J.D.’s Dilemma

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Without Donald Trump’s backing, J. D. Vance was a wealthy man and a best-selling author, but he wanted more. With Trump’s backing, Vance wagered, he might become president. For a while, that looked like a good bet: Trump helped Vance overcome an underwhelming campaign to become a senator from Ohio, then chose him as a running mate in 2024. Trump treated him as his heir apparent, and Vance’s most obvious rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said he wouldn’t run in 2028 if the veep did.

Vance’s gamble is looking shakier now. In a 60 Minutes interview this weekend, Trump said he might not endorse anyone in the coming GOP primary. “I may or may not get involved,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m better off not getting involved.” No one, not even Trump, can say whether he’ll really stay out of it, but he famously enjoys pitting his aides and employees against one another, which a withheld endorsement might achieve. Besides, Trump is at a political low after the midterms, and forcing would-be successors to compete for his favor is one way he can still exert control.

Then again—Trump is at a political low. Would his endorsement be much of a prize for Vance, or anyone else? This is the bind that any aspiring Republican presidential candidate will confront ahead of 2028: They need Trump’s support, or at least can’t afford his animosity, because even in his weakened state, his base remains loyal and potentially decisive in a primary. But as the GOP’s disastrous results this month show, being seen as too close to Trump can also be a major liability.

You can watch Vance attempting to navigate this trap in recent days. In a lengthy postelection analysis on X, the vice president—a reported skeptic of the war in Iran—pinned the blame for poor Republican performance on the war. This had the advantage of distracting from all the other unpopular parts of the MAGA platform that Vance does support, but it also looks a lot like either a criticism of Trump or an attempt to nudge him into an anti-war position—risky either way.

Yesterday, Trump announced that he was pulling Vance off his duty of negotiating with Iran, assigning him instead “to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S.” (How this is different from Vance’s previous detail as “fraud czar” is not totally clear—though given Democratic gains at the state level this month, the remit has certainly widened.) Trump added that “we don’t need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed.”

The new assignment is a Rorschach test. Is it a punishment for Vance for getting out of line on Iran? (The vice president was also reportedly considering new direct talks with Iran when Trump made the change.) Is Trump giving Vance a thankless, amorphous task that will further alienate domestic audiences who have already turned against the White House? Or is Trump helping Vance by pulling him off a dead-end role and allowing him to create some distance from the Iran debacle? (Trump could also just be acting impulsively.) Vice presidents tend to get stuck with these types of vague, impossible tasks, which later become electoral baggage. It was one of Kamala Harris’s big challenges in 2024.

But Vance and Harris share a larger disadvantage. “There basically isn’t any good example since presidential approval ratings began of the VP to an unpopular president later being elected president himself,” Nate Silver notes. Maybe that’s one reason, according to a CNN report today, “Vance has given serious consideration to not running for president in 2028 after last week’s calamitous midterm elections.” The article cites conversations with “roughly a dozen allies and advisers.” Yet The Washington Post also reports today that Vance is “still more likely to run for president than not,” a conclusion based on conversations with—you guessed it—“more than a dozen people with a view into the vice president’s orbit.”

Although Vance has consistently led 2028-primary polls at this early stage, a Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found Rubio slightly ahead of him. One poll is just one poll, and I’ve written that Rubio will have the same can’t-win-with-Trump, can’t-win-without-him dynamic that Vance does, especially because he’s the secretary of state and national security adviser during the Iran war. (There’s also the matter of him using taxpayer money to fly military jets to watch his son’s football team, as my colleague Sally Jenkins writes today.) But the result does suggest Vance’s vulnerability.

With the nomination looking more available, other Republicans are also suddenly making themselves visible. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis offered some sharp statements about the direction of the GOP after the midterms, evidently positioning himself as an alternative. But the 2024 Republican primary showed DeSantis’s limits as a campaigner—and the difficulty he faced in trying to be both an inheritor and alternative to Trumpism. Former Vice President Pence is interested too; a Pence campaign would test whether a Republican can win with the rare combination of being both tainted by association with Trump and also detested by him. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy apparently wants to see whether a candidate can succeed on the basis of folksy aphorisms delivered in an exaggerated drawl.

On Kalshi, the prediction market, traders still see Vance as the most likely nominee, but they have John McEntee as fourth. McEntee is no household name; he was a personal aide to Trump in his first term but was pushed out over alleged problem gambling, and since then has become a TikTok influencer and the founder of a right-wing dating site. Whether McEntee’s place in the market is more an indictment of Kalshi’s usefulness or the 2028 Republican presidential bench is difficult to say.

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Today’s News

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed the Commerce Department for failing to blacklist Megaspeed, a Singaporean company under investigation for allegedly smuggling Nvidia chips into China. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned over a series of revelations about extramarital affairs, including one with a woman who led Megaspeed and is linked to Chinese intelligence.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland announced last night that he will challenge Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader, calling for new leadership after Democrats’ midterm victories. Van Hollen said that more than 10 senators have pledged their support, while Schumer said he has enough votes to retain the position in a December leadership election.
Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican, narrowly lost her reelection bid in Colorado to the Democrat Eileen Laubacher, a retired Navy rear admiral, according to the Associated Press.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Boris Kachka on the writers who tried to reconstruct the past.

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Evening Read

A man longingly looking at a character on a phone. — Illustration by Mojo Wang

The People Working to Keep Their AI Partners Alive

By Victoria Turk

Whenever AI companies release new models, die-hard users tend to greet the updates with a wave of grumbling about changes to how a model responds to prompts, how it integrates into their workflow, or, simply, the way it speaks. Most people soon get used to the latest release, ready to gripe again when the next one comes along. But for one niche group of particularly fervent AI users, model updates represent a much more alarming proposition.

These are people who have developed what they consider to be intimate relationships with AI products. For them, AI has become a companion—a kind of friend, partner, or even lover—and any change to the underlying model poses something akin to an existential threat.

Read the full article.