What do you do when a stranger says “I love you”? Vice President JD Vance, who doesn’t get much affection on the campaign trail, seemed momentarily flummoxed when a man yelled those words to him at a recent stop in Tyler, Texas. “I love you too, sir,” Vance replied, “in a totally platonic way, to be clear.” He then paused for effect. “I’m the vice president, not James Talarico,” he said, referring to the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas whom the GOP has tried to portray as an effete vegan socialist. He looked mighty pleased about his juvenile ad-lib.
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.
.@VP JD Vance implies U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico (D-TX) is gay: "I love you too, sir. In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I'm the Vice President, not James Talarico." t.co/1u5BqG7cD3
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 13, 2026Vance 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.
In some respects, Vance is walking a tightrope familiar to vice presidents with aspirations to succeed their boss. In this thankless job, he is forced to take on unappetizing tasks (like his on-and-off role as a principal negotiator with Iran) and publicly defend his boss’s unappetizing positions, even those he does not personally agree with—like Trump’s ill-conceived war in Iran. But at the same time, he cannot merely imitate his boss; Vance’s attempts at recreating Trump’s unique appeal always end up backfiring. So Vance has to carve out a distinct political identity, which explains why his aides have been leaking to the press about his disapproval of that war. And he has had to do all of this while competing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio for Trump’s endorsement in the 2028 race.
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.
Vance is singing a different tune. He comes across less as a chest-thumping gladiator than a jilted ex, trying one last time to win back someone who never wants to see him again. Appearing on the All In podcast last month, Vance implored voters to “give us another chance—or, give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.” A month later, he was even more dejected. “We know that we’re swimming upstream,” he said in Texas on Tuesday.
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.
This is an important distinction when considering where the Republican Party is headed after its term-limited octogenarian leader waddles back to Mar-a-Lago in two years. Vance can lean into bigotry and meanness, but he’ll never be Trump. He’ll never be able to replicate Trump’s odd, unique appeal. He can’t even compete with what Trump is doing on the campaign trail now—which is disjointed and incoherent but still unquestionably Trumpy. (In contrast to Vance’s homophobic humor, Trump is out there complimenting the butts of male Republican candidates.)
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.
None of those qualities are electoral deal-breakers in and of themselves, but Trump has fully MAGA-fied the Republican Party. And since it lacks someone who can replicate the president’s unique appeal, any follow-up act will be a letdown for the president’s devotees—something Rubio has to contend with at least as much as Vance does.
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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