Vance calls Rubio ‘my best friend in the administration’ despite 2028 ticket talk

Vice President JD Vance gushed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is “my best friend in the administration” in a “Pod Force One” interview after President Trump teased them as an “unstoppable” 2028 ticket.

Vance, 41, told The Post’s Miranda Devine on the latest edition of the podcast, out Wednesday, that he ribbed Rubio, 54, about the prospect of their potential presidential ticket after discussing the details with Trump over lunch six months ago.

“We try to get lunch every couple of weeks just to catch up on what’s going on and talk about things,” Vance said of his sit-downs with the commander-in-chief.

“[Trump] mentioned it probably six months or so ago,” the veep said of a potential Vance-Rubio ticket. “And I mentioned it to the secretary in jest, but it, it feels so premature because we’re still so early.

“And what I always say to people is, if we take care of business, the politics will take care of itself,” Vance said. “And we’re nine months into this administration]. We’ve done a lot of good.”

Still, “there’s a lot more work to do because I mean, look, the thing that I most worry about is that Biden left us a terrible affordability crisis,” Vance said of former President Joe Biden. “We’ve got to make life more affordable for American citizens.

“Again, we’ve chipped away at that problem, but there’s a lot more work to do there. So my attitude is, the American people elected me to be vice president. I’m gonna work as hard as I can to make the president successful over the next three years and three months.

“And if we get to a point where something else is in the offing, let’s handle it then,” Vance said. “But let’s at least get through the next couple of years and do good work for the American people before we talk about politics.”

The 2024 Trump-Vance ticket topped Vice President Kamala Harris and her running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in all seven of the critical battleground states while also winning the popular nationwide vote.

Asked if a Vance-Rubio duo would cause any “tension” between the veep and secretary of state, a former presidential candidate who would now be playing second fiddle, Vance denied it, calling Rubio his “best friend in the administration.

“He and I work a lot together,” Vance said. “A lot of the good work that we’ve been able to do as an administration is because we’re all able to work together.”

That work has included flying on diplomatic envoys to Europe to try to help end the war between Russia and Ukraine as well as the fighting between Israel and Hamas terrorists in Gaza.

“Worrying too much about the politics actually, I think, makes you worse at the job that you have,” Vance said. “I never want to wake up, and so far I’ve never woken up, and thought to myself, ‘How do I make myself president of the United States?’ What I wake up and think to myself is, ‘How do I do a good job as vice president?’

“And I think Marco Rubio asks himself, ‘How do I do a good job as secretary of state?’ And that should be the question that each of us keeps on asking ourselves,” the vice president said.

Vance has dominated the polls when it comes to the 2028 presidential race, often beating out the competition for the Republican presidential nomination by as much as 40 percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics survey aggregator.