A day after JD Vance suggested Donald Trump would endorse him for president, a reporter asked Trump about it while Vance stood right behind him in the Oval Office. Trump said Vance is "a very talented person" and "a very good person," then claimed they've never even talked about it. The vice-president shifted around like a man who just heard his own surprise party get cancelled.
The Most Awkward Smile in the Oval Office
Let's set the scene, because it deserves the full treatment. Vance goes out and says Trump would back him in 2028. The next day, Trump gets asked about it, with Vance standing behind him, and offers a forced smile and a vague compliment. "But we've literally, I don't think we've ever talked about," the president said, trailing off before he could finish a sentence that had already finished Vance.
Notice the phrasing. "I don't think." Not "we haven't." Not "no." Trump left the claim hanging, unconfirmed, like a fish left on the dock to rot. As The Guardian laid out, if the two men truly haven't discussed Vance's presidential prospects, they are the only two people in Washington who haven't.
This is the man Vance has spent two years defending in public, and he got a compliment you'd give a decent waiter.
The Roadshow Nobody Is Calling a Campaign
Meanwhile, Vance has been everywhere. Iowa, Florida, Texas, Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, and his native Ohio, stumping for Republican candidates as the party tries to hold the Senate and House while Trump's approval ratings sink. Trump has told voters to act as though he's on the ballot. Vance is the one actually showing up to the rallies.
The theory among analysts is that this is a dry run for 2028. Every stop builds contacts and goodwill. Political historian Matthew Dallek called it a way to "build up chits" so the MAGA movement remembers Vance "was a good soldier." Rick Wilson, the former Republican strategist who now runs the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, put it more bluntly: when Vance fires up a campaign machine in two years, people will owe him something.
Notice who's missing from this picture. Marco Rubio, widely seen as Vance's main rival for the nomination, is busy putting out the fires Trump's global agenda keeps starting. Rubio has a job. Vance has a tour bus.
Explainer-in-Chief, Professional Sane-Washer
Here's the job description Vance has quietly taken on. Whenever Trump says or posts something unhinged, Vance shows up with a calmer, more palatable version. Critics call it "sane-washing," and honestly, the name fits like a glove.
Recent examples are not subtle. Vance rationalized a meme Trump posted on Truth Social that seemed to depict Trump as Jesus Christ. This came right after Vance published a book about his conversion to Catholicism, so he got to defend the Jesus meme with a straight face and a very awkward amount of professional credibility. He also tried to deny, or at least reinterpret, Trump's remark to journalists that he did not think about Americans' financial situation while conducting the war with Iran.
That one's a keeper. The president says he doesn't think about your money while running a war, and the vice-president's job is to explain that he didn't quite say that.
"I've Not Once Seen Evidence"
The best moment came at a CBS town hall last weekend. Asked about voters' concerns that Trump is making money from cryptocurrency, Vance said: "You can make all kinds of criticisms of our policies and decisions, but I've not once seen evidence that Donald Trump has enriched himself."
Okay. Per Forbes, Trump's personal fortune went from $2.3bn in 2024 to $6.5bn this year. That's roughly $4.2bn in two years for a man who, according to his vice-president, has never once been seen enriching himself. Either Vance hasn't read Forbes or he has a very specific definition of the word "evidence."
This is what unstinting loyalty looks like in the Trump-dominated Republican Party. It's the coin of the realm, and Vance is spending it like a lottery winner.
The Pence Problem and the Gore Problem
Here's where it gets genuinely tricky for Vance, and the history is not encouraging. Mike Pence, Trump's first vice-president, refused to overturn the 2020 election and had to be evacuated to an underground shelter in the Capitol on January 6 while rioters called for his execution. That is the price of independence in this party.
So Vance faces what former Republican congressional staffer Kurt Bardella called two choices: "Either ride Trump all the way to the island of irrelevancy, or break with him and incur his wrath." Bardella's assessment of both options: "Neither are great."
And a clean break after winning the nomination doesn't work either. Al Gore tried it in 2000, telling his convention, "I stand here as my own man," to escape the Clinton impeachment baggage. He lost to George W Bush and even lost his home state of Tennessee, where he'd been a senator. Distance from the boss didn't save him.
The Dingo Take
The vice-president stood behind the president, heard himself described as a "good person" in the tone usually reserved for a neighbor's dog, and then watched his boss say they'd never discussed the thing Vance had publicly said was a done deal. Nobody walked that back. It just sat there.
Look at what Vance has built. He has spent two years explaining away a Jesus meme, a war with no concern for your wallet, and a billionaire's mysterious lack of enrichment, all so he can inherit a movement whose owner won't even confirm he's the heir. The loyalty is total. The return on investment is a forced smile and a shrug.
That's the trap, and it's not complicated. Stay loyal and you tie yourself to a president whose numbers are collapsing and whose habits are only getting weirder. Break away and you get the Pence treatment. Vance picked the first option with his eyes open, and now he's on a seven-state tour to prove he deserves a job that the guy he works for has "never really talked about."
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