JD Vance and the future of MAGA

Vice President JD Vance speaks during a press conference outside the West Wing of the White House on October 30, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images

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........

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