Vance 2028 Is Here
· The Atlantic
J. D. Vance’s strategy, since he became the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2024, has been for President Trump to coronate him as his successor. “Donald Trump will ultimately decide who’s going to be the Republican nominee,” Vance told Sean Spicer last month, neatly excising the primary electorate from the decision matrix.
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Yet the midterm elections indicate the existence of a market among Republican voters for a 2028 presidential candidate who will distance their campaign from the current administration’s failures. Vance wants to be that Republican, but without forfeiting Trump’s support. How does he manage to do both?
Blame everything on the Iran war. That is what Vance shrewdly, if disingenuously, has done.
In a lengthy post on X, the vice president fully conceded that his party had been routed, and that “many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.” You often see analysts describing the 2024 Republican presidential electorate as “Trump voters,” but Vance understandably avoided this shorthand.
[Read: The simple message that produced a Democratic landslide]
He reduced the disaster to a single cause, writing: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.”
This argument has several advantages. First, it is partially correct. The Iran war has been a political debacle, both because it violated Trump’s oft-stated promise to avoid quagmires and because it drove up the cost of fuel and other goods.
Second, and of equal importance, Trump likely agrees with this critique. The president has been publicly blaming Iran for months, while defensively insisting that the cost has been minor, temporary (the conflict has been two weeks away from ending since it began), and necessary to avoid nuclear cataclysm. In a Fox News interview last night, Trump insisted, “We actually have the greatest economy,” but “because of the gasoline price, people don’t see it as much as they would have without it. And the gasoline was caused by Iran.”
Donald Trump Jr. quickly shared Vance’s post, commenting, “Every word of this is 💯💯💯,” stamping the royal family’s quasi-official imprimatur on Vance’s concession.
Third, Vance’s argument aims to box out his most likely rival, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If the war is the problem, then why would anybody prefer a Cabinet official whose entire job is foreign policy? Rubio is a well-known foreign-policy hawk, and blaming the hawks for snookering Trump into a mistake implicates the Rubio wing of the party for the midterm debacle.
Fourth, Vance ignores every other way Trump dismantled the 2024 Republican coalition. Tariffs? Mass deportation? Corruption? The gilded-palace binge? A domestic agenda focused on cutting taxes for the rich, while throwing millions of low-income Americans off their health insurance and food stamps? Trump is not willing to cop to mistakes on any of them, and Vance either justified or enthusiastically supported all of these errors, anyway.
In his X post, Vance specifically tried to refute Republican critics who (correctly) believe that the administration’s ironfisted approach to immigration enforcement alienated Latino voters who had expected a narrower approach focused on deporting criminals. “Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty,” Vance wrote. “I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.”
“Amnesty” is not the only alternative to Stephen Miller’s plan of deploying hastily trained masked agents and encouraging them to use the roughest tactics. But amnesty was a feature of an immigration-reform plan that Rubio briefly supported during Barack Obama’s second term, a historical fact that might explain Vance’s eagerness to revive the concept—as an epithet against his factional rivals.
Vance’s post asserts that a pollster told him that disgruntled Trump voters—sorry, Trump/Vance voters—would “come back on our team” if the administration did four things:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel.
From a certain point of view that is especially prominent on the online right, those four things can be reduced to one thing: Trump has to stop letting Israel manipulate him into foreign wars, and instead focus on making Americans rich. Conveniently for Vance, Trump appears open to this critique, having blurted out on Fox News yesterday that he now favors phasing out American aid to Israel.
[David Frum: Things are going to get ugly]
Vance is right to imply that Israel helped persuade Trump to go to war with Iran. But Israel’s advocacy is not the only reason the Strait of Hormuz has been closed. Trump has argued on and off for attacking Iran since it emerged as an American bête noir during the hostage crisis that began in 1979, when Trump’s short list of immutable beliefs about the world first formed. Trump also seemed to drop his inhibitions about the use of military force after the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro left him giddy with power.
Blaming all of the administration’s domestic failures on the Iran war, while subtly pointing the finger at Benjamin Netanyahu for tricking the president into it, would seem to offer Vance the shortest and straightest path to holding together the MAGA coalition and his place within it. The Trump presidency is working perfectly well, and the only slight course correction required is to recommit to “America First” principles.
Who among us might lead the MAGA movement into this new future of Trumpism-without-war? And without veering away from Trump’s militarized immigration strategy, or acknowledging the ongoing orgy of corruption and abuse of power? Only one man.