It was a bad 72 hours for JD Vance, 2028 presidential candidate.
More than ever before, the winds seem to be shifting against the White House in which Vance serves as No. 2 at a time when his political star should be rising. Republicans are facing down a brutal midterm season, with a handful of Senate race ratings shifting in Democrats’ favor this week and the possibility of Republicans losing both chambers growing by the day.
His boss, Donald Trump, seems more erratic than ever as he tries to find a “mission accomplished” banner to drape over his war with Iran, although the U.S. is approaching the end of the second month of war without a means to forcibly secure its objectives, nor an agreement to achieve those means diplomatically.
Vance, the presumed successor to Trump, is already being eyed for his sturdiness as a presidential candidate. It’s a tough sell for a political consultant: Vance, a political novice, has still been in government for less than the duration of one U.S. Senate term, the office he was originally selected for before being plucked into the Trump campaign by the president and his son, Donald Trump Jr. Were it not for Trump, Vance’s political stardom may have never happened. The Hillbilly Elegy author was running in the relative minor leagues of the Ohio Republican Senate primary in 2022 before winning Trump’s endorsement that year.
Now, as vice president, Vance remains in Trump’s shadow (albeit to a lesser degree than Kamala Harris during her own time as Joe Biden’s veep). He emerged this past weekend to tackle a tough challenge for the president: Trump, the dealmaker, sent Vance in his place to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet face to face with Iranian negotiators and find an end to a two-month-long conflict that is now tearing the younger part of the MAGA coalition apart at the seams.
He failed. Vance, after a marathon negotiation session, could only point to the discussions themselves as a positive development as he slinked back to Washington without an agreement to either open the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway, or deal with Iran’s nuclear program.
“The bad news is, we have not reached an agreement,” Vance told reporters. “They have chosen not to accept our terms. The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that they will not seek a nuclear weapon and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon.”
Once again, in an administration that has repeatedly touted its peacemaking efforts, the White House has come up short of the biggest prize.
That wasn’t the only body blow suffered by Vance’s presidential ambitions this weekend. On Sunday, the longtime White House ally Viktor Orban lost re-election in Hungary, dealing a casualty to the global far-right alliance envisioned by the likes of Steve Bannon and the MAGAworld culture-war obsessives who often find a champion in Vance, who is willing to genuinely espouse the Christian nationalist doctrine that Trump often finds hard to pass off as convincing rhetoric.
Orban’s defeat was particularly embarrassing for Vance, who traveled to Hungary late last week in a bid to save Orban’s campaign with some of that exact rhetoric: “Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers?”
His appeal to heaven unsuccessful and his bid to follow in Trump’s faux peacemaker footsteps in Iran also coming up short, the vice president returned home to D.C. on Sunday to face a different kind of holy war.
The nation’s second Catholic vice president woke up (jet-lagged, no doubt) on Monday morning to see Trump fire off a fresh round of attacks at the Pope on Monday, following rare criticism of the White House from the first American head of the Catholic Church.
In a moment that exemplified the surreal nature of this White House, Trump stood next to the “DoorDash Grandma” at the door of the Oval Office, accepting two bulging bags of McDonald’s delivery, before once again accusing the Pope of being “weak on crime” and – unrelatedly – denying that he meant to portray himself as Jesus Christ after posting an image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media.
Vance’s only contribution to this discourse so far was to seemingly dismiss a report that the administration summoned a Vatican ambassador to the Pentagon for a tense meeting after Pope Leo issued criticism of the war in Iran. The nation’s highest-ranking Catholic in the federal government seemed briefly unaware of who the Holy See’s chief diplomat to the U.S. was.
With the Trump 2.0 era less than half over and the post-midterms world presenting a whole new canvass for Trump’s vice president to shine in the spotlight, it’s hardly time to write the obituary of JD’s future political ambitions. But this weekend did not help matters at all, and Vance may have missed his best opportunity to get his boss publicly out of a jam — while simultaneously earning the praise of Americans who by and large do not support the White House resuming its war.
