WASHINGTON – In recent conversations with aides and allies, US President Donald Trump often interjects with a question about his vice-president: Does J.D. Vance have what it takes to go all the way?
He usually answers his own question: He’s not so sure.
It is not that Trump is abandoning Vance.
He involves him in major decisions, has given him high-profile opportunities to position himself for 2028 and trusts the 41-year-old vice-president to wage partisan warfare on his behalf.
In a Cabinet meeting this past week, Trump compared Vance to Eliot Ness, the mob-busting federal agent, for working to ferret out fraud in mostly Democratic-controlled states.
Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance.
Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.
But when it comes to Vance, the stakes are higher.
As the default front-runner for the Republican nomination and would-be inheritor of the president’s political movement, Vance’s fortunes ride to a substantial degree on the enthusiasm of the support he gets from Trump.
And Trump’s regular polling of people on whether they prefer Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become one of the most closely watched early indicators of how power in the Republican Party might pass to the next generation.
When he conducts those polls in private, Trump often compares Vance’s performance to his own achievements.
He has told several allies that Vance has never won a tough race without his help. (Trump’s endorsement got Vance over the finish line in a tight race for an Ohio Senate seat.)
He has brought up the number of vacations Vance has taken as vice-president. (Trump does not generally take them.)
He has repeatedly mentioned the vice-president’s initial opposition to starting a war with Iran and has done so in front of Vance. (“I’m more of a peace person than you are – but I had to do it,” he has said to him.)
The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war.
Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Vance might not look the part.
He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn. (Trump has said he is happy it wasn’t him.)
This account of Trump’s relationship with his vice-president is based on interviews with more than a dozen people who are directly familiar with the dynamic between the two men.
Some of them were granted anonymity to speak about Trump’s thinking.
“Vice-President Vance has done a remarkable job of helping implement the president’s America First agenda,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement.
“There has been no vice-president in history who has been more empowered, and that is a reflection of the strong trust and relationship between the two. Any false media narratives from unknown and unnamed sources fabricating stories clearly do not have any knowledge of the truth.”
Through it all, Vance has exhibited the one quality that Trump most prizes: loyalty.
He has put aside his reservations about the war to back the president’s handling of the conflict and carried out the traditional No. 2 attack-dog role against Trump’s critics, even Pope Leo XIV.
He remains a popular figure among Trump’s MAGA base.
Tony Fabrizio, a longtime pollster for Trump, said the president chose Vance as a running mate in 2024 because he appeals to those voters.
In an interview, Fabrizio said that the president saw Vance as “a MAGA warrior who would go out every day and fight for the things the president wanted.”
Fabrizio added: “He knew that, and that was exactly what he got.”
Even so, Trump has continued to needle Vance on matters of substance and style, from criticising his shoes to ribbing him for his tendency to interject in conversations.
In November, the president wondered aloud why Vance was not more subservient, like the officials who work for Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“Why don’t you behave like that?” Trump asked Vance during a breakfast for Republican senators. “JD doesn’t behave like that! JD butts into conversations! I want to have that for at least a couple of days. OK, JD?”
People close to the president say that Vance is in Trump’s good graces.
“My father always brings up how JD is a savage and annihilates the fake news, like the made-up narrative of this story,” Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest son, said in a statement relayed through his spokesperson. “Interviews, rallies, podcasts – he shows up and performs, and that’s what my father cares about.”
To win the 2028 nomination, Vance must stay in good standing with Trump and reassure a Republican Party that has been molded in the president’s image but fractured by his choices.
So far, like most vice-residents, Vance has prioritised his relationship with the president.
Despite his misgivings about the war with Iran, he has loyally defended Trump’s decision to start the conflict.
And he has backed another politically fraught action, the creation of a US$1.8 billion (S$2.3 billion) fund to compensate victims of what the administration contends is political persecution.
Compounded by Trump’s recent retribution efforts against Republican lawmakers, that fund has sent Republicans into open revolt.
For Vance, whose political rise rested in part on his criticism of excessive US intervention abroad, the war in Iran has left him balancing his loyalty to Trump against the anti-war sentiments of much of his political base.
As Vance works to shore up Trump’s policies, the president has pondered his vice-president’s future.
Last summer, Trump said Vance was “most likely” to be his political heir apparent: “In all fairness, he’s the vice-president,” Trump told reporters in August, adding that he thought Rubio could eventually be added to a presidential ticket but that it was “too early, obviously, to talk about it.”
Since that interview, Trump has praised Rubio and has told people close to him how impressed he is with the job Rubio is doing.
Rubio spends more time with Trump than Vance does, as is typical of a national security adviser.
Rubio frequently travels with Trump on Air Force One, and they have bonded over weekends in Florida.
Vance, by nature of being vice-president, does not travel on the same plane as Trump.
At a dinner in the Rose Garden earlier in May, Trump quizzed his guests about who would be the better choice: “Who likes J.D. Vance?” “Who likes Marco Rubio?” He made it clear that he was not endorsing either man.
In an interview with Fortune in the Oval Office in May, the president was asked, again, about who was best positioned to carry on his legacy.
“Whoever gets this is going to be very important,” the president said. “And if you get the wrong person: disaster.”
During that interview, Vance was watching from the back of the room as Trump answered.
Vance is one of the most recognisable figures in US politics other than Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
One of his advantages as vice-president is that he serves as finance chair of the Republican National Committee, with direct access to donors.
Allies of Trump and Vance say that the vice-president is still best positioned to be Trump’s successor.
Despite widespread concern over affordability and the cost of the war in Iran, Trump remains popular with Republican voters.
According to a recently published Quinnipiac poll, some 73 per cent of Republican voters still widely approve of the job Trump is doing.
According to a poll released by Pew in February, 75 per cent of Republican voters view Vance favourably.
They are both broadly unpopular, however.
The president’s overall approval rating has sunk to a second-term low.
According to Quinnipiac, Vance is similarly unpopular, with 39 per cent of voters approving of the job he is doing.
Recently, Vance has faced criticism among conservatives for his support for the war in Iran, and for engaging with Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo for speaking out against the war.
Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at age 35, advised the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to stick to religion.
Vance’s allies say that he is doing the work that would be most helpful to Trump by travelling the world on diplomatic missions and crisscrossing the country to bolster Trump’s domestic agenda.
They say he is not worrying about netting political wins.
On the international stage, Vance campaigned for a hard-right overseas ally, Viktor Orban.
Orban went on to lose his race to be reelected prime minister of Hungary.
Trump’s advisers say he expected that outcome, but the president wanted to help an ally who had stood by him in the years he spent as a political pariah.
A major test of Vance’s domestic political sway came last summer, when he was asked by the White House political operation to visit the Indiana Statehouse to encourage Republicans to vote to redraw the state’s electoral maps.
In the end, lawmakers declined to redraw the maps, and Trump waged a mostly successful retribution campaign to unseat those who defied his wishes.
Local officials believe that Trump’s attacks have done long-term damage to the Republican Party and that Vance has a perilous path ahead of him if he decides to run for the presidency.
“He came up empty in Indiana the same way that he came up empty in Hungary,” state representative Ed Clere, a nine-term Republican from southern Indiana who voted against redistricting, said of Vance.
Clere, who said he will run for mayor of New Albany, Indiana, as an independent when his term ends, added that the vice-president’s involvement in the redistricting fight “should be a wake-up call for anyone who thinks Trump will be able to pass the MAGA torch to Vance, or anyone else.”
James Blair, one of Trump’s top political advisers, said that Vance was willing to try to persuade Indiana Republicans even if it meant coming away with nothing.
“The vice-president was willing to take on the fight in Indiana because he’s not afraid to do what needs doing, even if it’s an uphill battle,” he said in a statement.
“The vice-president takes on some of the toughest tasks and keeps at it until the job is done.” NYTIMES
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
