Election 2028: Heir to the GOP Throne (?)

Vice President JD Vance is one of the most enigmaticfigures in contemporary American politics.

He was not the safe choice for the ticket. He arrived on Donald Trump’s presidential ticket with little political experience and plenty of baggage. During his two years in the Senate some senior colleagues found the Ohio freshman’s strident opposition to Republican policy orthodoxy presumptuous at best, sanctimonious at worst. And more than a few Republican lawmakers and donors privately acknowledged that they would have preferred someone else. Yet the vice-president, the third youngest in American history, has proved deft at a role that often ends up as a political dead end. And Vance, seen by America’s allies as a divisive, controversial figure, has been casting himself as a uniter of his party’s fractious factions, arguing that he is uniquely placed to bridge the gap between the “techno-optimist” and “populist right” MAGA tribes.

“Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators […] have the same enemy,” he has said. That enemy is globalization and cheap labour. He argued that restricting the flow of people and goods, while loosening regulations and lightening the tax burden of companies and investors, would encourage innovation and benefit workers and entrepreneurs alike. “We can only win by doing what we always did: protecting our workers and supporting our innovators,” he said.

Whether tech leaders—whose businesses benefit from the free flow of goods and services and federal support for scientific research—will buy this vision as it moves from theory to reality remains to be seen and Vance’s bridge may yet buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. But if the Republican Party could indeed fold working-class voters who feel nostalgic for a past age into a coalition with techno-optimist entrepreneurs, that would make MAGA a new kind of political movement. And that possibility may not be so far-fetched, given the remarkable level of fealty the Tech-Bro CEOs have shown to the Trump administration.

Assuming that Vance completes his four-year term as vice-president it will be the longest he has held a job since serving the same stretch in the Marine Corps after high school. After a rough, traumatic childhood, arguably on the fringes of what certain east-coast elites might term ‘white trash,’ the Ivy League-educated lawyer who clawed his way up the economic ladder worked at three venture-capital firms in six years and published his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”, when he was just 31. The book’s success expanded his already ample access to elite circles, and his time as American progressives’ favourite conservative led him to believe many affluent Americans looked down on the people he grew up with.

Vance, whose career in elected office was half as long as his current boss’s, didn’t bring the Washington know-how and vast experience of Dick Cheney or Mike Pence to the vice-presidency. Yet he has taken on a big portfolio, divided into four roles: spokesman, dealmaker, project manager and talent scout.

He is aware that his most important task is staying on the same page as the mercurial Trump, which is never easy even under the smoothest of circumstances. Yet, as part of a MAGA vanguard putting more intellectual scaffolding on the movement created by the 45th and 47th president, he relishes making flag-planting speeches (and sometimes actually literally planting flags).

Vance has delivered an intellectually blistering addresses castigating European governments for their shortcomings. Whatever leaks there have been about him have yielded precious little in that his private and public views on foreign policy did not diverge from Trump’s, even if he doesn’t always agree with the president. But like the elder millennial he is, he also takes time to battle on social media. His foreign trips united these instincts: to show loyalty to his boss by making his wilder ideas seem substantive and to troll liberals and foreigners.

After nearly a decade of cable TV appearances, Vance is adept on ‘old-fashioned’ media too. Though he lacks Trump’s unique (or peculiar) charisma, he is as talented a brawler, and the most important member of his audience agrees. “He is a feisty guy, isn’t he?” the president said on election night, 2024. “He really looks forward to it, and then he just goes and absolutely obliterates them.”

At the beginning of the administration, he worked on pushing through controversial cabinet nominees like Robert F. Kennedy junior, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth to Senate confirmation, a task seemed as (un)enviable as Kamala Harris’s responsibility for solving the root cause of America’s immigration crisis. Nearly every one of Trump’s cabinet picks made it through, and Vance had to cast a tie-breaking vote only once. Much of this success was thanks to atmospheric pressure created by the president’s and Elon Musk’s ‘steamroller’ tactics, Vance quietly played a role by listening to uncertain senators and assuaging their concerns. “J.D. is a jack of all trades, and he has been instrumental in working with the Senate to help advance President Trump’s cabinet nominees and our shared agenda,” says John Thune, the Senate majority leader.

Hillbilly in Power

Beyond Congressional matters, Trump has assigned his deputy to a mix of special projects. One of these tasks is crafting a deal that would enable TikTok to remain accessible in America, despite a law that ought to have forced its sale or closure. Another job is as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, the first vice-president in that post. Developing deeper ties with some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors at the same time has proven helpful in allowing Vance access to the both the faceless financial backers and the vast GOP political fundraising machine, something likely to pay dividends for his own ability to tap into these networks in the future.

Vance has also left his imprint on the administration in his role as unofficial HR manager. Vance acolytes have taken influential positions beyond the purview of his own constitutionally vague office, and he has also supported efforts to keep nominees in line with the Trump agenda. Before the election, in a joint interview with Donald Trump junior, the most influential Trump family member of the second term, Vance said that they had a shared interest in “keeping the snakes out of the administration”. While Trump senior is in charge of top selections, Vance’s influence can be seen at the lower levels, in the thousands of jobs that the president would not personally vet, yet would give the vice president substrata access to information in key governmental areas.

To what end has Vance agreed to do all this? After all, he was a Trump critic before adjusting both his style and his professed views during the president’s first term. Yet he had long been interested in politics. Before he found fame, he became friends with conservative intellectuals known as “reformicons”, who sought to shift the Republican Party away from its pro-business image towards helping voters more directly.

While a lot of this might be good old opportunism, there is the distinct impression that Vance believes US public policy, foreign and domestic, should be geared toward advancing the interests of the American working class and of the American family. While he has clearly changed his views on Trump personally, he has consistently filtered everything through the questions: Is this good for the worker? Is this good for families?”

Seen in this context, Vance’s dressing down of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky during the infamous first White House meeting, was rooted in his view that a conflict involving America would hit poorest Americans hardest. Vance—a vociferous critic of aid to Ukraine—believes in a restrained use of America’s limited resources around the world. His skepticism of support for Kyiv goes back to his time serving in Iraq. “It’s the same exact talking-points 20 years later with different names,” he said on the Senate floor when opposing aid to Ukraine in 2024. “The obsessive focus on moralism: democracy is good, Saddam Hussein is bad, America good, tyranny bad. That is no way to run a foreign policy.” His friends believe Vance has been ahead of the political curve on Ukraine, opposing assistance for the country in the days before Russia’s renewed invasion in 2022, and that his strident tone will age well with time. His sharper edge, particularly when criticizing Europe, is consistent with his own rhetorical transformation and Trump’s anger about the continent not spending more on defense while relying on the US to carry the can on spending.

Yet there is a paradox here, too. Vance’s own trajectory, from Hillbilly to the Ivy League, ran via service in the Iraq war. Not every question can be answered by asking what is best for the working class. Debates about how corporate tax cuts might affect families, for example, have persisted for decades within conservative circles. What does nuclear modernization mean for the working class?

Then there is the question of what happens after Mr Trump’s second (or maybe third) term. As with all modern vice presidents, Vance has been coy, recently telling NBC News that, “If I was like a central figure to getting the Russia-Ukraine crisis solved, who gives a shit what I do after this?” While many polling averages show that he has a net-negative favorability rating (which is not surprising as he is the sitting VP and needs to be held accountable for every government decision or action), yet he would be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2028. The ever-cagey and media-hogging Trump has held off anointing him as his successor, and recent history suggests that the president would enjoy watching several competitors vie for his official endorsement.

Of course, Trump's previously stated objectives on Iran have proven consistently fungible. He had originally talked about regime change, urging the Iranian people to "take back your government" in his early social media posts after the bombings. Then, he stated four clear objectives that did not include regime change: destroying Iran's missile capabilities, destroying its navy, making sure it cannot obtain a nuclear weapon, and preventing it from arming and funding terrorism across the globe.

So, when Vance accordingly downplayed regime change as a goal, it seemed to be in line with Trump's new list of objectives: "Ultimately, just whatever happens with the regime in one form or another, it's incidental to the president's primary objective here."

But as is his wont, Trump suddenly changed course, clearly adding regime change back to his list, posting on social media that after an "unconditional surrender" from Iran and the selection of "great and acceptable" new leadership, the US would "work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before."

All of this became yet another instance of Vance taking on a familiar job: attempting to articulate the president's message, when that message itself is at times confusing and self-contradictory. And while rolling with Trump's shifting messaging may make Vance a loyal vice president, it may also in the future complicate how he presents himself on any potential campaign trail.

Valued Team Player

Vance's articulate speeches and responses to reporter questions have made him a valuable asset to the administration. Where Trump's explanations often go on for a long time and can get convoluted (to say the least, especially when he happens to be seized by occasional flights of fancy), but they basically don't drill down into rationales and motivations, Vance oftentimes tends to give a more lawyerly explanation where he states not only the position, but the logic behind it.

This means that Vance not only attempts to explain contradictory messages, but also often seeks to take a more toned-down approach than Trump, in many ways appearing less argumentative and more cerebral, thus dialing down the emotion (though no less provocative when one considers the actual content of the response itself). This is apparent in the administration's anti-fraud efforts. In his State of the Union Address, Trump made some comments about Somali Americans which could be ‘spun’ to appear broadly dismissive:

"The Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota remind us that there are large parts of the world where bribery, corruption, and lawlessness are the norm, not the exception," he said. "Importing these cultures through unrestricted immigration and open borders brings us problems right here to the USA."

After Trump announced that Vance would be leading the anti-fraud program, the vice president took what is, for this administration, a gentler tone explaining the efforts last month.

"Part of the reason why we have these programs is we want to make sure that kids who grow up in families, not all that different from the family that I grew up in, that they have access to the basic necessities food, medical care, afterschool services when their family needs them, but they're unable to pay," he said.

This belies the fact that the policy itself is not that gentle — it includes holding back about $250 million in Minnesota's funding for Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income people, until the state comes up with a fraud-fighting plan the White House likes. What Vance’s language does do, is to dial down the “sting” in Trump’s rhetoric and make it all the harder for progressive opinions to demonize. The policy is the same but the tone by which it is rolled out, is markedly different.

The new role gives Vance a potentially much higher profile, at the intersection of multiple priorities, even beyond the idea of saving taxpayer money: immigration, highlighting fraud in Minnesota after federal agents killed two US citizens there, and pushing states to do what the administration wants.

Them’s Fighting Words

When he's softening Trump's language, Vance bears some resemblance to Trump's first vice president, Mike Pence. But there are of course fundamental differences – for example, Vance's penchant for fighting words.

Vance is not merely the Yale Law grad who neatly articulates the president's policies, he is also Trump's anti-establishment deputy who's ready for a knock-them-down fight. He ripped into the White House press corps after a federal agent killed Renee Good in January.

"Everybody who has been repeating the lie that this was some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves," he said at a White House press briefing. "Every single one of you."

And especially after Mike Pence certified that Joe Biden won the 2020 election — leading to the January 6 riot — the conventional wisdom was that Trump was looking for, above all, loyalty. And that's what he got, for Vance has shown that he is more than capable of switching to the vice president’s traditional ‘attack dog’ role when needed.

Being tied to an unpopular president could weigh on Vance if he aims to run for president in 2028, and there are few signs that he will not. That's especially true if Vance wants to take on positions that differ from Trump's either to distinguish himself from the president, or to carve out his own ‘brand identity’ and signature style. That's very possible – for years before becoming a politician, Vance was a vocal MAGA critic. Now, another, perhaps potentially more problematic contradiction has arisen: ahead of the 2024 election, he lauded Trump for keeping the US out of new conflicts and was widely seen as belonging to the GOP’s non-interventionist, "America First" wing. His role in supporting Trump through his current interventions may complicate how voters see him. At the very least, Vance’s very low profile when the bombing began showed how he wrestled with walking the tightrope being the president’s primary cheerleader and his own persona; beliefs. Consequently, in marked contrast, Trump has been seizing every opportunity to heap praise on Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the latter’s status of 2028 nomination challenger has been relentlessly ‘talked up’ by the media.

But for now, Vance's role is that of a loyal deputy whereas Rubio’s is to travel the world on high-profile assignments far removed from the often-messy hurly-burly of domestic policy. And Trump, with his instincts for showmanship will relish his impresario-like role in ‘talking up’ the rivalry between both men as they each position themselves to be his political heir. Besides, it’s not entirely impossible that Trump may not want to be reminded that he will have to give up the limelight, so he will spin things out for as long as he can get away with until time (and the Constitution) will compel him to make a public choice.

The simple truth about being Vice President of the United States is that for four (or eight) years one is basically a No. 2, and those who do succeed to the Oval Office have to be able to pivot in the public's mind to being the No. 1. That's a challenge for many vice presidents, particularly sitting vice presidents.

And it's perhaps an even bigger challenge after working in the shadow of this particular president.