J.D. Vance used to represent the future.
Early in President Donald Trump’s second term, Vance already seemed a lock for the Republican nomination in 2028. Name recognition, a compelling biography, rhetorical skills, credibility with the “New Right,” and, perhaps most importantly, the seeming approval of Trump himself, who had tapped him as running mate—Vance had it all.
No longer.
For many voters, Vance now represents a deeply and increasingly unpopular administration that presides over a spluttering economy, geopolitical decline, and a catastrophic war with Iran. What had seemed predetermined—Vance 2028—can no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps that’s for the best, both for Vance and the republic. American voters have a habit of defying expectations and ruining coronations. Just ask Hillary “Her Turn” Clinton.
As Vance’s aura of inevitability has waned, another Trump official and likely presidential candidate has seen his star rising: Marco Rubio, the secretary of state–cum–national security advisor. An AtlasIntel survey conducted in early May found that 45.4 percent of Republican respondents would support Rubio in the primaries, compared to only 29.6 percent for Vance.
Other polls show Vance still holds a respectable lead, but the mixed data only heighten the new sense of radical contingency. And the AtlasIntel survey jibes with conversations I’ve had with Republicans in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live. Stacey Sauter, a realtor who helps lead a local Republican club, told me she admires both men but has come to see Rubio as the more polished and charismatic figure. “I hear this from a lot of Republicans, that he comes across as more authentic, and they really like him for that,” Sauter said.
Two years hence, Vance will need to duke it out in the first competitive Republican primary in over a decade. It will be a momentous occasion. The first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms, Trump has dominated the headlines since 2016 and consolidated power over the GOP to an astonishing degree. His looming departure will leave behind a vacuum and high-stakes scramble to define the party’s future.
Vance, to come out on top, will first need to define himself. In recent years, he’s been dogged by the suspicion that he’s a cynical power seeker who doesn’t believe in much of anything. Because Vance has presented himself as a principled restrainer—i.e., an advocate of U.S. foreign policy restraint—the Iran War only magnifies the perception, hobbling the vice president and reviving the question: Whose man is J.D. Vance?
Media reports say he counseled against the war behind closed doors, yet Vance has been cozying up to the billionaire Miriam Adelson, a radical Iran hawk, pro-Israel megadonor, and Israeli-American dual citizen. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (an apparent nutjob who had called for nuking Iran), she aims to expunge voices critical of Israel from the Republican Party. The New York Times reports that Vance is using his position as GOP finance chair to woo billionaires like Adelson, with whom he’s “developed a relationship.”
Meanwhile, America First conservatives seek a national divorce from Israel, believing it has dragged the U.S. into costly wars, including the current one in Iran. “Hopefully the first thing we do, when and if this war’s resolved, is detach from Israel,” said Tucker Carlson, a friend of Vance and influential conservative podcaster, this April. Since neither side is looking to compromise, this may prove a difference that Vance isn’t able to split, though he’s tried before.
At a 2024 event cohosted by The American Conservative and the Quincy Institute, Vance carved out an exception for Israel in his restrainer worldview. In the keynote address, he highlighted the supposed religious affinity between America and Israel and argued Washington should boost Israel’s power in the Middle East. It was a boldly incongruous message considering the audience, but Vance was probably trying to appeal to people outside the room, effectively using a stage provided by antiwar institutions to curry favor with pro-Israel hawks.
Last year, amid a rise in anti-Israel attitudes among young conservatives, the vice president modulated his rhetoric. Speaking in October to an audience of university students, Vance emphasized that the U.S. shouldn’t follow Israel’s lead. “Sometimes they have similar interests to the United States, and we’re going to work with them in that case, sometimes they don’t have similar interests to the United States,” Vance said.
It’s a good line, but less credible now. Vance is number two in an administration that has launched a catastrophic conflict at Israel’s urging and on its behalf. While he has found ways to signal that he never fully supported the war, Vance has been obliged to defend it publicly, and America First conservatives, while still preferring him to Rubio, can’t be sure where he really stands.
“It has been disappointing to see him supporting current reckless war policies that go so hard against the grain of Trump’s earlier pledges to to use diplomacy, to not entrench the country in more forever wars,” Kelley Vlahos, a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute, said in an email. “It is clear his team is trying to build a narrative that he was the only one in the room to press against bombing Iran in June 2025 and February 2026.”
Young America Firsters don’t like what they’ve been hearing from the millennial VP. The ones I talk to still support him but are less enthusiastic than they had been. “I would hope that Vance does not agree with the current stance of the admin,” the head of a college Republican organization said. But many opinion-makers on the right urge younger generations to keep the faith. “We all know Vance was against the Iran War—we know it—but he has to be a loyal vice president, we also know that,” the author Ann Coulter told me in an interview.
To complicate matters further, most older conservatives and “normie” Republicans—the kind of people who vote in GOP primaries—remain supportive of American-Israeli ties and give Trump the benefit of the doubt on Iran. While 57 percent of Republicans under 50 hold an unfavorable view of Israel, only 41 percent of Republicans overall do, according to Pew Research data published in April. Republican support for the Jewish state may be in secular decline, but for the moment, the GOP remains a pro-Israel party.
Even so, most Republicans prioritize bread-and-butter issues and fear another forever war in the Middle East. A poll commissioned by TAC and conducted in mid-March found that a whopping 79 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters would support a decision by the president “to declare victory in Iran and quickly end this war,” while nearly 60 percent would oppose deploying ground troops.
And they are growing worried about the mounting economic consequences. The same poll found that 55 percent of respondents were concerned about “rising gas prices as a result of the war.” That number surely has grown as exploding energy prices boosted general inflation and borrowing costs like home mortgages. “I deal with kitchen table issues all the time, and I see that there’s some genuine fear out there about what’s ahead,” said Sauter, the Maryland realtor.
Trump’s plummeting approval ratings on inflation and the economy have driven his overall rating to new second-term lows, while his disapproval rating in May—58.6 percent—was his highest so far of either term, according to data aggregated by the stats guru Nate Silver. It can no longer be denied: The Iran War has dragged Trump down and threatens to destroy his legacy.
The polls don’t look any better for Vance, who has become the least popular VP ever at this stage of a presidency. “J.D. Vance is not doing too hot to trot at this point,” said CNN’s data analyst Harry Enten this April. “Down he goes!” Enten was reacting to polls showing Vance had started his vice presidency with a +3 net approval rating but was now 18 points underwater—a 21-point side.
The Iran War will complicate any effort by Vance to regain popularity and win the White House. Political analysts often claim that foreign policy doesn’t much affect elections because voters prioritize economic issues. But Americans know oil comes from the Middle East, and gasoline prices are prominently displayed across the country, so the connection between the war and Americans’ financial woes is easy to draw. Even voters who don’t perceive the connection blame Trump for war-inflated prices at the pump and store checkout.
Moreover, the observation that voters prioritize domestic issues and don’t care about geopolitics cuts both ways: Americans believe their priorities aren’t being attended to. Around 60 percent of U.S. adults say the administration is too focused on foreign affairs and not enough on domestic matters.
The truth is: Foreign policy does matter in elections—and the voters tend to be more dovish than the elites. Recent presidential candidates, including Trump, distinguished themselves in crowded primaries by condemning dumb wars and lambasting the presidents who launched them.
Vance, a former Marine, has said his experiences serving in the Middle East prompted skepticism about U.S. wars that don’t advance concrete American interests—and it’s a heck of a lot harder for him to tell that story now. He has a strong incentive to see the Iran War ended and its salience reduced as a political issue, so restrainers should want him in the room as Trump tries to find a resolution. And if the war persists and its economic costs remain top of mind for voters, Vance will need to convince them he never supported it.
True, the VP can’t openly undercut the president he serves, if only for reasons of self-preservation. Trump has demonstrated a continued ability to vanquish Republicans who challenge him, as Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky learned in May, when he lost his House primary. But at some point, trying to be everyone’s man could leave Vance on an island. In 2028, he’ll need to somehow prove what kind of Republican he really is—even if that means alienating one faction in the right’s civil war over Israel.
Perhaps the vice president feels he already defined himself for the public long ago when he published Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. The book takes a sympathetic, but critical, view of poor southern whites and the kind of domestic violence, substance abuse, and welfare dependency that Vance saw first-hand growing up in Ohio and Kentucky. It was acclaimed by both liberals and conservatives and adapted into a 2020 film directed by Ron Howard.
The book’s release in June 2016 coincided with Trump’s historic campaign for president. Vance initially bristled at the billionaire-turned-right-wing-populist candidate, fearing he inflamed the resentments and exacerbated the social pathologies of working-class whites. In a New York Times op-ed published that April, Vance deftly explained the allure of Trump’s antiwar, nationalist message, but he also asserted that “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”
As the campaign season wore on, Vance’s criticisms grew more pointed. “A lot of people think Trump is just the first to appeal to the racism and xenophobia that were already there, but I think he’s making the problem worse,” Vance told TAC that July. In other interviews, Vance described himself as “a Never Trump guy” and said Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
Trump’s unexpected election victory was thus an awkward development for Vance, who plainly harbored political ambitions and was thought, as early as 2017, to be mulling a run for U.S. Senate. No Ohio Republican could have won in the Buckeye State as a sworn enemy of Trump.
Fortunately Vance, despite his humble beginnings, had friends in high places. In 2021, the billionaire Peter Thiel set up a meeting for Vance at Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago. It proved a pivotal encounter. Vance apologized for his past statements and managed to win over the once-and-future president. The next year, Vance was elected senator. And only two years after that, Thiel, Elon Musk, and other tech tycoons convinced Trump to add Vance to the ticket as vice president.
Vance’s rapid evolution from Never Trumper to pro-Trump senator to Trump’s right-hand man has contributed to the impression that he’s more chameleon-like than even your average politician. “When you look… for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions,” wrote the columnist Gerard Baker this April.
To be fair, every Republican politician needs Trump’s support, including the many who initially opposed him. Rubio too had attacked Trump in 2016—and even hit him below the belt, implying the cocky alpha male was less than well endowed. It’s a testament to Trump’s surprising ability to discard grudges that Rubio and Vance not only made it back into his good graces but landed senior positions in his second administration.
Coulter thinks conservatives should follow Trump’s lead and cut Vance some slack. A frequent speaker on college campuses, she says that many young Republicans distrust Vance because of his previous “untoward statements” about Trump. “I give him a break because he had just gotten out of Yale Law School,” Coulter explained. “That’s like getting out of Chinese-style brainwashing. So come on, give that a rest. Obviously he changed his mind.”
That explanation dovetails with the vice president’s own account of his volte-face. “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions,” Vance said in his first TV interview as VP nominee. “I bought into this idea that somehow he was going to be so different, a terrible threat to democracy. It was a joke.” Vance’s narrative is plausible, but his past remarks have created a perpetual need to prove the sincerity of his conversion.
As Vance aligned with Trump politically, his persona likewise mutated, becoming less pensive, more pugilistic. Hillbilly Elegy had been a constructive critique of dysfunctional white communities, not unlike the writings on black culture by Booker Washington and other African-American conservative intellectuals. But Trump wasn’t an ethnographer of downtrodden whites—he was their tribune, and their gladiator. Vance too would need to show some fighting spirit.
In a 2021 interview with Carlson, Vance declared that America was run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” The contemptuous remark sounded very different from the warmly melancholic tone of Vance’s memoir, and certainly lacked its sociological nuance.
As vice president, Vance has often emulated his boss’s never-back-down, always-hit-back-harder rhetorical style. “The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace,” Vance said in January, nearly shouting. He was speaking at a press conference about the killing in Minneapolis of Renée Good, an American woman who had been fatally shot in the face by an immigration officer. “That woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”
Vance’s performance played well with right-wing friends of mine, but independents were appalled by the shooting, and two weeks later, another U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, was shot dead in Minneapolis by ICE officers. The country soured on the admin’s immigration crackdown—of which Vance had made himself the angry face.
Permit me some leeway for speculation: Vance’s newfound fury, however righteous, probably exacerbates his authenticity problem. It doesn’t appear to come naturally and departs from the sort of sentiments expressed in Hillbilly Elegy. “Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me,” Vance readily confides on page two. I don’t recall any such expressions of vulnerability in The Art of the Deal, Trump’s self-help classic.
Vance simply doesn’t seem like the same gracious and thoughtful guy whom America encountered in 2016, back when Americans actually liked him. Sometimes politicians need to “get their mojo back,” but Vance could stand to lose some of his. Of course, he shouldn’t dilute his conservatism or abandon his principles, and he should avoid alienating Trump—the ultimate kingmaker—if possible. But pretending to be more aggressively unlikable than you actually are seems inadvisable, especially now.
American voters have a tendency to tire of presidents’ political styles and swing toward the opposite. Bill Clinton the slick philanderer preceded George W. Bush the Bible-thumping cowboy, who was succeeded by the urbane and professorial Barack Obama, and so on. And polls suggest Americans are growing weary of Trump’s confrontational nature, with only 26 percent considering him “even-tempered.” It’s understandable that Vance saw fit to imitate the most successful politician of our era, but Americans want something new, and the imitation isn’t convincing anyway.
So, whose man is J.D. Vance? As 2028 approaches and voters ponder whether he deserves to be their president, Vance would do very well to become his own man again. At the very least, that sounds less exhausting than trying to please irreconcilable factions on the unruly American right.
Obviously, I’d prefer he please my own faction—America First—rather than megadonors who see the U.S. military as a machine for taking out Israel’s Mideast adversaries. Three airmen from Ohio, Vance’s home state, have been killed in the Iran War, and their lives and sacrifice were infinitely more valuable than campaign cash from the ghastly Miriam Adelson, whom even Trump has suggested loves Israel more than America.
A man who came from nothing, achieved tremendous success, but never forgot his roots is a classic American archetype, and it was Vance’s recognized identity until recently. If Vance helps end the war and finds a way to reclaim his past, he just might become the GOP’s future once again.
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