JD Vance’s first 100 days have been a naked pitch for president

NEW YORK – Unless President Donald Trump defies the constitution and seeks a third term as President, there is one man already waiting in the wings to take his place.

Vice President JD Vance is the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, even though there are three years to go until the election.

Vance, 40, a former senator from Ohio, is seen as the ideological standard bearer for the Make America Great Again (Maga) movement. 

Having undergone a transformation from a Trump critic to a Trump evangelist, he is more intellectual but no less committed to Maga than the President.

Vance is applauded by the Maga universe for going toe to toe with liberal journalists and schooling them about the President’s policies.

His star rose further in these circles in February during a meeting in the Oval Office when he asked the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky why he was not more grateful to Trump, prompting the infamous dressing down in front of the cameras.

The same month the Vice President won a straw poll of potential 2028 Republican candidates at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a whopping 61 per cent of the vote.

More recently, he represented the United States on the international stage during a family visit to India, during which he called for closer relations between the two countries during a meeting with the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

He also had a high-profile if brief meeting with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, the day before his death. Vance converted to Roman Catholicism in 2019.

But opinion is split as to whether Vance has the nomination sewn up.

J Miles Coleman is the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a respected political analysis website from the University of Virginia’s Centre for Politics. He told The i Paper that Vance was a “pretty decent bet” as things stood.

Coleman said that Vance won the vice-presidential debate in 2024 by coming across like a “podcast bro”, an image that has earnt him the support of tech tycoons including Peter Thiel.

Coleman said: ‘I think it’s also interesting that part of Vance’s job seems to be writing essays on Twitter/X, defending what the Trump administration is doing – his posts get traction in Maga world, which probably endears him to potential primary voters.”

But Republican strategist Brittany Martinez is not so sure. Asked if Vance had the nomination sewn up, she said: “Absolutely not”.

Martinez pointed to comments from Trump in February saying Vance was not his chosen successor, although she suggests it would be unlikely for the President to forgo so easily three years of intrigue and drama over choosing his successor.

“There’s an old saying that goes something like: ‘Every Senator looks in the mirror and sees a President’, so one can only imagine what a Vice President sees,” Martinez said.

Other potential candidates including the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posed a threat to Vance, Martinez said.

“He’ll have been Vice President and that makes him appear as an automatic front-runner, though it may not be the case in actuality,” Martinez said: “He’ll also be able to tout executive experience that someone like a senator wouldn’t be able to.”

But being so close to Trump may actually prove to be a liability three years down the road.

Martinez said: “If the administration does not deliver for the American people, presidential candidates may not want his [Trump’s] public backing”.

Vance grew up in a working-class family in Ohio where his mother was a drug addict, a story he chronicled in the 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, which was later made into a hit film starring Glenn Close.

Vance’s criticism of Trump has been trenchant in the past and in 2016 he wrote on Facebook: “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like [Richard] Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

But after a stint as a venture capitalist, Vance changed his tune and entered politics with an extraordinary victory: a US Senate seat in Ohio in 2022.

Vance, who is married to Usha, 39, a lawyer and former US Supreme Court clerk with whom he has three children, is thought to have become Vice President in part due to his close relationship with the President’s son Donald Jr.

In February Vance sparked outrage in Europe – and praise from the White House – after lecturing European leaders on a trip to Munich where he told them to end the isolation of far-right parties.

Vance’s distaste for Europe was on full display in messages that were made public during the Signalgate scandal, when a reporter was accidentally added to a high-level app chat between Trump administration officials.

In one message, Vance wrote: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC”.

Martinez noted that Vance had drawn some distance between himself and the President.

The Vice President said that violent 6 January rioters should not have been pardoned but fell in line after anger from Maga supporters.

Some of the President’s aides thought Vance was contradicting Trump’s plan for airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen in messages released as part of Signalgate.

Martinez said this could be a sign that Vance was “staying close” but he “may also be thinking strategically about paving a pathway for himself”.

Coleman said Vance lacked Trump’s charisma and would face some pushback from the President’s hardcore supporters given his U-turn to support him.

He said: “There’s probably a nativist faction of Maga that doesn’t trust him, or at least would be a little hesitant to back him. This could be, fairly or not, because of his Indian family,” referring to Vance’s wife, who is of Indian heritage.

Coleman said: “There’s also the fact that when he was on the ballot himself, he did not do especially well. He won his Senate seat by six points in 2022 as other statewide Republicans in Ohio were winning by 20 or more.”

Publicly Vance is not saying much and in an interview in May, demurred when asked about a possible presidential run.

“I really am just not focused on [presidential] politics”, he said.

One Trump world source said that Vance was playing a careful game of not upstaging his boss but doing enough to stay in the headlines.

“For now JD is staying loyal to the President,” the source said. “He knows that there is one thing Donald Trump values above anything else: loyalty.”