President Donald Trump’s informal audition for his 2028 successor appears to be over — at least for now.

For months, Trump treated Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as something like rival contestants, polling aides and donors on the two men and floating each as a possible heir without tipping his hand. In recent weeks, that has stopped, according to five people familiar with the president’s running commentary on the race to succeed him in 2028.

“It’s become, ‘JD’s our guy, we gotta help JD,’” said a senior administration official, one of several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Another person said Trump has taken to remarking that his vice president has been looking good lately.

“There’s been a lot of that,” the person added.

People familiar with Trump’s shift pointed to a specific inflection point: Vance’s press tour for his new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” about his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.

The tour took Vance to ABC’s “The View,” where the reception was warm enough that co-host Ana Navarro asked co-host Joy Behar why she was “so in love with” him. He also sat for an interview with Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time”; Maher later said he would be open to voting for Vance in 2028. He logged extensive time on Fox News — the president’s preferred cable news channel. And he appeared on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, where he criticized the infighting within the MAGA movement over the war in Iran as “very immature.”

It was that stretch — Vance holding his own in semihostile terrain while carrying the administration’s message — that caught the president’s attention, these people said.

It hasn’t hurt that Trump has been privately complimentary about Vance’s weight loss, according to two people familiar with the comments. At an event in Michigan last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he and Vance were among several administration officials following a sauerkraut-heavy diet devised by the physician Dr. Sean O’Mara, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Trump is notoriously mercurial, and his feelings about people in his orbit can shift from day to day. One person familiar with the matter said the president expressed disappointment over the collapse this month of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, which Vance had negotiated alongside Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. And Vance and his team have grated on some senior White House staff with what one official described as a near-obsessive focus on online chatter about Vance and the administration.