Last week, President Donald Trump gave Vice President JD Vance two high-profile foreign policy assignments: travel to Budapest on Tuesday and Wednesday to help save the Hungarian election for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing Christian nationalist party, then head over to Islamabad for the weekend to negotiate a final peace agreement with Iran.
Vance was harshly graded on Sunday. Early in the morning, he announced an impasse with Iran in terse remarks that offered little suggestion of a diplomatic path forward. By the end of the day, Hungarians rejected Vance’s argument that a vote for Orbán is a vote for “sovereignty and democracy, for truth and for the God of our forefathers,” handing the opposition coalition a parliamentary supermajority that throws Orbán out of office and sets up the possibility of a constitutional overhaul.
To be fair to Vance, these were impossible assignments. Orbán’s party, in power for 16 years, was trailing badly in the polls thanks to a public fed up with corruption and economic stagnation. An American vice president can’t swoop in at the last minute and change the minds of locals while claiming he isn’t meddling in a foreign election.
The Iranian regime has long earned a reputation for stubborn and patient negotiation. Even Trump grudgingly praised them as “lousy fighters but great negotiators.” And the regime just proved it has the tenacity to not only remain in power after the assassinations of more than four dozen of its highest officials, including its Supreme Leader, but also gain negotiating leverage with newly seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is critical to the global economy. The 41-year-old Vance has only been an elected public official for just under 40 months and has no diplomatic experience.
Meanwhile, Trump hung out in Miami at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event with the person who is supposed to hold the foreign policy portfolio, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Iran reportedly requested that Vance—who privately opposed Operation Epic Fury—lead the American negotiating team. But where in The Art of the Deal does it say you should let your adversary pick its negotiating partner?
In theory, anyone could have been sent to be the face of a likely failure. Why choose Vance? Why set up the vice president to fail?
Exploring that question is not just mining for schadenfreude. Trump’s difficulty, or disinterest, in grooming an heir apparent threatens his movement’s ability to sustain itself beyond this presidential term.
Vance is not the first vice president of Trump’s to be put in impossible situations. You probably remember that Mike Pence had the Constitutional task to preside over the ratification of the 2020 election’s Electoral College count. Trump publicly and privately pressured Pence to invoke the authority to reject the electors from several states won by Joe Biden and deny Biden’s victory. When the January 6 mob chanted “hang Mike Pence,” according to testimony given to the House, Trump resisted taking any action to quell the riots and privately shared that Pence “deserves it.” Four years later, the two would run against each other for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.
But Trump always recognized that Pence, an old-school Ronald Reagan conservative skeptical of protectionism and Russia, wasn’t a full-fledged believer in MAGA. According to American Carnage by Tim Alberta, when Trump learned that his nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency criticized him during the 2016 campaign, he vented, “This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone.” Come 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed America, Trump sidelined his own Health and Human Services Secretary and named Pence the leader of a pandemic task force. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported in their book, The Divider, that Pence’s team suspected “the vice president was put in charge just to have someone to blame when everything went bad.” Moreover, Trump wouldn’t let Pence control the task force’s press briefings, hogging the spotlight for himself day after day. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that Trump never tried to set Pence up as his successor, even before January 6 drove a permanent wedge between them.
Vance, at first, seemed poised to pursue a more rewarding vice-presidential path. He became famous in 2016 during his Hillbilly Elegy book tour as a product of the white working-class who could explain Trump’s appeal to confused liberals while criticizing the candidate. But once Trump was elected and he eyed a political future for himself, Vance rebranded as a Trump loyalist, a social conservative extremist, and cheerleader for far-right anti-European Union political parties across the Atlantic. Vance was promoted to the vice presidency by Trump’s son, Donald Jr., who said he wanted to make sure “those snakes and the liars don’t get those positions of power” where they could constrain the MAGA agenda. As a true believer—or as true as any opportunist can be in TrumpWorld—Trump has every reason to prepare Vance to carry his baton. Right?
Except we have no reason to believe Trump cares about what happens to other people and institutions once he leaves the political stage. All evidence suggests that Trump cares only about himself and his ability to command attention and wield power. While he seems to have bowed to the Constitution’s two-term limit, such an acknowledgment of reality doesn’t preclude him from trying to be the power behind the throne.
That would explain why Trump has been publicly toying with both Vance and Rubio, talking them both up as potential successors and ticketmates, not-so-subtly creating a reality TV show drama with two characters competing for a presidential rose. Vice presidents—when they are not running against their old bosses or their old boss’s namesakes—have a perfect record of winning modern presidential primaries, which gives Vance a natural advantage. So to create drama, Trump must periodically knock Vance down a peg. Last week, it was two pegs.
Trump is not the only recent president who didn’t adequately set up his vice president for an easy succession. In 107 Days, Kamala Harris expresses her belief that—if not quite set up to fail by the president—she was not supported to succeed by the president’s aides. Lamenting her assignment, handed down early in the Biden administration, to solve the “intractable” problem of the “porous border,” Harris wrote, “No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.” [Emphasis original.]
But the people around the president were likely taking their cues from a president determined to run for a second term, even though during the 2020 campaign, he sold himself as a transitional figure. In Biden’s last days as a candidate in 2024, trying to salvage his campaign after the disastrous debate with Trump, he was still insisting he was uniquely electable, telling ABC News, “I don’t think anybody’s more qualified to be President or win this race than me.” A four-year project of elevating Harris would have undercut such claims.
Biden’s inability to get out of his own way is particularly tragic since he had built a strong policy foundation worth extending—investing in technology and infrastructure, producing affordable clean energy, employing antitrust tools to tackle rising costs, and standing against Russian imperialism. Trump, in very stark contrast, does not have a coherent set of thoughtful policies—only self-indulgent impulses—which only adds to the challenge of setting up a successor for success. But the reluctance of both to prepare their vice presidents for the immediate future affected their governing choices. It compromised their ability to build durable political coalitions capable of winning consecutive elections and outlasting their own careers.
One should never discount the possibility that a vice president can eventually get a promotion. Fifteen out of 49 vice presidents have become presidents, nearly one in three. And while nine of the 15 ascended to the presidency because of a presidential election or resignation, three of the last nine presidents who entered office by election were former vice presidents. Becoming vice president provides an expotentially better probability of becoming president than any other position.
And if you look at the 2028 presidential primary polls today, you will find the people leading each party’s field are vice presidents.
Of course, neither Vance nor Harris expect a coronation. But if they both earn presidential nominations, Vance’s fresher humiliations and policy failures would likely make his path far more fraught.
To shore up his future political viability, Vance is looking for opportunities to define himself on his own terms, but Trump will always make that job difficult. In June, Vance will roll out a new memoir, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, about his conversion to Catholicism. He will likely have to spend part of his publicity tour fielding questions about why his president attacked Pope Leo XIV and shared social media images depicting himself as Jesus Christ.
