The tension between JD Vance and Trump is growing

The relationship between the president and vice-president of the US is surely one of the weirdest in politics. On the surface, the two present themselves as a unified team, good friends with the closest of working relationships, the two most visible public faces of an administration.

In practice, the main formal duty of the vice president is to take over if the president dies or becomes incapacitated – meaning otherwise their job is largely to sit around. But the VP is rarely, if ever, chosen based on that criterion. Instead, a campaign team picks whoever it thinks might provide some electoral advantage or cover a political weakness.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, for example, barely knew one another before he selected her as VP, and she had publicly savaged him on the campaign trail. But Biden had promised to select a woman as his Vice President, and Harris came through vetting as the most qualified, and so – boom – they’re a team.

Against that backdrop, then, the bar is set fairly low for Donald Trump and JD Vance’s relationship. It would hardly be unprecedented for it to be a troubled one, especially given what happened to Trump’s first vice-president: Mike Pence became a declared enemy of the Trump regime after refusing to play along with the president’s plan to declare the 2020 election results invalid. As a result, Maga supporters online have called for Pence to be hanged, and threatened violence against him.

It is safe to say that the relationship between JD Vance and Donald Trump has not got that bad, or at least not yet. But the cracks are certainly showing, and the US media is taking notice – not least because it could decide who becomes America’s next president.

As the midterms approach in November, Republican strategists are already starting to think about the 2028 presidential election. As a two-term president, Donald Trump is not eligible to stand in that contest (not to mention he will be 82 when it happens). That means the search is on for his successor.

Vance clearly wants to be that man. The vice president is anyway typically the frontrunner in a contest to succeed a two-term president – but with the modern Republican Party so obviously dominated by Donald Trump, everyone involved knows that the game is more complicated than normal.

Trump himself is hardly trying to make that easier. He is fond of “joking”, in a way where no-one is quite sure if he is serious, that he would like to stand for a third term, even though the Constitution bars it. He is also fond of making belittling comments about Vance.

Asked, shortly after picking Vance as his running mate in 2024, whether he would be ready “on day one”, Trump instead answered that the choice of VP “makes no difference” in the election. “You’re voting for the president,” he answered. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

In February 2025, Fox News asked Trump if he viewed Vance as his “successor”, to which the president simply answered “no”. He added “he’s very capable…I think you have a lot of capable people”. Trump is fond of belittling his subordinates and playing them off against each other.

Vance, a known critic of the war with Iran, was given responsibility for trying to secure a peace deal. “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” he said in half-joking remarks over the Easter weekend. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

Behind closed doors, Trump reportedly expresses doubts over Vance’s suitability as his heir even more clearly. Vance has hardly always been on the Trump train, of course – famously, he once likened Trump to Hitler, before changing course after realising his own political future relied on siding with the president.

Donald Trump is a transactional man. He has few lifelong friends or allies. For Trump, everything is a deal – and deals have winners and losers.

Trump is surrounded by people who are trying to use the president to further their political agendas, or advance their political careers. Vance is perhaps the foremost among them, one man among many who have tried to ride the Trump tiger – but many others who have made the attempt have found themselves hurled off and disposed of. Few of those who were in the White House in the first term were still there for the second.

Trump is the reality television president, and the show that propelled him into office was The Apprentice. The parallels between that programme and his own situation are not going to have passed him by. Trump is obsessed with ratings – whenever he criticises a TV programme or host he calls them low-rated.

He knows that the battle to succeed him is box office. He knows that playing favourites off against each other is good television. He loves a spectacle, and he loves people fighting for his approval.

Vance was never going to get the president to change that. If Vance wants the Trump endorsement, he’s going to have to work for it – and he should prepare himself for a long, long battle.