One day last month, Mike Pence secretly huddled with some of Michigan’s top donors, including the kingmaking DeVos family, as he pitched his vision for the Republican Party before flying to Georgia to campaign against former president Donald Trump’s choice for governor.

Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, has developed a long PowerPoint presentation about how previous candidacies for president failed — and has shown it to donors and others during meetings on how he would run a successful campaign.

Advisers and allies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, have discussed the margins for his 2022 reelection that would help put him in position to run for president in 2024 — aiming to beat the three percentage point margin that separated Trump and President Biden in the state in 2020…

“They’re all going to run against him,” said Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s longtime pollster. “If you have the former vice president running, what does that say for the loyalty argument?”