I felt nauseous watching Vice President JD Vance’s press conference following the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minnesota.
His words were both shaming and shocking from a man “only a heartbeat away” from the most powerful political office in the Western world.
As the Trump administration pre-judged the incident in a highly questionable way, limited the investigation into what actually happened and declared “absolute immunity” for the shooter, Vance blackened Good’s name. He claimed without offering any supporting evidence that she had been “brainwashed”, “a deranged leftist” responsible for “a tragedy of her own making”. Vance claimed he wanted to “turn down the temperature” but his words seemed designed to inflame culture wars.
To this observer, it did not look like a good day for Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy to post pictures of himself grinning with “his friend” Vance, hours after his chilling news conference threatening anyone who disagreed with his version of the killing.
Lammy with Vance this week (Photo: UK Government)But I am not an American voter or one of the lickspittle reporter/influencers with which the White House increasingly fills its briefing room. Intemperate as they are, Vance’s outbursts and obvious silences should all be taken as calculated bids to enhance his chances of securing the Republican nomination in the 2028 presidential election.
Vance’s ambition to succeed Trump as the next POTUS is so overt that Trump openly teases him about it. Should the flagbearer in 2028 be “Vance or Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State?” the President likes to ask out loud. It’s a question that will get louder and louder in the rundown following this November’s mid-term elections.
Last year, in her revelatory Vanity Fair interview, Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff who is widely seen as the senior grown-up closest to the President, predicted that Rubio would fall in behind Vance, if the vice-president ran. But there are years and months for slips before and after that happens. Wiles was also much warmer about the “thoughtful” Rubio than about Vance who she noted had been “a conspiracy theorist for a decade”.
Vance continues to be the favourite for the nomination amongst Republicans but his lead has declined recently. An AtlasIntel opinion poll showed that his support dropped significantly from 54.6 per cent in September to 46.7 per cent at the end of the year, in spite of an emotional endorsement from Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika.
Events since then, in Venezuela, in the Atlantic and in Minneapolis, have all exacerbated divisions in the Maga movement which dominates the Republican Party.
As Trump veers towards becoming a more traditional Republican interventionist President, prepared at least to dabble in war in South America, Nigeria and the Middle East, Vance is posing as the leading isolationist “America First” option.
He was notably absent from deliberations over the Maduro raid at Mar-a-Largo. From last February’s Munich Defence Conference onward he has repeatedly spelt out how “I just hate bailing out Europe”. That same month he led the ambush on President Zelensky in the Oval Office.
Vance’s subsequent comments on the Venezuela raid have stressed the domestic importance for the US – as he sees it to keep drugs and undesirable people out of the homeland. This echoed his justification for the killing of Good, and his willingness to take public ownership of it. To him, ICE agents are forces of law and order and the first duty of the administration is security on the home front. “It means we’re going to get tougher”, he warned: “We won’t give in to terrorism.” In Vance’s ideology, his leading role over Greenland does not break with isolationism because it should be part of the US – which needs to protect itself.
Vance’s words about Minneapolis were in part a provocation to spark protest and civil disorder, in the same city where the killing of George Floyd by police, sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Jacob Frey, the mayor, rose to the bait, describing claims that the killing was an act of self-defence as “bullshit”. Tim Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, is urging calm: “They want a show, we can’t give it to them.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on the other hand, points out that he is “a diplomat now”, and has consistently tried to stay out of culture wars, keeping his interventions to foreign policy matters. As a Cuban American his rhetoric on the Venezuela raid is more in line with another strand of Republican thinking of “anti-communism”.
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Of course these differing stances are just straws in the wind around the rock of total public fealty to Trump, whatever he does or says. What makes it difficult for the pretenders to the Oval Office is that nobody knows which way the President is going to go on any given issue. Perhaps he does not know himself. He certainly does not seem inclined to endorse Vance as his heir apparent any time soon, perhaps because neither he nor Rubio are actual members of the presidential family.
Trump boasted to the New York Times this week “I don’t need international law”, and that the only thing which can stop him is: “My own mortality. My own mind.” But as the end of his second term draws closer his influence in the Republican Party will dwindle inevitably.
JD Vance, will do or say anything to get the presidency and it looks desperate. He is gambling that his Maga hardline will win him the presidency. Alternatively, his callous comments and exploitation of the Good killing may expose character weaknesses which cost him the prize.
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