Online, overseas and in the halls of the White House, Vice President JD Vance has taken on a far more visible role in recent weeks.
He flew to Israel to help keep the U.S.-brokered cease-fire deal with Hamas on track. He has been President Trump’s attack dog on redistricting and the government shutdown, trolling Democrats on social media and from the White House. And when critics of the administration’s foreign policy called U.S. strikes in the waters off Venezuela a war crime, Mr. Vance shot back on X: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
To Mr. Vance’s allies, the 41-year-old vice president is showing off the ability to defend his boss on various platforms and to different audiences as the heir apparent to the political movement led by Mr. Trump, who is 79.
But in the process, Mr. Vance has shifted his positions and defended or promoted views he once opposed, even as recently as the 2024 presidential campaign. On issues like foreign entanglements, free speech and the Jeffrey Epstein files, Mr. Vance has had to backtrack on or simply ignore a string of flip-flops.
Mr. Vance is certainly not the first politician to change his positions or evolve in his thinking, and doing so is something of a job requirement as the second-in-command to Mr. Trump, whose positions often morph over a period of days.
But as Mr. Vance looks to a possible presidential run in 2028, his seemingly mutable positions could test his appeal as the face of his party for the next generation.
Some of his shifts have already risked putting him at odds with members of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base who liked his original defenses of military restraint and free speech. They have also helped focus new attention on a question that has hung over him during his rise from author who disparaged Mr. Trump as “America’s Hitler” to the Senate to No. 2 in the White House: What does JD Vance believe?
“Is this a conversion, a political conversion, or is this something of a political convenience?” said Matthew Bartlett, a G.O.P. strategist and former State Department official under Mr. Trump. “In politics today, authenticity reigns supreme.”
Brendan Buck, a former adviser to two Republican House speakers, said it was well documented that Mr. Vance had “a much more nuanced view of the world” in the past. “But people want a fighter right now, and that’s what he’s offering,” he said.
“He accomplishes two things at once by being the president’s chief promoter and defender,” Mr. Buck added. “He is helping the president in the short term, but also demonstrating to the base that he can own the libs, he can fight the woke on the left.”
That strategy was “clearly what people — or a large share of the party — are looking for,” Mr. Buck said.
Pivoting on a Dime
Earlier this year, Mr. Vance declared that the Trump administration was entering a new phase of military restraint.
“No more undefined missions. No more open-ended conflicts,” he told a graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Mr. Vance is now backing the bombing campaign against alleged drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela, and what Mr. Trump has made clear could be strikes on Venezuelan territory, despite the president’s not seeking congressional authorization thus far.
“Our main focus is obviously to blow up these boats that have narcotics on them,” Mr. Vance said on Sunday, referring to military strikes in the Caribbean.
The Trump administration has described the strikes as a counterdrug mission, but U.S. officials privately concede they are part of a larger drive to oust Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. It is the kind of broad operation, with no fixed timeline, that Mr. Vance has opposed in the past.
It was just one in a string of shifts for Mr. Vance, who was already known for one of the most dramatic reversals in American politics, transforming from a self-proclaimed Never Trumper into Mr. Trump’s second in command.
Mr. Vance’s office declined to make him available for an interview. White House officials insist that he has been consistent in his views, and argue that the military operation in the Caribbean is meant to prevent an overdose crisis in the United States. Mr. Vance only draws the line at speech that encourages violence, they say.
Like all vice presidents, Mr. Vance is called on to keep his public views in line with the president’s. But doing so has sometimes meant pivoting on a dime.
He warned repeatedly during the presidential campaign against the United States’ becoming involved in overseas entanglements, only to defend Mr. Trump’s decision to bomb Iran over the summer. That led to an uproar on the right among those who believed Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance had been committed to steering the nation out of, not into, foreign conflicts.
During the presidential campaign, he also called for the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released, only to backtrack when Mr. Trump decided not to do so, causing another round of blowback inside the president’s base.
And when a Signal chat that was inadvertently shared with the editor of The Atlantic showed that Mr. Vance privately disagreed with Mr. Trump over the timing of a military strike in Yemen, his office went into damage-control mode, saying the president and vice president were “in complete agreement.”
Mr. Bartlett, the Republican strategist, said that Mr. Vance’s shifting positions spoke to a range of viewpoints held by the Republican base he will need to court in earnest as he looks to the future, as well as Mr. Trump’s tendency to alter his stances.
“MAGA is not necessarily a fully defined set of ideas,” Mr. Bartlett said. “MAGA is where the president is at the moment. And it has worked incredibly well for the president at the moment. MAGA is Trump. So how do you pass the torch on that?”
Mr. Vance spent much of the campaign casting conservatives, and Mr. Trump in particular, as victims of censorship. In February, he told a European audience that the biggest security threat they faced was their own suppression of the speech of far-right party members.
He called for the reinstatement of Marko Elez, a Department of Government Efficiency staff member who had resigned after being linked to racist posts he made under a pseudonym. “I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts,” Mr. Vance said on X, “but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.”
He recently brushed off a trove of racist and homophobic text messages from a Young Republicans group chat, in which members of the group joked about rape and Hitler, and referred to Black people as monkeys. Mr. Vance said the messages were comparable to “anything said in a college group chat.” (The Young Republican National Federation is a political organization with thousands of G.O.P. members across the country between the ages of 18 and 40.)
But Mr. Vance took a far harder line on speech last month, following the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, a close friend. Mr. Vance hosted Mr. Kirk’s podcast and signaled a broad crackdown against left-leaning organizations and those who criticized Mr. Kirk.
Mr. Vance called on people to name and shame those seen to be “celebrating” Mr. Kirk’s death. “Hell, call their employer,” he said.
“I think where I draw the line is encouraging violence against political opponents,” Mr. Vance told NBC in May.
But the crackdown Mr. Vance called for after Mr. Kirk’s death went far beyond punishments for encouraging violence. Instead, he and Mr. Trump made general, unsubstantiated claims about left-wing groups to justify a clampdown on dissent more broadly.
On Message and on the Attack
Nine months into his vice presidency, Mr. Vance has juggled two seemingly competing identities. The same man who has called for “civility” in public discourse regularly attacks Mr. Trump’s opponents in combative and vulgar ways, particularly online.
Mr. Vance has posted on X more than 400 times since he was sworn into office in January, more than double the number of posts issued by his predecessor, Kamala Harris, during her first nine months in office.
He is known to swear and use coarse language in his posts, which is unusual for a vice president.
When asked about his rhetoric, Mr. Vance typically dismisses concerns as “pearl clutching” or an inability to take a joke. In July, he resurfaced a meme Mr. Trump had originally posted showing former President Barack Obama in O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco being chased by police cars driven by Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance, adding a laughing emoji.
At a White House briefing earlier this month, he was pressed on an A.I.-generated video the president had posted on social media showing Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wearing a fake mustache and sombrero.
Mr. Jeffries and others said the video was racist and bigoted; the meme was meant to suggest that Democrats want to provide free health care to undocumented immigrants — the crux of a misleading argument that helped lead to the government shutdown.
“I think it’s funny,” Mr. Vance said. “The president’s joking, and we’re having a good time.”
Joel K. Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who has studied the history of the vice presidency, said Mr. Vance could eventually regret rhetoric that has become harsher than “any of the other vice presidents in modern times.”
“He’s defending the administration. He’s presenting himself to Republican voters who will be choosing sides for 2028. It may serve his purposes at least in those contexts,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Whether people perceive him as somebody who they view as presidential is another question.”
Mr. Vance has said these dueling personas simply reflect modern life. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine last year, he said: “Well, isn’t that how most people are? Sometimes they’re frustrated with what’s going on in the country, sometimes a little bit more optimistic. Sometimes it’s both, right?”
During the campaign, he compared himself to his grandmother, who raised him in a working-class town in Ohio as his mother struggled with drug addiction.
“Mamaw was in so many ways a woman of contradictions,” he said at the Republican National Convention in July of last year. “She loved the Lord, ladies and gentleman. She was a woman of very deep Christian faith. But she also loved the F-word. I’m not kidding. She could make a sailor blush.”
Mr. Vance does not appear to be paying a political price for his political flip-flops.
As with Mr. Trump, views of Mr. Vance are mostly locked in by party. A vast majority of Republicans view him favorably, and a vast majority of Democrats view him unfavorably.
During a speech last month at a Howell, Mich., factory meant to focus on Mr. Trump’s domestic policy legislation, Mr. Vance received loud applause from the crowd of Trump supporters when he warned about “crazy left-wing radicals.”
“He seems to be one of us,” said Jason Woolford, a Michigan state representative and Trump ally who attended the speech.
Mr. Trump has been elusive when asked about his possible successor, though he said in August that Mr. Vance would probably succeed him as the leader of the MAGA movement.
“I think most likely, in all fairness. He’s the vice president,” said Mr. Trump, who has occasionally mused about running for a third term in 2028, even though the Constitution does not allow it.
So far, it has been his strongest public endorsement of Mr. Vance’s political future.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Dylan Freedman is a machine-learning engineer and journalist working on a team at The Times that leverages A.I. for reporting.
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