At a White House photocall this week, JD Vance dropped the ball. Or rather, he fumbled a trophy belonging to the Ohio State Buckeyes, the national college American football winners, while the Marine Band played Queen’s “We Are the Champions”.
Vance had attended Ohio State before joining the Marines on his upwardly mobile journey from the rust belt to the Vice Presidency. But as he picked up the trophy, the base fell to the floor, and the golden top was caught in the nick of time by the team’s running back. It felt like a sign. Could Vance fumble America’s biggest prize?
Donald Trump witnessed the slip-up. The day before, the President had been at a UFC fight in Miami accompanied by Elon Musk, Robert F Kennedy Jr and other members of his cabinet. Vance was not present at the muscle-fest. Perhaps this is why Vance’s wife Usha said in an interview that being Vice-President “can be a very lonely, lonely world”.
The US public is not seeing a lot of Vance. This may seem strange to British readers, as he has just given an interview to the British publication UnHerd about the “real cultural affinity” between America and the UK. But while he attends White House meetings with dignitaries and pops up from time to time on Fox News, Trump is not obliging him with much of a domestic profile.
Vance is not rich enough or fun enough to be part of Trump’s posse, but he is clever enough to pose a threat. Being Vice-President can be perilous, as Trump’s first VP Mike Pence found out. During the January 6 Capitol riot, Pence put his oath to the US constitution over loyalty to his boss and was thrown to the wolves.
The ambitious Vance is taking the opposite course: shamelessly shilling for his boss. But he is equally disposable. Trump, who doesn’t “do” abroad unless he has to, has been sending Vance here, there and everywhere, far from Washington. Fancying a third term for himself, the 47th President disapproves of the way some right-wing influencers have taken to calling his young sidekick “48”.
Over Easter, Vance and his family will be in Rome. It will be a meaningful, personal trip for the Vice-President, a recent Catholic convert, which will include a visit to the Vatican. He will also see Giorgia Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister, but he already met her on Thursday in Washington (well, sort of – the Oval Office was crowded).
From there, Vance will head to India to meet Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister. His wife Usha will receive a warm welcome as the first Hindu American to serve as Second Lady. There will be some useful discussions of trade deals, but much of the visit will be “cultural” in purpose. Sightseeing, in other words.
So far diplomacy has not been Vance’s strong point, sometimes purposely. At the Munich security conference in February, he deliberately tore a strip off European allies for their dependence on America. But his attempted love-bombing of Greenland was a disaster, which ended in the sacking of the US space force commander at its Pituffik base on Greenland’s western coast.
“I do not presume to understand current politics,” Colonel Susannah Meyers wrote in a blistering email to all base personnel, “but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice President Vance are not reflective of Pituffik Space Base.”
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A more cuddly JD Vance has emerged - I wonder why
Read MoreWhere Vance does appear frequently is on social media, where he usually adopts the most slavish pro-Trump positions. This week he has been jousting with critics on X about throwing an unfortunate immigrant, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, out of America and into El Salvador’s Centre for Terrorism Confinement mass jail, despite an order from the US Supreme Court to “facilitate” his return.
Calling out his opponents for their “smug, self-assured bullshit”, Vance posted: “Are you proposing that we invade El Salvador to retrieve a gang member with no legal right to the country?” Nobody is, of course.
The Yale law graduate should feel ashamed that a Reagan-appointed appeal court judge has ruled that the government cannot “stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order”, no matter how unsavoury their character.
Vance has been less forthright on tariffs, fearing the economic consequences, but has played the loyal soldier. He is tied to Trump’s policy, unlike Ted Cruz, the Texan senator who still hankers to be president.
“Tariffs are a tax on consumers, and I’m not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers,” Cruz told Fox News.
Cruz, by the way, was with Trump at the UFC in Miami. The President loves to divide and conquer. If Vance wants to succeed him, there is going to be a cage fight.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Centre for International Reporting
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