U.S. President Donald Trump weighed in Monday on who might lead the Republican Party after he leaves office, naming Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance as top contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination. But he kept the door open to … himself. Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Japan, Trump responded to suggestions that he should seek an unconstitutional third term, an idea recently floated by former White House strategist Steve Bannon. “I would love to do it — I have the best numbers ever,” Trump said when asked about Bannon’s comments. Trump, however, went on to add that he “hasn’t really thought about” running again. “We have some really good people,” he said. When pressed to name names, Trump gestured toward Rubio, who had walked back to the press cabin to speak with reporters. “We have great people — I don’t need to get into that. One of them is standing right here,” Trump said. He went on to praise his vice president, Vance, who has taken a prominent role in the administration on a range of domestic and national security issues. “Obviously JD is great. The vice president is great,” Trump said. “I’m not sure anyone would run against those two.” Bannon has been among the most vocal of those pushing for Trump to try for a third term. “There is a plan,” he said in a recent podcast, suggesting that Trump could make another run despite constitutional limits preventing him.

Former United States Vice President Kamala Harris suggested she may run again for U.S. president. The Democratic Party presidential hopeful, who lost to Republican Donald Trump in 2024, told the BBC in an interview to be aired Sunday that she is “not done” with politics. “I have lived my entire career as a life of service and it’s in my bones,” she said. Asked whether she could be the first woman in charge in the White House one day, Harris replied: “possibly,” hinting that she could make another presidential bid. But she added that she has not made a decision yet about whether to run again for president. The next American presidential election is in 2028. “There are many ways to serve,” Harris said, “but I have not decided yet what I will do in the future.” Harris dismissed polls suggesting that she would be an outsider in the presidential race with little chance of winning the Democratic ticket. “If I listened to polls, I would have not run for my first office, or my second office — and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here,” she said.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s revenge campaign is continuing apace, with celebrities who backed his 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris now in his sights. The Republican leader launched a blistering tirade against legendary rocker Bruce Springsteen last week, calling him “not a talented guy” and attacking his physical appearance, after the New Jersey icon — who endorsed Harris last year — branded the Trump administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous” during a concert in England. Now Trump is demanding a “major investigation” into Harris’ lengthy list of celebrity endorsements, singling out Springsteen as well as Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bono, and claiming they were illegally compensated. “Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment,” Trump fumed in a caps lock-heavy screed on social media in the early hours of Monday. “This was a very expensive and desperate effort to artificially build up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL!” he added, calling the various artists who came out in support of Harris “unpatriotic.” Then-Vice President Harris received a steady stream of celebrity backers leading up to the November election. Beyoncé spoke at a rally in Houston along with former Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland, but did not perform, while Winfrey hosted a star-studded, live-streamed town hall near Detroit. Rumors falsely circulated that the superstars were paid millions for their support, which their teams quickly shut down. The Harris campaign, which raised more than $1 billion in just a few months, paid Beyoncé’s production company $165,000 and gave $1 million to Harpo Productions, Winfrey’s company, according to campaign finance records. Winfrey addressed criticism over the figure in a social media post, saying she did not receive “any personal fee.” “However, the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story,” she wrote on Instagram. Beyoncé’s mother said the Grammy-winning artist “did not receive a penny” for her endorsement either and slammed the speculation as fake news. Harris often made her campaign rally entrances to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” Trump himself has courted celebrity endorsements in all three of his presidential campaigns, from Kanye West to Kid Rock, with the latter taking the stage at the Republican National Convention and Trump’s inauguration-eve victory rally.

Former U.S. President Joe Biden defended his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential election just a few months before the crucial November vote, claiming it wouldn’t have changed anything if he’d called it quits sooner. Biden has been criticized for announcing his withdrawal too late, giving his Vice President Kamala Harris — who became the Democratic nominee in his stead and ultimately lost to Republican opponent Donald Trump — just a few months to campaign. “I don’t think it would’ve mattered,” he told BBC Radio 4 Today in an interview broadcast Wednesday, his first since leaving office, when asked if he should have ended his candidacy earlier. Describing his administration as a “transition government,” his presidency was “so successful” that “it was hard to say, now I’m going to stop,” Biden said. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away,” he said. After a disastrous debate performance against Trump in June inflamed already swirling concerns about his age and health, Biden faced public pressure to withdraw from fellow Democrats, including powerful Democratic party figure Nancy Pelosi, the former house speaker. Despite repeatedly vowing not to leave the race, he announced on July 21, just 106 days before the election, that he would no longer seek reelection, becoming the first incumbent president since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 to do so. Calling it “a hard decision” to take his name off the ticket, it was nevertheless the “right” one, he told the BBC, adding it would not have “made much difference” if he had dropped out sooner. Harris’ campaign leadership told American political podcast Pod Save America last November that they did not have enough time to come up with a strategy to defeat Trump. “There was a price to be paid for the short campaign,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris campaign adviser, said.

I know what you did in April 2015, Europe. Ten years can be a lifetime in politics, and the last decade is no exception: 2015 saw world leaders signing the Climate Agreement in Paris, the rise of ISIS, and of course, the start of Jean-Claude Juncker’s presidency of the European Commission. Europe’s biggest problem was the migration crisis — we definitely solved that one by not talking about it anymore and shutting our ports to ships in need. Our biggest ally and truest friend in the world was the United States, which was led by too-cool-for-school President Barack Obama. Things were so much easier back then. That’s why POLITICO decided to extend to Brussels to cover European politics: If there’s something journalists love, it’s doing something easy. And so, POLITICO Europe was born. Making EU policy sexy? Piece of cake. Shining a light on European institutions to make them more intelligible? You got it. Covering overly complex processes to pass laws that most people don’t like, only some understand, and no one will ever hear about in the 27 member states? Sign us up. We went through the terrible twos with Brexit and Donald Trump in power in the U.S. — never forget the glorious covfefe tweet; we also learned to read and write about pandemics and air-born viruses during our primary school phase — Declassified secretly misses the Covid-19 days when sitting on the couch binging TV shows was considered being a responsible citizen. Finally, some visionary at POLITICO Towers agreed to launch this very column in 2019 — a true sign of bravery. But we are now officially approaching our pre-teen years: Wish us luck, we’ll need it. In 2025, the climate is still on fire — quite literally — and no one seems particularly bothered by it; Europe’s fun uncle who will not turn down that drink offer after all — Jean-Claude Juncker — has been replaced by the more stern and sober monarch wannabe, Ursula von der Leyen; and terrorist attacks’ front-page slots have been given to the wars that are still going on in Ukraine, Gaza and many other places around the world. Here’s to another decade of chaotic politics and not-so-boring policies; hopefully, we’ll manage to have (some) fun along the way. CAPTION COMPETITION “It’s ‘bring your grandpa to work’ day.” Can you do better? Email us at gpoloni@politico.eu or get in touch on X @POLITICOEurope. Last week, we gave you this photo: Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze. “No no, this is not ‘exactly’ what Elon did!” by Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz

Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column. Declassified watched President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony so you don’t have to — you’re very welcome. Not live, of course. The event started outside working hours here in Europe, and we all know that any respectful EU bubble worker will not stay at the office for a single minute of overtime unless paid extra. Also, “watched the inauguration” might be a bit misleading, as the whole thing was way too long to follow and as a millennial with a past addiction to social media, Declassified has the attention span of a … where was I? Alright, what we really watched was a 30-second video of Melania Trump skillfully giving her husband an awkward air kiss while protected by her incredible accessory of choice — a hat. Not just any hat, but a Carmen Sandiego-inspired, flying saucer-size, eye-covering piece of art that created the most strategically effective buffer zone of modern political history: around Doland Trump’s lips. It’s likely he didn’t notice. The whole day was a giant wet kiss to Trump, and if there’s one thing Donny the Menace loves, it’s himself. I mean, check out his phone wallpaper. A Pulitzer-prize deserving photographer managed to sneak a pic of Trump on his mobile while the poster-in-chief was sitting in the car on his way to the inauguration. The wallpaper is, of course, his own face. Stay classy, Donny! Speaking of classy, the crème de la crème of European far-right politicians showed up to represent the Old Continent. And they did not disappoint: Former U.K. Prime Minister and woman-who-should-have-definitely-eaten-her-greens Liz Truss was in town — oddly cosplaying as Paddington Bear; while Italy’s strongwoman Giorgia Meloni and Argentina’s angriest haircut Javier Milei were spotted having a great time in the background. Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, French Reconquête’s Éric Zemmour and Trump’s British alter ego Boris Johnson also made the list. But the biggest fashion statement of the day — worthy of Bernie Sanders’ mittens — came from Senator John Fetterman, who showed up wearing gym shorts on a day when the weather forecast was “too cold to care whether we’re talking Celsius or Fahrenheit.” Declassified would like to thank him for dressing up for the event and for representing all Cold-Weather Shorts Guys in the country. Thank you for your service, sir. CAPTION COMPETITION “That moment when you realize your wife made the smart choice by staying home and you wonder if leaving the party after 10 minutes is rude.” Can you do better? Email us at gpoloni@politico.eu or get in touch on X @POLITICOEurope. Last week we gave you this photo: Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze. “Meloni: What’s that empty space over there?  Von der Leyen: It used to be called the left.” by Daniel Makonnen.

Jimmy Carter had such confidence in his improbable path to the White House that he bet Americans worn down by Vietnam and Watergate would welcome a new kind of president: a peanut farmer who carried his own bags, worried about the heating bill and told it, more or less, like it was. And for a time, the voters embraced him. Yet just four years later, in the aftermath of a presidency that was widely seen as failed, it sometimes seemed as if all that was left of Carter was the smile — the wide, toothy grin that helped elect him in the first place, then came to be caricatured by countless cartoonists as an emblem of naïveté. But it was Carter’s great fortune to enjoy a post-presidency more than 10 times as long as his tenure in office — in March 2019, he became the longest-lived president ever — and by the time he died at 100, he had lived to see history’s verdict soften. Carter entered home hospice care after a series of hospital stays, the Carter Center confirmed Feb. 18. His wife, Rosalynn Carter, passed away Nov. 19, 2023. If the 39 th president did not achieve all he sought in four years in the White House — and he did not — his abiding concern for human rights in international affairs, and for energy and the environment as a defining challenge of our time, can now be seen as prescient. If, in later years, his unyielding support for Palestinian rights (and his frequent sharp criticisms of Israel) drew many detractors, his brokering of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt stands as a milestone of modern diplomacy. If he was the first president to confront what we now call “Islamic extremism,” he was far from the last. And if he sacrificed his re-election to the super-powerlessness of the Iranian hostage crisis — and a botched military raid to rescue the captives — his administration’s persistence nevertheless brought all 52 diplomats safely home in the end. From left, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Carter and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin meet at Camp David on Sept. 6, 1978. The three leaders hammered out a historic peace agreement. | The White House via AP At a time when only six women had ever served a president’s Cabinet, Carter had appointed three of them — along with three of the five women ever to serve as departmental undersecretaries, and 80 percent of those to serve as assistant secretaries. There is almost no battle over policy or public image that Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama ever faced as first lady that Carter’s trusted wife, Rosalynn, did not fight first — whether campaigning for mental health, or sitting in on Cabinet meetings. James Earl Carter Jr. could be pious (“I’ll never lie to you,” he pledged while campaigning in 1976). He could be petty (his micromanagement of the White House tennis court was roundly mocked). He could be tone-deaf (lecturing his countrymen on a national “crisis of confidence” in a way that only accented the problem, and dispensing with some of the pomp of the presidency that ordinary people actually liked and expected). But he could also be disarmingly candid, in a political culture that almost never rewards that trait (who can forget his confession to Playboy magazine that he had lusted after women not his wife and committed adultery many times in his heart?) And he had a gift for improbable friendships — not least with the man he so narrowly and bitterly defeated, Gerald Ford, and with John Wayne, the arch-conservative whose support nevertheless helped him pass the 1977 treaty surrendering the Panama Canal. He grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, on a dirt road in rural Georgia, surrounded by poor blacks, and was the only president ever to live in public housing — upon his discharge from the Navy, when he went home to take over his family’s peanut business after his father’s death. He was the son of a staunch segregationist, and in his early career, right up to his election as governor of Georgia in 1970, he often finessed the issue of race. But on taking office in the state house, he proclaimed that “the time for discrimination is over,” and Time magazine hailed him on its cover as the face of America’s New South. Carter’s life had a classic Horatio Alger arc. As a teenager, he joined the Future Farmers of America and cultivated, packed and sold his own acre of peanuts. He fulfilled his dream of an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, and went on to become a protégé of Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, in the post-World War II submarine fleet. He married a childhood friend of his sister Ruth, and raised four children. His first political post was that quintessential American office: chairman of his local school board, where in the early 1960s, he first spoke up in favor of integration. Two terms in the Georgia State Senate and an unsuccessful run for governor in 1966 paved the way for his election as governor in 1970. By the end of 1972, he had become determined to launch a presidential campaign, but the long odds against him were exemplified in a 1973 appearance on “What’s My Line,” where none of the celebrity panelists recognized him and only the movie critic Gene Shalit eventually guessed he was a governor. But Carter’s status as an unknown outsider was a distinct advantage in the wake of Watergate — an edge understood early by the late R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times — and he quickly became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, winning the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In 1976, he published his campaign manifesto-cum-memoir, the self-confidently titled, “Why Not the Best?” and the rest is history. Rosaylnn and Jimmy Carter wave during the 1976 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden in New York. | AP At his inauguration, Carter brought a bracing fresh breeze to Washington, walking from the Capitol to the White House after his swearing-in. But soon enough he brought a stern and scolding tone as well, ordering the White House thermostats to be set at a frigid 65 degrees (a move he ostentatiously announced in a televised “fireside chat,” wearing a tan cardigan), selling off the presidential yacht Sequoia, banning hard liquor from White House parties and limiting the playing of “Hail to the Chief” at official functions. Much of the national media and Washington’s chattering class quickly pronounced the new president a rube, out of his depth and surrounded by a “Georgia Mafia” equally unschooled and uncouth. He requited with prickly disdain for his critics. The very style that had seemed unpretentious and refreshing now seemed sanctimonious and crabbed, and on the substance, he just couldn’t seem to catch a break. He was saddled with a national economy stuck in “stagflation,” and by June 1978, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution was analyzing why his presidency had failed: because it lacked an overriding vision. In an afterword to excerpts from his White House diaries, published in 2010, Carter would write: “As is evident from my diary, I felt at the time that I had a firm grip on my presidential duties and was presenting a clear picture of what I wanted to accomplish in foreign and domestic affairs. The three large themes of my presidency were peace, human rights and the environment (which included energy conservation).” But, he added, “In retrospect, though, my elaboration of these themes and departures from them were not as clear to others as to me and my White House staff.” In 1980, Carter faced a challenge for re-nomination from Sen. Ted Kennedy, and then lost the November election to his polar opposite, Ronald Reagan. He sulked for a while, then bought a $10,000 Lanier word processor, composed the first of the more than two dozen books he would write on leaving office, and set about establishing his presidential library and Carter Center in partnership with Emory University in Atlanta. The Carters attach siding to the front of a Habitat for Humanity home in LaGrange, Georgia, in 2003. | Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images Over the ensuing decades, he would build houses Habitat for Humanity, monitor foreign elections, conduct semi-sanctioned (and sometimes unsolicited) diplomacy, and continue to offer various unvarnished assessments of his successors of both parties. Posing in 2009 in the Oval Office with all the living members of the presidential club just after Barack Obama’s election, he could not restrain himself from leaving a conspicuous physical distance between himself and his fellow southerner Bill Clinton, an old frenemy whose extramarital affair in office so offended Carter, long the nation’s Sunday school teacher-in-chief. (He continued to live the part: Carter kept teaching Sunday school in Georgia year after year, taking a picture afterward with everyone who attended.) Most surveys of professional historians still rank Carter in the third quartile of effective presidents (as it happens, on par with his friend Jerry Ford). Carter himself preferred the simple summary of his vice president, Walter Mondale: “We obeyed the law, we told the truth, and we kept the peace.” In the long line of the presidency, that’s not the best boast ever. But it’s far from the worst.

LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s team channeled Donald Trump to secure his landslide election victory this year — and now believe the strategy can help U.S. Democrats regain the White House.  Starmer’s Labour Party focused relentlessly on a core group of patriotic, working-class voters with similar characteristics to the demographic which swung the U.S. election for Trump two weeks ago.  At one crucial turning point, Starmer’s chief of staff even said the Labour leader needed to show his party had a plan “to make Britain great again,” echoing Trump’s famous “MAGA” slogan.  Now, in the aftermath of Trump’s second presidential election victory, some of Starmer’s election-winning team believe Kamala Harris’s defeated Democrats can learn from Labour’s success.  “The lessons are: Identify who you want to speak to, identify what they care about and don’t talk about anything else,” said Deborah Mattinson, Starmer’s director of strategy in the run up to the U.K. election in July. “There’s going to need to be quite a big reset for the Democrats.” When Starmer took over the Labour leadership in 2020, his party was deeply demoralized. It had just suffered its worst result for more than 80 years at the hands of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in the election of December 2019. A succession of poor local and parliamentary by-election results pushed Starmer himself to the point of quitting in 2021.  It was around this time that his top aide, Morgan McSweeney, drew up a plan to win back the trust of Brexit-supporting working-class voters who had dumped Labour in favor of Johnson’s Tories, according to a new book, “Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election.”  McSweeney, who is now the PM’s chief of staff, wrote a memo called “Labour for the country” in which he set out how Starmer should respond to the heavy defeats the party had suffered in the 2021 local elections, according to the book. In the memo, McSweeney said Labour would not persuade swing voters until Starmer “shows he has heard them and their clear and repeated verdict” on his party.  ‘WE ARE PATRIOTS’ Labour should emphasize its past “patriotic” successes under former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, McSweeney wrote, and Starmer must show that “Labour is the party with a plan to make Britain great again.”  Starmer adopted McSweeney’s blueprint and put it into action in the weeks and months that followed. In a crucial speech to Labour’s party conference in September that year, he highlighted the importance of national pride, telling his audience, “Here in this conference hall, we are patriots.” He praised the “great British men and women” who serve in the armed forces, and used phrases such as “great Britons,” “makes this country great” and “greater as Britain.”  In the summer of 2024, Starmer’s Labour Party stormed to a landslide election victory, after 14 years in the wilderness. While the politics of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer could hardly be further apart, both the Republicans and the Labour Party recognized that their route to power ran through former industrial heartlands and patriotic, disillusioned working-class voters. | Pool photo by Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images While the politics of Trump and Starmer could hardly be further apart, both the Republicans and the Labour Party recognized that their route to power ran through former industrial heartlands and patriotic, disillusioned working-class voters who felt left behind by the political elites.  That, according to Mattinson, Starmer’s former strategy chief, is where the U.S. Democrats need to pay attention now. She undertook some work with the Democratic Party before the election and conducted focus groups in the U.S. to identify swing voters’ views, finding that many felt abandoned by Joe Biden’s party. “This was a change election and whoever could be the change that people wanted was going to win,” Mattinson said of the U.S. presidential race. “One of the things we did was hone in very tightly on the voters Harris needed to win, just as we did with Labour. They were working-class voters, wherever they happened to be, and they cared about two things: the cost of living and immigration.”  “There just was not enough done to really nail that message,” she said of the Harris campaign. “They could have had more message discipline. They didn’t have bad policy but they didn’t really feature the policy they had that would have hit the spot for these voters.” AUTHENTIC TRUMP By contrast, Mattinson said, nobody could be in any doubt about Trump’s message. Swing voters believed he would “make America great again,” as he continually promised to do, she added: “He talked about the things they wanted to hear about. He talked about immigration and he talked about the cost of living.” Trump was seen as “strong”, “positive,” “authentic” and patriotic.  That analysis is broadly shared by another former Starmer adviser — Claire Ainsley, director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. She said Trump’s victory “reflects the strategic challenge of the center-left globally, which is that their traditional base has felt in recent years that they don’t reflect their values and interests any more.” “The U.K. Labour Party is one of the few examples of a modern center-left party that has managed to win an election — including winning back sizable chunks of that working-class vote, along with the more liberal middle-class, which has been pulling towards center-left parties anyway,” Ainsley said. “The victory for Trump clearly means that that challenge is as pressing now as it was when it first arose many years ago. And Labour do offer some of the ingredients of what center-left parties need to do.” But the defeat for the Democrats also contained a warning for Labour, she added. “If you don’t get the politics of that right in government, then voters won’t come back and elect you for a second term.” “Landslide: The Inside Story of the 2024 Election”, by Tim Ross and Rachel Wearmouth, is published by Biteback on November 21.

President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as secretary of State, according to two people informed of the decision. If confirmed for the role, Rubio may bring some more traditional GOP views into Trump’s foreign policy orbit. The Florida Republican has hawkish views on many U.S. foes, but he has also championed maintaining alliances, such as NATO. It’s unclear whether Rubio would endorse large-scale cuts to the State Department workforce as some Trump allies hope to push through, but he will likely support some reforms to the institution. The people confirming the information — a former Trump administration official and another person told of the decision — were granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the selection process.

State Attorney General Rob Bonta has already prepared legal arguments against everything from a possible national abortion ban to Project 2025 targets.