When the Iran war started, JD Vance was photographed in the White House Situation Room looking disheveled and tieless beneath the grand seal of the President of the United States. There were some empty seats and a handful of cabinet members present (two looking at their phones). He did not cut a commanding figure.
This was not the room where it happened. All the action was taking place at a makeshift command centre at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Florida compound, where the multitasking US President was launching lethal missile strikes and hosting a Maga Inc fundraising party.
Protocol dictates that vice presidents can’t be in the same place as their boss when war breaks out, but the image summed up Vance’s powerlessness. He had the look of a man watching his presidential ambitions going up in smoke.
The Iran war has merely amplified Vance’s political problems at home. In the US, it turns out he has been anointed man-of-the-future by the wrong crowd. Despite his vaunted brains, he did not see that coming.
Vance was against the war before he was for it, telling a podcaster in 2024 that Iran was “the most likely and dangerous scenario for provoking World War Three”. Let’s hope he was wrong about that.
Swallowing his reservations, the isolationist Vance reportedly counseled Trump to go “big and fast” on Iran or don’t attack at all. But even if the kinetic war is over soon, the aftershocks won’t be. Trump won’t thank Vance for thinking, “I told you so”.
Ever since the attempt on his life in 2024, Trump has developed a Messiah complex. This was in evidence on Thursday at the White House, where evangelical leaders convened by Paula White, Trump’s personal White House pastor, prayed and laid hands on him inside the Oval Office.
Trump’s Christian nationalist base, a core component of Maga, is with him on the Iran war, casting it in spiritual, end-times terms. This group is also staunchly in support of Israel.
In contrast, Vance, who is much more religious than Trump and converted to Catholicism in 2019, is out of step with his own spiritual leader, Leo XIV, the first American Pope, on war in the Middle East and immigration at home.
After flip-flopping from liberal Republican to Maga-acolyte in pursuit of power, Vance isn’t fully trusted by the Maga base as one of them, despite his hardscrabble Appalachian origins.
For all the Vice President’s extraordinary CV, nobody grows up thinking I want to be “JD”. Trump has a raw look-at-me magnetism that enables him to change direction at whim, leaving Vance beached and looking like Billy-no-mates.
Trump selected Vance as his running mate at the urging of his son, Don Jr, who has presidential ambitions of his own, and TV personality Tucker Carlson, who shed his bowtie for a man-of-the-people check shirt long ago and now broadcasts from a “barn”.
Carlson has called the Iran war “absolutely disgusting and evil”, prompting Trump to hit back, “Tucker has lost his way. He’s not Maga . . . Maga is America first and Tucker is none of those things”.
If the war goes wrong, Vance will look shifty while Carlson, like Don Jr, may have his own future plans. But Carlson – as Trump also insinuated – is looking less and less pro-America, with his very obvious anti-Israel and pro-Putin sympathies.
Vance has been bigging up the far-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) and met its leader, Alice Weidel, after the Munich Security Conference last year, but the AfD is out of step with Trump on Iran for the same reasons as Carlson.
According to Weidel, “the renewed destabilisation of the Middle East isn’t in Germany’s interests and must be stopped”.
The other Vance booster whose political star has waned is Elon Musk. The richest person in the world put down $10m in the race to succeed former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky to little effect. It is the largest sum Musk has donated to a Republican senate primary.
Musk’s chosen candidate, Nate Morris, a friend of Vance from the world of tech, is lagging in the polls despite the infusion of cash. As yet Trump has yet to endorse a candidate – the only decision that counts with most Republican activists.
Morris is also part of tech mogul Peter Thiel’s circle, like Vance. The billionaire tech bros are not the political force they were now that the promised economic miracle has yet to arrive for most Americans while they are doing just fine.
Vance still leads the most polls on who is best placed to succeed Trump as the Republican candidate but – in so far as any polls can be trusted at this stage – would lose the presidency to California Governor Gavin Newsom by six points, according to YouGov.
Trump is enjoying touting Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s achievements and has Cuba next in his sights. But the biggest obstacle to Vance’s ambition is Trump himself.
At 79 and bestriding the world like a colossus, this President thinks he is invincible. The more full of himself Trump becomes, the less willing he will be to cede the stage to anybody else.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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