Trump’s Oval Office answer leaves the endorsement question unsettled
Vice-President JD Vance, who spent only two years as a US senator before Donald Trump tapped him as his running mate in 2024, has spent recent weeks making stump speeches for Republican candidates. He has held rallies in Iowa, Florida, Texas, Alaska, Georgia, Michigan and his native Ohio in a crisscrossing schedule that compares with Trump’s own as the party struggles to retain its grip on the US Senate and House of Representatives amid Trump’s plunging approval ratings. Trump has told voters to behave as though he were on the ballot. Vance’s visibility has risen as Trump’s popularity has waned, while the path to inherit the MAGA movement remains more complicated than it may appear.
A day after Vance suggested Trump would endorse him if he ran for president, Vance shifted awkwardly in the Oval Office while Trump was asked about the remark. Trump called his running mate “a very talented person, and he’s a very good person,” with a forced smile this week. He added: “But we’ve literally – I don’t think we’ve ever talked about,” the president claimed, leaving the assertion unconfirmed. The Guardian said that if Trump and Vance truly had yet to discuss Vance’s prospects, they were firmly in the minority in Washington. The source placed the episode within a question asked for decades: whether the vice-presidency is a platform or a “poisoned chalice” for an ambitious successor.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio, widely seen as Vance’s main rival for the next Republican nomination, has spent the period focused on fighting the fires sparked by Trump’s global agenda. Analysts believe Vance’s campaigning roadshow was intended as a dry run for a 2028 presidential bid. Each stop enables him to build contacts and goodwill he can call on in the likely event that he seeks the nomination in less than two years. A photograph by Cheney Orr/Reuters showed Vance at a Turning Point USA summit in Phoenix in December.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said Vance was trying to “build up chits” aimed at making Trump’s MAGA movement “remember that he was a good soldier.” A Getty Images photograph showed Vance at a rally in Harlingen, Texas, in September. Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who now runs the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Vance was doing what a lot of smart vice-presidents had done throughout history: earning credit with state and congressional candidates “so that when he kicks up a campaign machine in two years, people owe him something.”
The Guardian said that, time and again over the past two years, Vance had slipped into “explainer-in-chief” mode, providing what it called “a more palatable narrative” after Trump’s more extreme statements, impulses or policy decisions. Critics branded the practice “sane-washing,” describing it as an effort by the verbally dextrous vice-president to use his facile language skills to normalize otherwise outlandish utterances or actions. After publishing a book on his conversion to Catholicism, Vance had rationalized a meme Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that seemed to portray the vice-president as Jesus Christ. Vance also tried to deny, or at least reinterpret, Trump’s words when the president told journalists he did not think about Americans’ financial situation in conducting the war with Iran. Bardella said Vance’s self-anointed role as Trump’s “explainer-in-chief” positioned him to sell himself as “all the things you love about Donald Trump without the craziness and the chaos.”
At a CBS town hall event last weekend, Vance was pressed on charges of corruption after voters raised concerns that Trump was making money from cryptocurrency. “You can make all kinds of criticisms of our policies and decisions, but I’ve not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself,” Vance said. Forbes reported that Trump’s personal fortune had surged from $2.3bn in 2024 to $6.5bn this year. Vance’s midterm campaigning has included vitriolic personal attacks on Democratic candidates, including Kansas Senate candidate Adam Hamilton and James Talarico, who is in a cliffhanger race with Trump-endorsed Republican Ken Paxton for the Texas Senate race. The Guardian said those attacks could prefigure another weapon a Vance presidential campaign might use: demonizing opponents. Dallek said: “One of the previews that we’ve had is that he is going to define the Democratic party as this radical leftwing communistic anti-American threat to the future of the country.”
Trump has welcomed Vance’s loyal defense, but The Guardian said those comments also highlight problems Vance may face in trying to become Trump’s heir as head of the MAGA movement. The source said unstinting loyalty is the coin of the realm in the Trump-dominated Republican Party, while Trump’s “vice-like grip” on the party presents a fundamental challenge for anyone hoping to step from his shadow and assert an independent persona aimed at winning the base. A Getty Images photograph showed Republican supporters in Sharonville, Ohio.
Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional staffer who left the party in 2017, said Vance faced two choices: “Either ride Trump all the way to the island of irrelevancy, or break with him and incur his wrath.” Neither option was good, Bardella said, because anyone tethered to Trump faces electoral backlash and Trump “will continue to erode democratic norms as his grip on power wanes.” He said that backlash would force Vance into untenable positions: either “double down on the crazy” or break with Trump and alienate the primary base he needs to win the nomination.
Some observers believe personality, rather than ideology, may stymie Vance’s presidential ambitions, The Guardian reported. The source said Vance was repeatedly mocked for his awkward campaign persona during the 2024 presidential election and remains a “grating presence” on the stump, with attempts at humor often falling flat. Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said Vance’s inability to project authenticity threatened his presumed frontrunner status. “JD Vance comes across as so manufactured. There’s nothing authentic about him, and people see right through it,” she said. Setmayer added: “You can see that coming across when he goes out there and tells these jokes or tries to be funny and it lands like a lead balloon, because he’s not inherently secure with himself.”
The source said the trait appeared to be on display last week in the town of Tyler, Texas, when a male supporter shouted: “I love you.” Vance replied: “I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice-president, not James Talarico.” The source said Vance was referring to the Democratic Senate candidate, whose sexuality Vance and other Republicans had repeatedly questioned without evidence or obvious cause. A Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images photograph showed a woman wearing a Vance 2028 hat at an event in Howell, Michigan, last month. A Bloomberg/Getty Images photograph showed Vance in the White House press briefing room in May.
Wilson agreed that many diehard Trump supporters viewed Vance as an unsatisfactory substitute and said Vance’s ascension to the Republican nomination was not assured. “JD Vance is not Donald Trump, and he will never be,” he said, arguing that “the modern voter out there in the world is not interested in Diet Trump. They want the full experience.” Wilson continued: “Vance is more facile than Trump. He can change his personality to adjust to the room. Trump, for all of his evils and corruption and craziness, is the genuine article. He didn’t change everything he believed overnight to achieve something political. He’s always been the asshole that he is. Vance is the asshole that you want him to be.” Setmayer agreed that Vance’s claim to the movement’s succession remained unsettled: “As much as JD Vance thinks he is the Maga heir apparent, he’s not. There’s a lot of consternation about him. He’s not completely won the Maga base by any means.”
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who is now a Democrat, said Vance must sell himself to two audiences: Trump’s MAGA base and the broader electorate after winning the nomination. “He cannot sell himself to the second audience if he doesn’t make the sale with the first audience, and that means sticking to Trump and going full Maga,” Walsh said. He argued that Vance’s rightwing identity was so well developed that expressing views appealing to Trump supporters would require little simulation. “I don’t know what he actually believes, but he’s taken on a lot of these Maga beliefs,” he said, adding: “JD Vance is more pro-Putin than people realize – more pro-Russia, more anti-Ukraine” and “JD Vance is very skeptical of Israel. Vance really does have a lot of the Maga beliefs.”
The Guardian treated the fate of Trump’s first vice-president, Mike Pence, as a warning about the price of political autonomy. Pence had to be evacuated to an underground shelter in the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, as pro-Trump rioters called for his execution following his refusal to overturn the 2020 presidential election result. A Bloomberg/Getty Images photograph showed Vance with Trump in the Oval Office in March. Even if Vance attempted a clean break after securing the Republican nomination, the historical portents were not encouraging.
Al Gore attempted to put clear blue water between himself and Bill Clinton after becoming the Democratic nominee in 2000. “I stand here as my own man,” he told the party’s convention, trying to avoid an electoral backlash over the then president’s impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Gore lost the election to George W Bush and his own state of Tennessee, where he was a US senator, despite excluding Clinton from the campaign trail. A Dirck Halstead/Getty Images photograph showed Bill Clinton and Al Gore with their wives, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore, on the campaign trail in Monroe, Michigan, in August 2000.
Dallek said the Gore example was useful because Gore tried to distance himself without doing so very successfully, and he was doing so from a pretty popular president. “When you’re vice-president, you can only get so much distance from the president, and if you try to distance yourself, you’re going to antagonize the people who supported the president, and create the impression that you’re not just disloyal, but two-faced,” he said. That history left Vance with limited options in how to pitch himself for the presidency.
Wilson offered a different diagnosis: “Even JD Vance doesn’t fully have a theory of the case yet of why he should be president.” Wilson said Vance would “see what the terrain looks like in mid-2027, then calibrate my message, my campaign and my personality to what I think will win.” Wilson said the wait-and-see approach was “not really something that works in the age of authenticity that we supposedly live in now,” when “it’s harder for somebody to fake being anything anymore than it ever has been in politics.” The Guardian said the approach was underpinned by Vance’s reputation as a “shape-shifter,” capable of jettisoning previously held principles. Years before becoming a Trump supporter, Vance declared himself a “never Trumper,” labelled Trump “cultural heroin” and voiced fears that Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” He formed an alliance with Trump after Trump’s first presidency ended in 2021.
Dallek argued the biggest encumbrance might be the tendency of the vice-presidency to become a poisoned chalice. Almost four decades had passed since the last serving vice-president won election as president. “The vice-presidency historically was seen as a terrible job – very little power, and not that much of a stepping stone,” he said. It was difficult to win essentially a third term, something that had happened only once in modern times, with George H W Bush in 1988. “It’s not the best springboard for the presidency at any time, and especially when Americans hate the establishment, think Washington is corrupt, and distrust people in positions of power,” Dallek said. He concluded: “JD Vance is still very much subject to the laws of vice-presidential politics – and in that, I think he is similar to a lot of his predecessors.”