After a successful 2024 election, Vice President JD Vance came into the White House ready to shake things up, support President Donald Trump at all costs, and post whatever he wanted online.
But what does Vance — the former “never Trump” conservative who has maneuvered, at least for now, into the position of MAGA heir apparent — really want the country to look like? And with a potentially difficult midterm season approaching, will the vice president begin to distance himself from Trump?
Host Noel King spoke with Ian Ward, a reporter at Politico, who covers conservatives and the American right. They discussed the highs and lows of Vance’s first year and what it tells us about what the Republican party could look like after the Trump administration.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
From late 2024 onward, you see memes of Vance: huge head, dancing, little boy hat, lollipop. It starts as a way to mock the VP. But he doesn’t treat it like that. What does he do instead?
He’s embraced it. One notable example: there’s this famous meme of the vice president, overweight with long curly hair and big bulging eyes, that started circulating around the election. And for Halloween this year, Vance dressed up as that meme and took a picture with big bulgy eyes and posted it online.
He’s part of the millennial generation that grew up at the peak era of online blogging and sort of early social media. I think he understands really innately that conservative politics are flowing upwards from the internet at this point. So by engaging with some of those memes, he’s signaling that he’s in the engine room of the right and that he gets it in a way that an older generation of politicians didn’t.
He comes into office January 20. What do some of his early wins look like?
He was deputized very early on to shepherd some of Trump’s more controversial nominees through the Senate —people like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., or Tulsi Gabbard. So that was a big win for him.
“I think everyone understands that he’s the heir apparent and that it’s his nomination to lose in 2028.”
A second one was his trip to Europe. He gave two very notable speeches there, one at the Munich Security Conference where he basically torpedoed 50 years of transatlantic collaboration, and one in Paris where he laid out the administration’s view on AI. And those both showed that he was willing to enter into these spaces and disrupt a status quo that in his mind wasn’t working.
In February, President Trump met Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. Might have been not a big story, but it became a big story in part because of the role that JD Vance played. Remind us what happened.
Zelenskyy was in town to finalize a critical-mineral deal. The meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelenskyy and Vance and a couple other Cabinet members very quickly devolved into Trump and Vance berating Zelenskyy. Vance has an idea that Europe has benefited tremendously from the international order governed by American military and economic hegemony.
At the same time, I think he thinks that that international order has harmed the type of working-class blue-collar American that he grew up with in Ohio. These are the people who actually fight the wars. They’re the people who’ve borne the brunt of the de-industrialization that’s accompanied economic globalization.
So I think, in his mind, Europe — and Ukraine by extension — are sort of freeloaders who are leeching off working-class Americans and not thanking them for it
And then in June, we have this “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, and JD Vance defends Trump when he drops the bunker buster bomb. How does Vance navigate his clear and obvious disdain for foreign wars with President Trump?
All signs indicate that behind the scenes he was advocating against direct US intervention in that conflict. But once it became apparent that Trump was going to intervene, Vance publicly fell in line. After the strikes in Iran, Vance articulated what he called the “Trump Doctrine” to justify these strikes.
It all goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, about him as not just a defender but a kind of explainer and justifier. It’s not really sufficient in his mind to defend these things; he wants to offer a kind of intellectual rationalization or justification for them.
In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. What was Vance’s relationship with Charlie Kirk, and what did you see him doing in the aftermath of the killing?
Kirk and Vance were very close. Some reporting came out after Kirk’s death that Kirk was actually one of the first conservatives to identify Vance as a rising star, that he eventually introduced him to Donald Trump Jr.’s team and vouched for him as a legitimate convert to the MAGA movement.
He hosted Charlie Kirk’s show a couple days after his death, sitting behind his desk in the old Executive Office Building, delivering a straight-to-camera monologue with an American flag behind him. It looked extremely presidential. He sort of led the charge in positioning Kirk’s death as a consequence of rising political violence on the left, which he said is a much larger issue than right-wing political violence.
In October, some messages from a Young Republican group chat were leaked and there was lots of racism. There was open antisemitism. JD Vance involved himself in that story. How so?
He downplayed the nature of those statements. More broadly, there’s a sense on the right that, for the past five or 10 years, Republicans have sort of laid down and let what they call “cancel culture” take over. Vance and others are trying to effectuate a kind of broader cultural shift where they’re going to say, No matter how offensive a comment was, we’re not going to give up one of our own, and we fight back against our enemies and our perceived enemies in the media.
Does that extend to the next skirmish? Because a few weeks later, Tucker Carlson interviews Nazi-curious Nick Fuentes and doesn’t ask him any hard questions.
Yeah, he stayed sort of conspicuously quiet in that whole controversy.
At the same time, he is doing some coalitional management here. I think he rightly recognizes that Fuentes, despite his very odious views, has a very real and very mobilized following of young men that MAGA desperately needs to keep in its electoral coalition. He’s called Fuentes some names, but he’s made no real effort to actually banish him from the conservative coalition.
What role do you think the vice president is going to play in the midterms?
I think you’ll see him out on the trail selling some of these economic accomplishments. Definitely talking a lot about immigration. I think immigration is at this point really the issue that’s holding the otherwise somewhat fractious MAGA coalition together.
And I think they will run, very prominently, on the very precipitous drop in illegal border crossings. And also whatever progress they’ve made on the mass deportations, despite the controversy that’s kicked up.
What has JD Vance said about whether or not he plans to run for president in 2028?
The decorum, of course, is not to talk about your presidential ambitions until you’re actually a candidate for president. Vance clearly understands that and has said it’s not my focus right now and denied that he’s angling for it. But I think everyone understands that he’s the heir apparent and that it’s his nomination to lose in 2028.
Do people like JD Vance?
The polling is not very good on this, so it’s hard to peer into the electorate.
I think a lot these days about the sociologist Max Weber, actually, who wrote about the “structure of charismatic movements” and the way that charismatic leaders end up anointing successors. The process of anointment matters a lot for whether the charisma rubs off on a successor. I think a lot of that question hinges on how exactly Vance ends up securing the nomination.
Is it an endorsement from Trump? Does Trump throw it open to a factional fight in which someone like a Vance and someone like a Rubio and Ted Cruz have to duke it out, where some of the dirty laundry coalitionally is aired out? Then it’s a much harder task for Vance to consolidate the MAGA base behind him.
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