If you are looking for a moment that sums up Vance in 2026, you could hardly do better. It epitomizes his mean-spiritedness, his comfort with casual bigotry, and his inability to behave like a normal human being. The jab was, like Vance himself, incredibly uncomfortable—a “no homo” joke that would have been stale two decades ago, when Vance was an awkward undergrad at Ohio State. It lacked even a whiff of the rhetorical shield that has accompanied most of the right’s insults of Talarico, which typically aim to undermine his Texan bona fides. Vance basically just said he was gay.
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 13, 2026
Vance is not, and never has been, a natural or charismatic stump speaker. He’s the right’s new Richard Nixon in many ways: a striver of boundless ambition and considerable intellect—at least within the confines of the Republican Party—who just never quite seems at home with other people. It worked for Nixon, eventually. But Vance has a problem neither Nixon nor any other Republican has had before: He will have to succeed Donald Trump. And, as his attempt at humor in Texas suggests, few people are set up worse to follow Trump than Vance.
But even if they have diverged on policy or not gotten along particularly well, presidents and vice presidents have tended to at least appear to occupy the same plane of reality when speaking publicly. That is not the case with Vance and Trump. Take the midterms, which Trump has repeatedly insisted will be a “surprise” to people who expect a Republican bloodbath. The president has insisted that he is personally flipping entire districts with his barnstorming tour of the country, even as he has struggled to fill arenas that are considerably smaller than the ones he packed two years ago.
The obvious rejoinder is, “Who’s ‘we’?” The president certainly isn’t talking that way; he proudly denies the reality that all of us can plainly see. Vance’s approach is quite different: He acknowledges reality but sounds a positive note about overcoming the odds. “I think that we have as good a chance as I’ve ever seen to really defy those historical trends,” he said on Tuesday. Which is the kind of thing vice presidents say when heading into tough midterm elections. It’s not the kind of thing Trump says, though.
That Trump is sui generis has been undeniable for over a decade. Republican voters like him, in part, because he’s unpredictable, gleefully breaks political and social taboos, never bows to reality, and is funny—or funny to them, at least. Vance, meanwhile, is very much something we’ve seen before: ruthlessly ambitious, albeit in a palpably desperate way. He sticks to the talking points even when they’re not great. He’s bound to reality. He’s predictable. And he isn’t funny even to the handful of Republicans who profess to love him.
But lately Trump has been making this transition a little easier for everybody. Rallies that were once hot tickets, with a charged atmosphere somewhere between a carnival and a tent revival, have become heavily scripted, bromide-filled snoozefests. And the aging man leading them—slower, sleepier, more scatterbrained—is clearly going through the motions. Vance, at least, has youth on his side, with apparent vigor to spare. Then again, it’s not like people are flocking to his rallies. Turns out, gay innuendo doesn’t pack arenas to the rafters.
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