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Is 2028 a race JD Vance and Marco Rubio can never win? Donald Trump doesn't build successors — he builds loyalists. And the closer you are to him, the more dangerous your position becomes. This week, I'm joined by Puck's Julia Ioffe to break down the shadow primary already underway: Trump polling dinner guests on Vance vs. Rubio, the Donald Trump Jr. wildcard nobody wants to say out loud, and why the earliest frontrunners almost never make it to the finish line (remember when it was "definitely" going to be Ron DeSantis?). Then we go deeper: JD Vance's Catholic conversion, the rise of the reactionary Catholic wing of the Republican Party, what Julia learned reporting on the Russian Orthodox Church under Putin, and how Steve Bannon, Viktor Orban, and the anti-Francis Catholics became the ideological core of the new MAGA right. Julia Ioffe is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck, and the author of "Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy."

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