Today, Explained - JD Vance is just getting started

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

From Twitter feuds to memes to providing cover for President Trump, the vice president had a big year. Up next, the midterms. And then — the presidency? This episode was produced by Ariana Aspuru, edited by Miranda Kennedy and Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Vice President JD Vance at the Congressional Ball last week. Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ian Ward, who writes for Politico, became interested in J.D. Vance a few years ago when he realized who else was interested in J.D. Vance. I was talking to a lot of young MAGA conservatives in Washington, who I was asking, who on the national stage shares your worldview, and so many of them were telling me that it was J.D. Vance and J.D. Vance alone, who really encapsulated a lot of the political and intellectual currents that were swirling in that space. Ian went on to spend time with Vance, who arguably is like no other vice president in history. In 2025, yes, he played the traditional role of Veep, traveling to Europe, defending his president. But he consistently pulled focus online, brawling with Randos on Twitter, inserting himself into the Nikki Cardi beef, R-teeing memes and rumors, and like me, hosting a podcast. Coming up on today, explained J.D. Vance, vacillating between Trump-era parent and Twitter troll is just getting started. Support for the show comes from Snapdragon.

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Start building faster at MongoDB.com slash build. This is Today Explained. Politico's Ian Ward here to talk about one year of J.D. Vance. All right. So from late last year onward, you see these memes of Vance with the huge head, dancing, the little boy hat, the lollipop. And it starts out as a way to mock the VP. But he does not treat it that way, does he? What does he do instead? He's embraced it.

One notable example was there's this sort of famous meme of the vice president, overweight with long curly hair and big bulging eyes that started circulating around the election. And for Halloween this year, Vance dressed up as that meme and took a picture with big bulgy eyes and posted it online. Happy Halloween kids. And remember, say thank you. He's part of a generation, the millennial generation, that grew up at peak era of online blogging and sort of early social media. And he understands that those are very potent political and communication tools. And at the same time, I think he understands really innately that conservative politics are flowing upwards from the Internet at this point.

So if you're not engaged in the online fight, you're not really engaged in the engine of conservative politics at this point. I think he understands that. And by engaging with some of those memes, he's signaling that he's kind of in the engine room of the right at this point and that he gets it in a way that an older generation of politicians didn't. There was just a meme of the Pope, Usha, and a couch. And it, like, took me a second to get it. And then when I got, I was like, man, that's pretty good.

That's pretty good. I think if he was too self-serious, right, or sort of dismissed these things and was offended by them, it would be sort of boomer coded, right? That's not really how younger generations operate on the internet. It's a lot of exchanging insults and exchanging digs as a way to build solidarity across the coalition. I think he's privy to that dynamic and sort of savvy at navigating it. It's a good point. All right. So he comes into office, as everyone does.

January 20th. And then what does some of his early wins look like? He was deputized very early on, even before they took office, to shepherd some of Trump's more controversial nominees through the Senate to get people like Pete Heggseth or RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard through the nomination process, despite some of the hiccups they run into. Raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, Pete Hegson. I, Pete Hegson. I, Pete Hegson. So that was solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution of the United States. So that was a big win for him, I would say.

A second one was his trip to Europe early on. He gave two very notable speeches there. One at the Munich Security Conference, where he basically torpedoed 50 years of transatlantic collaboration. We think it's an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses. on areas of the world that are in great danger. And one in Paris, where he laid out the administration's view on AI. Oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.

And those both showed that he was willing to enter into these spaces and disrupt what he perceived at the status quo, a status quo that in his mind wasn't working. Also in February, President Trump meets Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office, might have been not a big story. Became a big story in part because of the role that J.D. Vance played. Remind us what happened. Zolensky was in town to finalize a critical mineral deal. Thank you very much. It's an honor to have President Zelensky of Ukraine. The meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky and Vansk.

and a couple other cabinet members very quickly devolved into Trump and Vance berating Zelensky. And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country? Vance has an idea that Europe has benefited tremendously in the past half century or so from the international order governed by American military and economic hegemony. At the same time, I think he thinks that that international order has harmed the type of working class blue-collar American that he grew up with in Ohio, right? These are the people who actually fight the wars. They're the people who've borne the brunt of the deindustrialization. It's accompanied economic globalization. So I think in his mind, Europe and Ukraine by extension are sort of freeloaders who are leaching off the economic and actual well-being of working-class Americans and not thanking them for it. Have you said thank you once this entire meeting?

And then in June, we have this 12-day war between Israel and Iran. And J.D. Vance defends Trump when Trump drops the bunker buster bomb. And at the time, a lot of people said, hey, Mr. Vice President, didn't you say you were going to be against this type of thing? How does Vance navigate his clear and obvious disdain for foreign? war in wars, with President Trump, who at times exhibits the disdain and at times seems like he just really wants to get involved. All signs indicate that behind the scenes, he was advocating against direct U.S. intervention

in that conflict. But once it became apparent that Trump was going to intervene, Vance publicly fell in line. After the strikes in Iran, Vance articulated what he called the Trump doctrine to justify these strikes. When you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it, and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict. That is the Trump doctrine. So it also goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning,

and about him as not just a defender, but a kind of explainer and justifier, right? It's not really sufficient in his mind to defend these things. He wants to offer a kind of intellectual rationalization of justification for them. In September, of course, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. what was Vance's relationship with Charlie Kirk and what did you see him doing in the aftermath of the killing? Kirk and Vance were very close.

Questions from him. I've known J.D. for a while. He has an only-in-America story. Some reporting came out after Kirk's death that Kirk was actually one of the first conservatives to identify Vance as a rising star that he eventually introduced him to Donald Trump Jr.'s team and vouched for him as a legitimate convert to the MAGA movement.

To introduce a friend of mine, somebody that I have just been so thrilled to see ascend American politics. He hosted Charlie Kirk's show a couple days after his death, sitting behind his desk in the old executive office building, delivering a straight-to-camera monologue with an American flag behind him. I can't promise you that all of us will avoid Charlie's fate. I can't promise you that I will avoid Charlie's fate. But the way to honor him is to shine the light of truth like a torch in the very darkest places.

Go do it. It looked extremely presidential. He sort of led the charge in positioning Kirk's death as a consequence of rising political violence on the left, which he said as a much larger issue than right-wing political violence. It was interesting that the same guy who went to Europe early in the U.S. year and very passionately lectured the Europeans about free speech. Was after Charlie Kirk's death somebody who did not decry people losing their jobs for criticizing Charlie Kirk or making bad jokes at his expense? It opened him up to charges that he's hypocritical on free speech. What does he say? He has mentioned this German philosopher by the name of Carl Schmidt,

who was a very prominent Nazi jurist back in the day. day during the Vinemar period and then the Nazi period, who had this distinction he drew, he said, all politics can be reduced to the distinction between friends and enemies. You help your friends and you attack your enemies. And I think that sort of informs Vance's broad political view and can help explain his asymmetrical deployment of the free speech argument. In October, some messages from a young Republicans group chat were leaked. And there was lots of racism. There was open anti-Semitism. J.D. Vance involved himself in that story. How so? What did he say? He downplayed the nature of those statements. The reality is that kids do stupid things,

especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke is caused to ruin their lives. I think more broadly there's a sense on the right that for the past five or ten years, Republicans have sort of

lay down and let what they call cancel culture take over. The term it gets thrown around a lot is like giving up a scalp. And I think Vance and others are trying to effectuate a kind of broader cultural shift where they're going to say no matter how offensive comment was, we're not

going to give up one of our own. And we fight back against our enemies, you know, and our perceived enemies in the media. Does that extend to the next skirmish? Because a few weeks later, Tucker Carlson interviews Nazi curious Nick Fuentes, doesn't ask him any hard questions. So that's pretty young to get canceled and pretty young to have friendships destroyed over politics. Like, that's usually, you know, like decades down the line. Right. What did you do? Well, I just became more emboldened, and so I... Yes. You wear those weird one-piece shoes?

I do. You actually do? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like in public? Yes. You don't think that's cool? No, I do. Yeah, he stayed sort of conspicuously quiet in that whole controversy.

At the same time, I think he's doing some coalitional management here. I think he rightly recognizes that Fuentes, despite his very odious views, has a very real and very mobilized following of young men that MAGA needs desperately to keep in its electoral coalition. He's called Fuentesome names, but he's made no real effort to actually banish him

from the conservative coalition. In late October, he was at a turning point USA event, and he takes a multi-barreled question from a young woman and ends up saying that he hopes that his wife, Usha, who is Hindu,

will join him in his Catholic faith. Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way. How do you see him walking this line between being a guy who's in a multicultural family and talks very proudly about it, but also has perhaps even a base himself who simply do not like that his wife is from an immigrant family? There's a term that gets thrown around a lot on the right called Heritage America or Heritage Americans, and these are Americans whose ancestry stretches back to the colonial period or the founding period, they tend to be white, Protestant, these people form the cultural core of America and their ethos

and values should inform the political culture of the country. And so long as immigrants respect that cultural ethos and immigrate legally to the United States, he's okay with having them there. The Trump administration's crusade against illegal immigration, but also to some degree legal immigration, has just enforced, or unleashed rather, a lot of xenophobia that Vance is now having to contend with, directed his own family, right? I think it's very hard to stake out a sort of principled anti-immigrant position without tapping into some very, very nasty undercurrents of xenophobia and emboldening those. And once the cat's out of the bag, There's really nothing to stop it from being deployed against his own family.

I think you're starting to see a subtle tension emerge between two of the movement slogans and the ideas they represent. One of them is America first. And then the other idea is MAGA, right? And I think you're starting to see Vance get the message a little bit and pivot a little bit away from some of the diplomatic issues and foreign policy issues. towards issues like affordability. So I think he's very, very sensitive to these coalitional dynamics and very sensitive to the criticism that America first is eclipsing MAGA

in the administration's priorities. And I think he's trying to correct that. I'm not sure if it will be effective or in time for the midterms. Ian Ward of Politico, coming up, could J.D. Vance, with all his contradictions, become the next American president? We've all been there. It's 5.30 in the morning, and the dawn mist is still swirling on the River Thames. You and your fellow Bodies of the Oxford University Rowing Club

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It's Today Explained. It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King, back with Politico's Ian Ward. All right, so let's talk about the midterms. They are approaching in a little under a year. What role do you think the vice president is going to play in these big elections? I think you'll see him out on the trail, again, selling some. of these economic accomplishments. What grade would you give the economy today?

A plus plus plus. Definitely talking a lot about immigration. I think immigration is at this point really the issue that's holding the otherwise somewhat fractious MAGA coalition together. And I think they will run very prominently on the very precipitous drop in illegal border crossings and also whatever progress they've made on the mass deportations, despite the the controversy that was kicked up. But why have rents gone down for four consecutive months?

Because we're starting to get those illegal aliens out of the United States of America, those criminals, those gang members. What has J.D. Vance said about whether or not he plans to run for president in 2028? Well, the decorum, of course, is not to talk about your presidential ambitions until you're actually a candidate for president. And Vance clearly understands that and has said, you know, not my focus right now and denied that he's angling forth. But I think everyone understands that he's the heir apparent and that it's his nomination to lose in 2028. So I think his denials are mostly pro forma at this point. The world of conservatism is vast and varied and more diverse than ever. Traditional hawks, the Chamber of Commerce, style Republicans, there are still

some Mitt Romney's, the Maga populace, the tech guys in Silicon Valley are now. on the right. Do people think J.D. Vance has what it takes to bring together all these different factions if he's going to be a viable candidate in 2028? I think he has pretty much a lock on the elite conservative class, right? And the activists, the donors, many of the people who would identify as kind of MAGA Republicans, even if they're more tech right or new right or populist right, The group of voters he is and probably should be most worried about are the 2024 Trump voters who do not identify as MAGA or even in some cases as Republicans who view themselves either as political independence or swing voters, the sort of imagined podcast bro, right, who isn't a MAGA ideologue but was unhappy with the state of the country during the period of the election. Talk to anybody who's broke. Talk to anybody who's struggling to pay. for bills and groceries.

Talk to anybody's trying to buy a car. The economy's bananas right now. We don't live in this like care bear world anymore. Our politics, it's become a dirty fucking business. So I think you want a businessman in there. I think you're seeing preliminary signs that those people are swinging away from the GOP. Do people like J.D. Vance? What's your impression of the way your ordinary person,

who's kind of allergic to politics and says, I'm an independent. I'll vote for the person I think is going to do the best job. What's your sense of what they think of Vance? The polling is not very good on this, so it's hard to peer into the electorate. I think a lot these days about the sociologist Max Weber, actually, who wrote about the structure of charismatic movements and the way that charismatic leaders end up anointing successors. And the process of anointment matters a lot for whether the charisma rubs off on a successor, right? And so I think a lot of that question hinges on how exactly Vance ends up securing the nomination. Is it an endorsement from Trump? Does Trump throw it open to a factional fight

in which, you know, someone like a Vance and someone like a Rubio and Ted Cruz have to duke it out where some of the dirty laundry coalitionally has aired out, then it's a much, much harder task for Vance to consolidate the MAGA base behind him. How do his politics align with the broader Republican Party on things like tech, things that are really top of mind right now? I think he's proved to be rather tech optimistic. I think that's causing some friction within the movement. Some of the tech skeptics in the movement were expecting or hoping that he would take a more

forceful line on things like AI, and he's actually proven quite friendly to AI and some of the tech interests. in Silicon Valley. They're so terrified about the problems with AI. And to be clear, there are problems with AI. But if you're so terrified with the problems with AI, you don't actually embrace the potential, then you're going to get the worst of the problems

without any of the benefits of the upside of it. You spent time talking to J.D. Vance before he was vice president. You watched him closely throughout the last year in this very high-profile job. Do you think the vice president is getting what he wants? out of all of this. And what does he want? I think he imagines a future in which the Republican Party under a kind of populist nationalist banner can consolidate an electoral majority of somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the electorate that provides the party with a kind of FDR-era-style

consensus, right, in which Republicans can carry out a really, really far-sweeping transformation of the country at both an economic, a cultural, and a geopolitical level. That requires a type of consensus that is extremely, extremely rare in 21st century electoral politics. And by hitching his wagon very closely to the MAGA coalition, he inherits all of that division and all of that baggage. And I think that makes it very difficult for him to realize the type of far-reaching electoral coalition that he wants to achieve. I think a lot of this will depend on the next three years of the Trump administration. And if people feel good about the direction of the economy come 2028, I think he has a pretty good chance of succeeding Trump in carrying that movement

into the future. If the current trends continue and people are discontent with the state of the economy, people feel like the administration has squandered its political capital on foreign entanglements and not done enough domestically, I think he's in a very, very difficult position. Ian Ward, he writes for Politico. Ariana Espudu produced today's show, Miranda Kennedy and Jolie Myers edited. Patrick Boyd is our engineer and Laura Bullard check the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. Fox Creative.

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