Conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro has doubts about JD Vance’s ability to inherit the MAGA movement in 2028.
The MAGA ally discussed his bleak vision of the vice president’s political future in an interview with former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on her radio show.
“The idea that J.D. can somehow just pick up the Trump coalition and then carry it across the finish line, that is almost never true in politics,” said the 41-year-old pundit Tuesday.
Shapiro drew comparisons between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, pointing out how both candidates united wide swaths of their respective parties with their larger-than-life personalities. He then argued that, just as Hillary Clinton struggled to maintain the Obama coalition in 2016, Vance, the current heir apparent to take over the GOP after Trump, could struggle to unite the rifts within the conservative party.
“There’s already a battle going on for what comes next after Trump,” said Shapiro. “There’s a conspiratorial wing of the Republican Party that says they actually want to seize away from Trump, his own movement… This is people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker [Carlson], some of these folks. And then you have folks who are sort of more libertarian-minded like Elon [Musk] who are trying to grab control of the movement and move it in that direction.”
Shapiro argued that this sort of infighting, including among wings of Vance’s coalition, could hurt the Ohioan’s chances as a 2028 presidential candidate.
“There are some uneasy seams inside the J.D. Vance coalition between sort of the [Peter] Thiel libertarians and the Tucker isolationists, and kind of big government’s Appalachia types,” said Shapiro.
Vance has recently been under fire from critics within the the Republican Party. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul publicly came out against Vance after he said he “doesn’t give a s—” if critics call the Trump administration blowing up a small Venezuelan boat of alleged drug dealers a “war crime.”
Vance also insulted senators who grilled Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the HHS secretary’s calamitous Senate hearing, saying in an X post that they “support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal ‘therapies’ for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma.” He also called them “full of s—.”
Though Vance was likely referring to Democrats in his tirade, Kennedy faced tough questions from Republican senators, including Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Barrasso.
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