I’ve seen a lot of chatter online from people who are surprised by JD Vance’s big role in the Trump presidency, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The vice president is a powerful and public-facing figure in American politics. We’ve just had a string of weak VPs for so long many people have forgotten what a VP is even supposed to do. For that reason, and the VP being next in succession if something happens to the president, there can be more infighting over the VP pick than the presidential candidate himself. A classic example of this is FDR being forced by his own party to pick Truman as his VP in the 1944 election, which ruined any aspirations he may have had for a lasting post-war peace with the Russians.
It is also hard to not notice that virtually every time an American president drops dead or is forced to resign, there’s a VP behind him ready to immediately do the exact opposite of whatever controversial policy was being attempted.
Kamala Harris was known to be grossly incompetent and aggressive, which isolated her from most of the White House bureaucracy she was supposed to be working with hand in glove. Biden appointed her as the “border czar,” an extremely important task, but she was terrible at it. Harris was so terrible, when she became the Democrats’ next presidential candidate, left-leaning media outlets actually went back into their own archives and erased mentions to her being the border czar. Some even tried to deny that she was in charge of the border at all. Your own supporters having to lie and pretend that you weren’t in charge of something isn’t exactly a good sign.
Mike Pence was an experienced politician who served as a state governor and should have been a powerful figure in the Trump presidency but wasn’t for reasons a bit mysterious to me. Trump appointed Pence to oversee the COVID response. This was a huge opportunity for Pence to prove to the American people and federal government that he was a competent organizer. No one expected Pence to magically stop people from getting sick, but he could have ordered briefings, held press conferences, toured ICUs and things like that to show the situation was under control. For whatever reason he was indifferent to the task. Unfortunately, there was some precedent for this. There was a particularly bad AIDS outbreak while he was governor of Indiana and he handled that crisis with the same indifference.
Then of course Pence turned on Trump during the controversy over the 2020 election results. This briefly got him positive reviews from the liberal press, but totally destroyed his chances of ever being respected or taken seriously by Republican voters again. On one hand I can sympathize, because that was definitely a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. But if Pence had been a bit more effective as a vice president he could have used his reputation to serve as a peacemaker between scorned Trump supporters and the anti-Trump neocons.
Under the Obama presidency, Biden was largely a paperweight. True, he was Obama’s point man in the Ukraine coup, but it is unclear to me what accomplishments can be personally attributed to him besides being a conduit for his crooked family to get fantastically rich. At the time I wasn’t paying any attention to news in Ukraine so generally felt indifferent about Biden. To me he just seemed like an old workhorse living out his twilight years in the Obama White House before entering a dignified retirement. The guy barely appeared in public so the signs of serious aging were apparent even then. Another reason Biden had such a diminished role was because Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, was walking all over everybody, even Obama.
As for Dick Cheney, I wouldn’t call him stupid or incompetent. He was just more interested in looting every single thing not nailed down for himself and his corporate buddies. The Bush regime was just so awful it is hard to say if Cheney was better or worse than everyone else. Eight years of Bush effectively destroyed the American conservative establishment and it never recovered. The right-wing populist MAGA movement that eventually emerged from the ashes doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the old party. I don’t think it’s even possible for a right-winger in 2025 to say he likes Bush without being laughed at and ridiculed by his own side.
So far, JD Vance is handling things well and a good indicator of that is how fervently opposition media is trying to smear him and play divide and conquer. If he doesn’t screw up, Vance has a very high chance of being the next president.
Ian Kummer
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Interesting.