Jack Butler writes for National Review Online about political challenges the vice president faces in Donald Trump’s administration.
No person has a better chance of being president in 2029 — extrapolating from current trends, all things being equal, etc. — than does Vice President JD Vance. In all early polling of the 2028 Republican presidential primary, Vance is a near-prohibitive front-runner. Democrats are still broadly unpopular and lack a serious standard-bearer, much less an agreed-upon and viable presidential candidate. These facts alone argue strongly in favor of the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
American politics, however, is unpredictable. It may seem hard to accept now, a little more than a decade after Trump launched his campaign and proceeded to dominate the national scene ever since, but his candidacy was scoffed at when it was not outright reviled — by, among others, Vance himself. Vance’s decision to cast his lot with Trump has fueled an astoundingly rapid rise, comparable not only to that of Richard Nixon, but also to that of Barack Obama, whom he once claimed to admire. Vance has continued to display canny political instincts in the first year of his vice presidency. But he will have to pull off a truly tricky feat to ensure his place in the Oval Office four years from how. …
… In his first few months as vice president, moreover, Vance has displayed a knack for sizing up intended audiences, either to give them what he intuits they want, or to mark them out as political targets to rally supporters against. One can see evidence of the former in something as terminally online as his embrace of the memes produced en masse that featured deliberate distortions of his likeness. And one can see evidence of the latter in his condemnation of European elites at the Munich Security Conference.
