The pre-Trump Republican establishment isn’t dead. It’s just waiting.
Vice President JD Vance has the clearest path to Donald Trump’s eventual endorsement for 2028, but a significant faction of the GOP — one that never accepted Trump’s remaking of the party and has no intention of accepting Vance’s continuation of it — is already working to undermine him. The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, long the standard-bearer of traditional, business-friendly conservatism, has become the sharpest venue for that effort.
The case against Vance, as assembled by Journal editorial board members Kimberley Strassel and Allysia Finley, rests on several interlocking charges that are worth taking seriously on their own terms — even if the political motives behind them are transparent.
The critics converge from three overlapping directions: pro-Israel conservatives alarmed by Vance’s foreign policy positioning, traditional Republicans who want to roll back the Trump revolution rather than extend it, and the Murdoch media empire, whose owner Rupert Murdoch lobbied Trump against picking Vance as his running mate and has privately praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio as “brilliant.” These three currents run directly through the Journal’s opinion pages.
Vance’s camp is unmoved — and strategically, they may be right to be. A top Vance ally told Axios the Journal’s attacks “only send the exact signal to our base that we want,” adding that the editorial board is “doing our work for us.” A Trump administration official dismissed the board as “a relic of a bygone era” whose “globalist screeds” no longer carry weight with actual Republican voters. That’s a self-serving framing, but it isn’t entirely wrong. Trump’s 2016 rise demonstrated, brutally, that elite conservative opinion had lost its grip on the party’s base. The Journal opposed Trump twice. He won twice.
The establishment’s preferred alternative is Rubio, who has insisted he won’t run and whom Strassel praised explicitly for following the Mike Pence model: head down, do the work, let results speak. Major GOP donor Ken Griffin has already said publicly he’d back Rubio over Vance in a primary. The Rubio option flatters the old guard’s preferences on foreign policy and tone — but Rubio’s willingness to run, and his ability to out-Trump Vance with the base if he did, remain genuinely open questions.
What this early skirmish reveals is a Republican Party still fighting over what it actually is. Trump dismantled the Bush-era consensus on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Vance represents the ideological consolidation of that dismantling. The Journal represents those who believe — against substantial evidence — that the party can be reclaimed. The 2028 primary, if Vance runs, will test whether elite conservative opinion has found any new leverage, or whether Trump’s transformation of the GOP is simply permanent.