JD Vance told the truth about why Republicans got crushed, and the cable hawks haven’t stopped punishing him for it.
Now the checkbook crowd that misses the Bush years is shopping for a replacement.
And Brian Kilmeade let slip whose name keeps coming up at the big-money tables.
Kilmeade Read the Donor Tea Leaves Out Loud on Talk Radio
Brian Kilmeade stopped by The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show to sell copies of his new history book. He walked out having delivered a campaign memo on behalf of the biggest checkbooks in Republican politics.
Clay Travis asked the Fox & Friends host to size up the 2028 field after the midterm drubbing. Kilmeade said he had contacted Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s camp about reports that Rubio planned to leave the administration, and Rubio’s people swatted the story away.
Then Kilmeade added a condition. “I don’t think Rubio runs unless one thing happens,” he said.
The one thing came in two parts. President Trump would have to refuse to endorse his Vice President, and the donors would have to sit on their wallets. Kilmeade suggested the second part looks underway already: “there’s an indication that they’re not, that the money people are not lining up behind the vice president.”
Travis asked which big-dollar players he meant and floated Elon Musk’s name. Kilmeade didn’t bite. “Well, I don’t know, Elon. I don’t know, Elon,” he said.
But he had no trouble naming the money crowd’s favorite. “But I will say that Rubio impresses everybody,” Kilmeade said.
The Rubio Pitch Sounded Like a Toast at a Bush Fundraiser
Listen to how he described the appeal.
“He’s a mix of I get Trump and I get what the Bush years were like. I get what I did wrong trying to redo immigration without sealing the border,” Kilmeade said.
Read that slowly. A Fox News host listed fluency in the Bush years as a qualification, as if Republican voters had warm memories of the stretch that ran from the invasion of Iraq to Barack Obama’s inauguration.
And “trying to redo immigration” is a gentle way of describing the Gang of Eight bill Rubio helped write in 2013. That bill offered amnesty and a path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens.
Notice the lesson Kilmeade says Rubio learned. The mistake, in his telling, wasn’t the amnesty. The mistake was the order of operations. Seal the border first, then hand out the green cards. Donors who want a bottomless supply of cheap labor couldn’t have written a friendlier summary if they’d paid for it.
But the base never asked for a better-sequenced amnesty. It asked for no amnesty, period. Every amnesty in living memory arrived with a border promise stapled to the front, and somehow the amnesty always showed up first.
Kilmeade kept rolling. “They like him on the world stage. They like him on the domestic stage. They like the Hispanic background,” he said.
Then came the knife. “And so far, JD Vance is leaning way to the right, like the extreme right, the anti-Israel right,” Kilmeade said.
The Vice President’s supposed crime was a post explaining why Republicans lost. Alongside ending the war and tackling the cost of living, it called for rethinking America’s relationship with Israel. Asking whether an alliance puts American interests first is the entire premise of America First. Branding that question as extremism says more about the accuser than the accused.
None of this comes out of nowhere. Kilmeade, a dependable voice for the hawkish wing of cable news, has been nudging Rubio toward Vance’s seat for months. In June, he asked US Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT) about the Iran talks, “How much better would you feel if Marco Rubio was in that room as opposed to or with the Vice President of the United States?”
Kilmeade Picked a Strange Model for a Loyal Vice President
Kilmeade called the Vance post a “ridiculous, insubordinate posting on X.” Citing what he called “the word,” he claimed Vance walked out of a private meeting where the administration agreed to get on the same page, then went public anyway.
And then Kilmeade reached for an example of how a loyal Vice President behaves. He picked Kamala Harris.
“But whatever you want to say about Kamala Harris, she had every reason to dump Joe Biden,” he said. “I think you’re a vice president first, and then you become a candidate. I just think you do your first job first.”
Think about what Harris actually did with her first job. In February 2024, after Special Counsel Robert Hur laid out Biden’s memory problems, Harris called Hur’s comments “gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate” and insisted her boss stayed “on top of it all.” Four months later, Biden stumbled through a debate and the whole country saw what Democrats had spent years hiding.
That’s the loyalty Kilmeade holds up as the gold standard. Smile, vouch for the boss, and keep the bad news away from voters until a television camera makes the cover-up impossible.
Vance did the opposite. He told the President and the country the truth about what the war cost the party. President Trump called the post “largely true.”
Some insubordination.
The Money Crowd Has Tried Picking a Nominee Before
Kilmeade didn’t invent the donor chatter. Billionaire Ken Griffin, the fifth-largest Republican donor of the 2024 cycle at more than $100 million, has said he’d rather see Rubio lead the 2028 ticket. Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt wrote that Griffin urged Trump not to pick Vance as his running mate in the first place. Earlier this year, Fox News reported that a group of GOP donors started quietly working to raise Rubio’s profile without Rubio’s involvement.
A Trump-world operative didn’t hide his irritation at the time. “The divisive stories from some donors trying to cause chaos are not helpful,” the operative told Fox News.
And the donors have an awkward problem named Marco Rubio. “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him,” Rubio told Vanity Fair.
Maybe the money people know something the rest of the country doesn’t. Then again, Vance serves as finance chair of the Republican National Committee, the first Vice President to hold that post, and Sean Spicer called it a huge edge. “His network of donors is going to be a massive advantage if he runs in ‘28,” Spicer said. Trump himself reportedly told donors in private in August, “We need to elect JD.”
But Kilmeade’s own radio hour undercut him before he ever sat down. Earlier in the same broadcast, analyst Ryan Girdusky walked through the wreckage. By his count, Trump’s approval on gas prices sat close to 50 percent the day before the war started and sank to about 25 percent by Election Day.
Then Girdusky turned to Rubio. “Rubio was secretary of state while we were at war with Iran, which was super unpopular and helped destroy the Republican chances at holding the Senate in this midterm,” he said.
The exit polls say the same thing. Nearly two-thirds of voters told NBC News exit pollsters the US made the wrong decision in taking military action against Iran. Democrats carried 83 percent of that group, and 15 percent of it still went Republican.
The neoconservatives pushed the President into that war. Now the donor class wants to promote the war’s top diplomat and sideline the one senior official who argued against it.
This fight was always coming. The establishment wing wants its party back once Trump leaves, and Vance stands in the way because he opposes foreign wars and the open-borders policies that swap American workers for cheaper foreign labor. Democrats will enjoy every minute of it. Their new majority comes with a socialist wing eager to pass amnesty and import a fresh voter base, and a Republican Party offering its own “redo” on immigration would hand them half the job.
The donor class has played kingmaker before, too.
In 2015, the big checkbooks crowned Jeb Bush. His super PAC, Right to Rise, hauled in $103 million in the first half of the year, with suggested gifts at its events often running $100,000. Bush and his allies spent roughly $130 million in all, and a big chunk of it went toward attacking Rubio, the same man many of those donors now adore.
Trump summed up the return on investment himself. “In New Hampshire, I spent $3 million. Jeb Bush spent $44 million. He came in five, and I came in No. 1,” he said.
Rubio isn’t Jeb. He’s sharper on a debate stage and far more popular with conservatives than Bush ever managed to be. But his only presidential run ended in March 2016, when Trump beat him in his home state of Florida.
In the first six months of 2015, about 9,900 donors handed Jeb Bush’s super PAC $103 million. Bush quit the race the following February with four delegates to show for it.
Sources: The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, “Hour 3 – The GOP Tea Starts Spilling,” iHeart transcript; Crooks and Liars, “Brian Kilmeade Smacks Down JD Vance”; CNN, “Vance, DeSantis make quick moves after disastrous GOP midterms jumpstart 2028 race”; The Daily Beast, “Billionaire GOP Donor Delivers Big Blow in Trump Succession Race Between Marco Rubio and JD Vance”; Fox News via WFMD, “Rubio gains early momentum in hypothetical 2028 GOP primary race as Vance remains clear front-runner”; Fox News via WFMD, “Vance’s midterm rally blitz draws attention from GOP insiders weighing 2028 predictions”; The Washington Post, “Trump tells donors, ‘We need to elect JD,’ as VP weighs his future”; The Hill, “Harris slams ‘politically motivated’ special counsel report that questioned Biden’s memory”; NBC News, Right to Rise fundraising report; Mother Jones, Right to Rise donor count; Associated Press via Fox News, “Bush campaign, super PAC raise $114.4M for presidential bid”; The American Spectator, “Jeb Bush Spent $32.5 Million Per Delegate”; Fox News, “Consultants reaped windfall from failed Bush campaign”; NBC News 2026 exit polling.