J.D. Vance Is Having Kamala Harris Problems |
The day before Joe Kent resigned from the Trump administration as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, declaring he could not in “good conscience” support the war in Iran, he reportedly met with Vice-President J.D. Vance. Vance and Kent had been allies in the MAGA realm, representing the isolationist, war-skeptical faction that seemed ascendant in Trump’s 2024 campaign. Kent presented his resignation letter to Vance, and the vice-president told him to check with Donald Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
Though much of the recent media focus has been on Kent and Tulsi Gabbard, the onetime isolationist turned hawkish director of national intelligence, it is Vance who will ultimately have to wrangle with the political fallout of Trump’s decision to attack Iran. Assuming Trump does not illegally seek a third term, all early polling — as well as history and conventional wisdom — suggests it will be Vance accepting the nomination two and a half years from now. On Wednesday, he held a campaign-style event in Michigan to try to sell Trump’s domestic agenda even as inflation spikes upward and gas prices surge as a result of the war. It is an incredibly awkward moment for Vance, who was supposed to be the star of the Republican Party and Trump’s heir apparent. To ensure he remains in the good graces of the base voters who will back Trump no matter what, he must now publicly support a war he has opposed in the past. (The base, for now, is all in on Iran.) It means defending a military entanglement that the median voter, beyond MAGA, seemingly does not want.
Even before the Iran attack, Vance’s path to the nomination was growing more complicated. A number of Republican donors reportedly began a “draft Rubio” movement. Trump has notably declined to outright endorse Vance for 2028 or downplay chatter around Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He now heaps praise on Rubio, which is ironic for those who remember how he humiliated him in 2016. A decade later, the former Florida senator is arguably, along with Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful members of the administration. He has emerged as the central foreign-policy voice, overseeing the toppling of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the bombing of Iran. Trump’s move to starve and cripple Cuba appears to be another Rubio project.
But opposition to these wars and various military interventions will probably only swell as more troops die and gas prices skyrocket. It is unlikely any of these violent conflicts will aid the eventual GOP nominee in 2028 the way the war in Iraq was able to buoy George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection bid. Absent a mass-casualty terrorist attack on American soil, the foreign-policy hawks, including Rubio, are going to have a hard time winning contested general elections.
That stubborn Republican support of the Trump agenda, even the wars, is nonetheless making life very complicated for Vance, who until recently decried the idea of bombing Iran and jeered neoconservatives the way a progressive Democrat might. Trump’s decision to follow hawks like Rubio is a decisive defeat for Vance’s faction. Publicly, he has been muted about the war in Iran and has not had much to do with the Trump agenda otherwise.
Vance, in some ways, finds himself in the same predicament as Kamala Harris, an heir apparent who was iced out of vital decision-making and does not have an obvious lane for himself. To the Republican base, he looks weak. He does not appear to be the guy in the room where the big decisions are made.
Harris lost the election in 2024 both because she could not separate herself from Biden and because she had been so ancillary to the administration’s policy achievements. It was a curious double bind, made harder because she did not even get to compete in any primaries. Vance will be going state to state, but he will be burdened, like Harris, with an outgoing president who is disliked by a majority of Americans — and a general sense that he has been sidelined.
Like Harris, Vance is the product of circumstance, the lucky winner in the 2024 veepstakes. He did very little, electorally, to get himself so close to the summit. Vance gained fame for writing a middling memoir, spent several years as a Trump explainer to confused coastal liberals, then embraced MAGA when he began to understand that only pro-Trump Republicans get elected in the state of Ohio. He won a contested Republican primary because he was able to charm Donald Trump Jr. and secure an endorsement from his father. In the general election, he ran behind the Republican governor Mike DeWine. Two years later, he was on Trump’s presidential ticket. He turned in a strong debate performance against Tim Walz, but that campaign was mostly about the top-of-ticket candidates and voter anxieties over inflation and immigration.
The greater question for Vance, in the short term, is what he does next in the administration. His recent campaign to root out fraud is the definition of a side quest, busywork as Rubio and Miller perform the true dirty deeds of the White House. Vance can make plenty of trouble for Democratic governors, and maybe, for now, with his boss conducting a dangerous war in the Middle East that he cannot speak frankly about, that’s enough for him.
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