Jeff Kabaservice

He made sure to reinvent himself as Donald Trump's biggest fan.

That got him the Donald Trump nod that allowed him to rise through the primaries in the Ohio Senate race and allowed him to get elected.

Donald Trump, in choosing Vance, I think, number one, liked the fact that he was a convert and could potentially carry the MAGA brand through the Republican Party into Congress.

The future, you know, typically when a president was running, even for reelection, he would choose somebody who represented a different faction of the party.

But Trump in this case has so thoroughly remade the Republican Party that it's all MAGA all the way down.

And therefore he was choosing somebody who would really be not just his potential successor, but also his ideological heir.

Well, there's a lot of noise in polls when it comes to trying to say now what voters' preferences will be in the fall of 2028.

Most voters, frankly, haven't even begun to think about these things.

But yes, there is a bit of confusion going on in some of the results of the latest polls.

The war in Iran might be complicating these things.

J.D.

Vance, he never has come across as very enthusiastic about this Iran war.

Donald Trump has actually said publicly that

that JD Vance maybe wasn't fully aligned with the plan to go into Iran?

He has since, you know, said he supported it, but largely as a means of keeping a nuclear bomb out of Iran's possession.

He hasn't been as enthusiastic about this intervention as Marco Rubio has.

And there's some evidence that the Republican Party is starting to show some splits, even among its MAGA base, on the Iran issue.

So we're all sort of waiting to see what happens with this Iran war and its resolution, if there is going to be one.

The high price of gas in this country, as well as the unsettled state of the world, are going to actually discomfort some of the megabase in ways that might put a damper on either Rubio or Vance's aspirations.

Well, you know, it takes a certain amount of hubris as a new Catholic convert to lecture the Pope on what the Pope really ought to be standing for.