Republican senator John Kennedy is thinking about running for president: ‘Why not me on a rainy day?’

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Louisiana’s colorful Republican Senator John Kennedy turned to a 40-year-old country song to announce his potential presidential campaign.

Kennedy, known for his “folksy” aphorisms and exaggerated drawl in congressional hearings and during his cable TV appearances, isn’t ruling out a run for the White House in 2028.

“What’s the old Judds’ song? ‘Why not me on a rainy day? Why not me to love your blues away?’” Kennedy said Sunday, quoting from The Judds’ 1985 hit “Why Not Me?”

The 74-year-old senator told NBC’s Meet the Press that he intends to seek re-election to his Senate seat in two years, unless “a bunch of goobers” join the race for the GOP nomination.

“On my side of the aisle, if a bunch of goobers run, and I think they’re goobers and one of the goobers might win, and I think I could do a better job, I would consider running,” Kennedy said.

“My plans right now are to run for re-election, but as I’ve said before, if I don’t think I can be effective in the Senate anymore, I would consider it,” he added.

President Donald Trump, who is constitutionally blocked from running for a third presidential term, has previously suggested that his Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio could succeed him.

Rubio said last month that he has “no plans at this time” to seek the nomination, and Vance said last week that it’s “really obvious” that Kennedy’s Senate colleague Ted Cruz intends to run in 2028.

Asked to weigh in on Vance’s potential entry in the presidential race, Kennedy told Meet the Press: “I’m not going to talk about another potential candidate.”

“I’m just not there yet,” he added. “It’ll be good for both parties to have a full field.”

But Kennedy has spent the last several weeks campaigning on behalf of Republican congressional candidates, suggesting he could be positioning himself as a prominent GOP voice after Trump’s presidency.

If he does enter the presidential race, and wins, Kennedy would be the third-oldest president to enter office behind Trump and Joe Biden.

Before he was in the Senate, the former Democratic state official and Oxford University scholar served as Louisiana’s state treasurer for nearly two decades.

After a failed campaign for the Senate in 2004, Kennedy registered as a Republican and launched another unsuccessful Senate bid in 2008. He was finally elected in 2016 and then re-elected in 2022.

Kennedy’s comments to Meet the Press follow his grilling of Jack Smith during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that dominated headlines — thanks to a Republican senator’s failed attempt to link the former special counsel to a conspiracy theory that he conspired with state prosecutors in Georgia to go after Trump.

Senator Eric Schmitt, who accused the former special counsel of perjury and labeled him a “total dirtbag,” claimed he had evidence that Smith was attending an NBA game in Atlanta at the time. Smith wasn’t attending an Atlanta Hawks game that day. He was attending an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland.

But before Schmitt’s round of questions backfired in real time, Kennedy unloaded a series of questions that would have made headlines if they hadn’t been overshadowed by Schmitt’s failed interrogation.

Kennedy asked probing questions about Smith’s wife and whether he knows anything about the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny and Jimmy Hoffa. In a series of questions dripping with disdain for the former special counsel, Kennedy asked Smith, “What does the word arrogant mean?” and “What does the word self-righteous mean?”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘often wrong but never in doubt’?” he asked.

“Do you believe in the tooth fairy?” he later asked. “How about the Easter bunny? … Do you think Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes?”

“You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” Kennedy told Smith.

The hearing was his latest viral moment in a political career full of them, including reading from sexually explicit passages during debate over book bans.

Kennedy is also among a handful of Republicans who can carefully navigate their criticisms of Trump without drawing fire from the president.

His grilling of now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem prompted testimony on fatal shootings and a taxpayer-funded ad campaign that became a liability for the president. Earlier this year, Kennedy spent several painful minutes trying to get Noem to answer why she would baselessly accuse American citizens of domestic terrorism after her officers shot them at point-blank range.

The senator also pushed her to explain why DHS paid more than $200 million for an ad campaign that prominently features the secretary telling immigrants to leave the country voluntarily.

Noem insisted they were “effective.”

“Well, they were effective in your name recognition,” Kennedy shot back.

Kennedy also inadvertently got Attorney General Todd Blanche to call himself Trump’s lawyer before he quickly corrected himself, a revealing moment amid heightened scrutiny into the president’s alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice to target his political opponents.

Asked this summer whether Blanche and Trump are “friends,” Blanche replied, “I’m his lawyer — was his lawyer.”