The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Life After Trump: President JD Vance || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Anytime we have a sitting US president that has exceeded the average lifespan, it’s a warranted endeavor to explore what happens after...they bite the dust. So, how would President Vance hold up?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3IWhCfC

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Lost Canyon. This is the famous jumble of Lost Canyon, and yes, that is the trail behind me. If you can see it, you've got better eyes than I do. Anyway, today we're taking a question from the Patreon crowd, specifically. Let's assume that Donald Trump, being 80, does what 80-year-olds dies and exits stage right. What would a president, J.D. Vance, White House, look like? The short answer is no idea. J.D. Vance is a junior senator, and so you never know when he's confronted with real-world problems and actually is in charge of something how he's going to react.

But let me point out two things to you. We have two presidents who were junior senators who became president. And they kind of give us goalposts guidelines. I'm not saying that he would turn out like either of them, but it's really our only points of reference. The first is Barack Obama. Barack Obama, in my opinion, he's going to go down in history. He's one of the top ten worst presidents we've ever had.

His problem was that he was so anti-social that he just didn't want to have meetings with anyone, including his own cabinet secretaries. And so for eight years, we didn't functionally have a foreign policy. We had very little domestic policy. We just had a bunch of speeches from time to time. The difference between J.D. Vance and Barack Obama is very simple. Barack Obama did build an independent coterie of people around him when he went to the White House, and then he was able to tap the Democratic Party for expertise to fill out his cabinet.

J.D. Vance doesn't have that option. He was almost a no one when Donald Trump picked him so that he has no independent followers, especially followers who have skills that could be applicable to governance. And Donald Trump has absolutely destroyed the Republican Party as a source of talent. So if he were, if J.D. Vance were to become president, he would become president alone with no one around him except for the people who used to hang on to Donald Trump. And as we've seen from the people who hang on to Donald Trump, most of them are not particularly competent in their chosen. fields. So it could be ugly. The other option is JFK, junior senator, was at best a mediocre president.

Maybe if you hadn't been killed, it would have turned around. Who knows? But something to keep in mind is the Cuban missile crisis. One of the reasons that the Soviets pushed when they did is because they thought the American president was weak. A lot of us probably did at the time. And woe and behold, JFK had nerves of steel and the Cuban missile crisis was more or less resolved to America's long-term advantage. So we can't rule out that J.D. Vance has it in him somewhere. But just like J.F.K., if it's going to happen, it's going to be happened because of J.D. Vance. It will not happen because of the circle of people he surrounds himself with, which makes it overall a risky bet.