggested that AOC might be “the best storyteller in the party since Barack Obama.” And her stories resonate with everyday Americans.

Do you remember Trump’s appearance at a McDonald’s during last year’s campaign, when he donned an apron and handed out food from the drive-thru window? It was an obvious performative photo op, yet it connected with certain voters. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris struggled to muster a response that broke through the noise.

Below is AOC’s response. You can hear the murmurs and shouts of approval from some in the audience, but more impressive is that when this was shown to focus groups it scored an approval rate in the 92nd percentile. She instinctively knows how to speak to working class voters in a way that has flummoxed other politicians.

So yes, Trump’s superpowers are his ability to attract attention and his knack for connecting with the working class. AOC has the same attributes, she just does it from the left and with a less vulgar style.

To be fair, just as with Trump, Jr., I have no idea what AOC is thinking. She may want to run for governor or senator first. She may have no interest in ever running for president. For all I know, she may want to leave politics behind, start a family, do something else with her life. But — if she wants it — AOC would immediately be among the top tier of contenders in a 2028 Democratic primary and, at minimum, she’d be a force to be reckoned with.

Again, I’m not making a prediction here — for either AOC or Trump Jr. But they’re possibilities worth pondering as we consider the future of American politics.

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Photos: Images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump Jr. via Wikimedia Commons.