At a rally in Hebron, Kentucky, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump called Jake Paul up to the stage at Verst Logistics, a packaging and transportation company. What happened next wasn’t about logistics.
After Paul delivered a short speech praising the president, Trump took the microphone back and made a prediction. He called Paul “a great guy,” “a courageous guy,” and “a hell of a fighter.” Then he went further.
“I just want to say, I predict, I’m going to make a prediction, that you will be in the not too distant future, running for political office,” Trump told the crowd. “And you have my complete and total endorsement.”
The crowd cheered. Paul smiled. And the internet immediately got to work.
The endorsement that endorses nothing
Here’s the thing about Trump’s endorsement: it’s for an office that doesn’t exist yet. Paul hasn’t announced a campaign, named a district, or floated a single policy position. Trump endorsed a candidacy that is, as of right now, entirely hypothetical — a blank check written to a 29-year-old YouTuber-turned-boxer at a packaging facility in northern Kentucky.
Paul seemed to embrace the moment. He told the rally crowd that Trump had taught him the value of courage. “We never back down from a fight,” Paul said, “even if they’re much bigger than you, much, much bigger than you.”
Which brings us to the fight.
About that ‘never back down’ thing
Three months before Paul stood on that stage in Kentucky talking about never backing down, he was lying on a canvas in Miami with a broken jaw.
On December 19, Anthony Joshua knocked Paul out in the sixth round of their heavyweight bout at Kaseya Center in Miami. Joshua dropped him four times. Every judge scored every completed round for Joshua. Paul left the arena, went to the hospital, and posted an X-ray of his jaw broken in two places.
Paul’s own post-fight message was defiant — “Jaw broken. Heart and balls intact” — but the scorecards told a different story. The man telling Kentucky he never backs down from a fight had just been shut out on all three cards by a former heavyweight champion who said it took him “longer than expected” to finish the job.
The Puerto Rico problem
In 2024, Paul recorded a lengthy video endorsing Trump for president and urged his 80 million followers to vote for the Republican nominee. But Paul himself didn’t vote. He couldn’t. He’d moved to Puerto Rico in 2021 — a U.S. territory whose residents cannot vote in presidential general elections. The move, which his own brother Logan has acknowledged was partly motivated by the island’s tax incentives, effectively removed Paul from the democratic process he was urging others to participate in. Now the president is endorsing him to run for office in the democracy he opted out of.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it more bluntly after Paul’s Super Bowl controversy last month, asking on social media whether he’d moved to Puerto Rico specifically to avoid paying taxes “while kids across America go hungry.”
One month ago, he called a Puerto Rican a ‘fake American’
That Super Bowl controversy is worth revisiting, because it happened just four weeks before the Kentucky rally.
Before Bad Bunny’s halftime performance at Super Bowl LX in February, Paul posted on X urging fans to boycott the show. He called Bad Bunny — a six-time Grammy winner born in Puerto Rico — “a fake American citizen performing who publicly hates America.”
The backlash was swift and came from every direction. His own brother Logan publicly disagreed. Amanda Serrano, the boxing champion signed to Paul’s own promotion company, posted a pointed rebuke defending Puerto Rican identity. AOC weighed in. Paul himself lives on the island.
Within hours, Paul backtracked. He clarified he wasn’t questioning anyone’s citizenship. Then he posted: “Guys i love bad bunny idk what happened on my twitter last night ?? wtf.”
That was February 9. On March 11, the president of the United States told America this man should hold elected office.
So is Jake Paul actually running?
Paul hasn’t said he’s running for anything. But Trump’s endorsements carry weight, and Paul’s audience is enormous.
Whether Jake Paul ever actually runs for office is an open question. What’s not open to debate is the resume he’d be running on: a YouTuber who moved to Puerto Rico for the tax breaks, couldn’t vote for the president who endorsed him, called a Puerto Rican artist a “fake American” and took it back the same day, and told a rally crowd he never backs down from a fight three months after getting his jaw broken in six rounds.
That’s the candidate. Trump says he has his complete and total endorsement.