Vice President JD Vance and Israeli Pime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a meeting in Washington designed to clear the air between them this week. Israeli officials characterised the talks as “frank and candid”, White House officials said they were “direct”.
Disagreements between Vance and Netanyahu over the Iran war have been bubbling away for months. But the Vice President has also been brooding over whether Israel’s US allies have been briefing against him and undermining him politically.
Nearly halfway through Donald Trump’s presidency, Vance’s position as heir apparent is far from secure. You would think his reservations about the Iran war would shore up his support at a time when two-thirds of Americans oppose it, according to a new AP/Norc poll.
But the rumblings against Vance have continued, ranging from accusations that he has been undermining Trump on foreign policy to a report that he was allegedly demanding too many helicopter rides for his wife and children, causing Secret Service agents to feel “fed up”.
He has also been losing personal and political friends by flirting with the far-right fringes of the Maga movement. His former friend, the conservative commentator Rod Dreher, told a podcaster this week that they fell out when he urged Vance to take a stand against far-right, white nationalists in the Republican Party – “but he hasn’t chosen to do it”.
Vance describes his politics as “reasonably moderate”. On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Vance said he was being attacked “in dishonest ways” by a “foreign influence campaign” which was “manipulating and trying to change American public opinion and keep the war going indefinitely”.
He added: “You know, my response to that is, ‘Well go to hell. I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first.’”
Vance with his wife, Usha. Rumblings against the VP continue – including from former friends (Photo: Alexander Nemenov/AFP)The attacks haven’t stopped. In Friday’s Washington Post, commentator Marc A Thiessen, whose hawkish views on the Iran war have been cited approvingly by Trump, accused Vance of “failing” the President and driving him into a “strategic cul-de-sac” on negotiations. He claimed Vance’s poor tactics had undermined any reason for the Iranians to strike a deal.
Most Republicans expect the battle for the succession to be between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and JD Vance. Indeed, the duo may have already struck a deal to be running mates. Rubio told Vanity Fair last year that Vance was “going to be our nominee and I’ll be one of the first persons to support him”, but speculation continues to whirl.
A majority of polls show Vance beating the more hawkish Rubio convincingly for the top spot but, intriguingly, Rubio was virtually tied with Vance (38 per cent to 39 per cent) in a recent Emerson poll of 2028 contenders. According to Emerson pollster Matt Taglia, “Vance is relying on less educated and generally younger voters, whereas Rubio is able to capture the more educated, older voters”.
As Taglia points out, older voters are the most likely to turn out to vote, but recent primary battles have shown the decisive factor tends to be who Trump supports. And there is no denying the number of committed, hard-right young voters in Trump’s Republican Party. Dreher, Vance’s ex-friend, has been warning about their rise for some time. He has an interesting background himself, having lived until recently in Hungary, where he helped to spread support for Viktor Orbán on the US right. He attended Vance’s Catholic baptism in 2019 and is credited by him in his book Communion for drawing him closer to religion.
But Dreher also claimed publicly last year that 30-40 per cent of Republican staffers under 30 were followers of the avowed Nazi sympathiser streamer Nick Fuentes. “This is a cancer growing fast within the conservative movement,” he warned. “If it is not stopped, and stopped soon, it will be a complete disaster for the Republicans.”
The Maga movement has been fracturing ever since – over attitudes to the Iran war, Israel and, most recently, Ukraine (thanks to a change of heart by the newly converted pro-Kyiv influencer Laura Loomer).
The New York Times delved last weekend into the “crack-up” all this has been causing at the right-wing think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, in Washington – and what it says about the future of the pro-Trump right. Alarmingly, the article claimed: “Discussions among new hires frequently echoed arguments…that shed doubt on the historical consensus around the Holocaust or the origin of the state of Israel.” One former staffer said he quit because he was not willing to “sit here and discuss whether the Holocaust happened or not”.
The new hires were allegedly being influenced by the increasingly anti-Israel, pro-Russia broadcaster Tucker Carlson (among others), to whom Vance remains close. Loomer, who has the ear of the President, has so far refrained from attacking his Vice President but this truce may not last.
Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, believes he is clever enough to stay in with Trump, keep the America First isolationists on board and appeal to the more hotheaded – to put it mildly – youth wing of the Maga movement. But one day Vance will have to choose: whose side is he on?
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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