Republican megadonor Ken Griffin said he would support Secretary of State Marco Rubio over Vice President JD Vance in a potential 2028 Republican presidential primary, offering an early glimpse of a growing divide among influential Republicans over who should succeed President Donald Trump.
Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel and one of the GOP's biggest donors after giving more than $100 million during the 2024 election cycle, made the comments Wednesday during a private interview with New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, Axios reported.
Asked whether he would back Rubio or Vance, Griffin noted he supported Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign and said he would be "predisposed" to back him again.
The remarks reflect an emerging split inside the Republican Party, with establishment-minded donors rallying behind Rubio while many in the party's populist wing favor Vance, in part because of his reluctance to involve the United States in foreign conflicts, which runs counter to the MAGA agenda.
Griffin has long been skeptical of both Trump and Vance. In 2022, he said it was "time to move on to the next generation" of Republican leadership.
He backed former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in the 2024 GOP primary and did not donate to Trump's campaign. According to Axios, Griffin also urged Trump not to choose Vance as his running mate during the 2024 vice presidential search.
Rubio, however, has sought to downplay any future rivalry, saying he would defer to Vance if the vice president decides to run in 2028.
Even so, the two men have increasingly been viewed as representing different wings of the Republican Party on foreign policy.
Reportedly, Vance has championed a more restrained, "America First" approach and has questioned some Israeli military actions, arguing they complicated negotiations with Iran. Rubio has maintained a more traditional Republican foreign policy stance, remaining supportive of Israel while leading diplomatic efforts related to Lebanon.
"The talk about differences is not idle speculation," said Dan Fried, a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to Poland who is now with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. "There is definitely something to it."
The White House fired back at any suggestions of a rift.
"Why is the legacy media obsessed with driving a wedge between Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio that does not exist? There is one camp — President Trump's camp — and the entire administration is fully behind the president's efforts to ensure Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon," White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said.
"When it comes to foreign policy and national security, we have no drama. We have no games," Rubio told reporters last week during a trip to Bahrain, the last of a three-nation tour of the Arab Gulf countries that have been most directly affected by the Iran war.
"We have a group of people that work very well together and closely to execute on the president's directives, which is why I think we've had good outcomes and good achievements, and we're going to continue to have good outcomes and good achievements," Rubio said. "Everyone has an important role to play, and everyone is playing that role and doing it in a collaborative process."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.