Vance Will Have to Choose Between Tucker and the Presidency

By Dan McLaughlin

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

 

JD Vance wants very much to be president. The further we get into Donald Trump’s second term, the more Vance’s ambitions to succeed him become the dominant story in our politics. Which means that it’s time to start thinking about what he might do to advance — or derail — those ambitions.

 

Whether Vance has a realistic prospect of winning the presidency in 2028 (assuming that Trump serves out his term) depends heavily on the unusual place we inhabit in the political cycle, after Trump became only the second man to return to the presidency after being voted out of it. Only one man — Martin Van Buren — has previously made the transition Vance seeks, from new second-term vice president to election in his own right without the president dying in office. As of now, Vance still has pole position for the 2028 Republican nomination. He is likely to keep the upper hand unless one of two things happens in the next 26 months: he falls out with Donald Trump, or (far less likely) Trump suffers a dramatic loss of credibility with Republican voters.

 

But one very large question still looms over Vance’s presidential ambitions: Does he want to be president more than he wants to be a loyal friend to Tucker Carlson? Because sooner or later, he will have to choose.

 

The Trouble with Tucker

 

Carlson, once a prime-time TV personality on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, columnist for New York, and cofounder of the Daily Caller, has been spiraling ever further into conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and propaganda for America’s enemies ever since he was let go by Fox in April 2023 amid the fallout from Carlson’s role in the network’s colossal defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Machines. That was apparently the last straw atop Rupert Murdoch’s mounting concerns with Carlson’s January 6 conspiracy theories, among other things.

 

Space does not even begin to permit a full recounting here of the ways in which Carlson, since moving his program to X/Twitter, has become steadily more extreme, paranoid, and detached from reality. This includes flacking for Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Hamas, and Qatar; hysterically predicting world war if the Trump administration hit Iran’s nuclear program; obsessing over Jews; arguing that we’d be better off as feudal peasants; and promoting World War II revisionism in which Churchill, not Hitler, was the real villain. But the provocation that really proved the tipping point in public attention to Carlson’s moral and intellectual descent was his choice to hold a sycophantic softball interview with notorious white nationalist and Hitler-loving and Stalin-praising antisemite Nick Fuentes a little over a week before Election Day 2025.

 

This was too much for many on the right to ignore. Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro tore into Carlson. Conventional Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson criticized him. The Heritage Foundation found itself plunged into months of wrenching controversy and resignations when its president, Kevin Roberts, blasted Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition,” a statement he only partly and grudgingly walked back. Carlson’s presence as an increasingly visible speaker for Turning Point USA after the assassination of Charlie Kirk led to a divisive split at the group’s events.

 

It’s bad enough for Carlson’s friends and allies that he has become increasingly toxic. But he’s getting worse — and he seems to revel in doing ever more provocative things to see how far he can push the people in his corner. This is the opposite of how a faithful ally or a good friend operates — especially an ally or friend of a man positioning himself to run for president. Even if JD Vance thinks he can survive his connection to what Carlson is doing now, there’s no way for him to predict how much further the man will go by 2028. What does it say about Vance’s judgment if he decides that he’s willing to write a blank check with his own political future to a man this unstable?

 

JD and Tucker

 

The problem for Vance is that he is tied very deeply to Carlson — so deeply that friends and foes of Vance alike (including Carlson himself) have openly called the controversies over Carlson a proxy war for opposition to Vance. Carlson promoted Vance constantly on his Fox show when Vance was running in a hotly contested Republican Senate primary in 2022, a race Vance won with 32 percent of the vote against a divided field of weak candidates. There is probably nobody — not Donald Trump or Donald Trump Jr. or even Peter Thiel — to whom Vance is more indebted for his meteoric political rise in three years from thirtysomething commentator to vice president than Tucker Carlson. Cementing the tie, Carlson’s son Buckley works on Vance’s staff.

 

Gratitude and loyalty are virtues, so it is entirely understandable that Vance would be hesitant to throw under the bus a friend who has also been a crucial patron. Vance has also postured himself as an opponent of “cancel culture,” and since the Carlson–Fuentes controversy broke, he has tried to square the circle by asking for peace between warring factions and criticizing Fuentes — but, carefully, not Carlson. Nobody is fooled by the pretense of what my colleague Noah Rothman branded Vance’s “performative neutrality”: Vance immediately pivoted to attacking Carlson’s critics while looking the other way at how intently Carlson focuses on assaults on Republicans (even Trump), and Vance himself has for years now taken to scorched-earth ad hominem attacks on Republicans and conservatives who don’t share his foreign policy views. He’s simply trying to circle the wagons in defense of Carlson without saying so.

 

For now, at least, Carlson remains enough in the good graces of both Trump and Vance to get multiple recent invitations to the White House, one of which resulted in his being asked to sit in on a Trump meeting with oil executives to discuss Venezuela not long after Trump arrested the Venezuelan leader whom Carlson had defended. If Trump finally tires of Carlson, the conflict between Vance’s loyalty to Carlson and the urgent priority of staying in Trump’s good graces will sharpen.

 

How You Win

 

Historically, one president after another has taught us the lesson that you don’t get to be president unless you’re the sort of person who will make the attainment and retention of that office a higher priority than loyalty to friends, allies, mentors, and patrons.

 

Trump, of course, has often turned on people who no longer served his purposes, and Bill Clinton did, too — even people who fell on their swords for him in investigations. Chester Arthur sold out the corrupt New York political boss Roscoe Conkling, to whom he owed everything, in accepting the vice-presidential nomination and then pursuing civil service reform as president. Harry Truman distanced himself from machine boss Tom Pendergast, who sponsored his career, when he needed to. Jimmy Carter got elected governor of Georgia by signaling that he’d govern like his mentor, arch-segregationist Lester Maddox — then turned on a dime once in office. Ronald Reagan sacked veteran campaign manager John Sears on the eve of the 1980 New Hampshire primary.

 

The most dramatic recent case was Barack Obama. Obama credited the volatile, incendiary, and bigoted Reverend Jeremiah Wright — and specifically, Wright’s radical politics — with bringing the irreligious Obama into a church. He titled his second book The Audacity of Hope after one of Wright’s sermons. When pressed on Wright’s views in March 2008, Obama distanced himself, but declared that he could no more denounce Wright than his white grandmother. While this was widely praised at the time as the greatest speech in American history, it didn’t get Obama out of his jam in the tight primary with Hillary Clinton, so in late April, he went further, branding Wright’s continuing comments “divisive and destructive”:

 

Appearing pained and irritated, the senator from Illinois said that Wright, who used a nationally televised speech Monday at the National Press Club to repeat some of his most incendiary comments, was “not the person that I met 20 years ago.” Obama called the pastor’s appearance a “spectacle” and a “performance,” and said it was a “show of disrespect to me” and “an insult to what we’ve been trying to do in this campaign.”

 

That got Obama where he needed to go, and his supporters turned on Wright. As one pastor said at the time: “I wish that Jeremiah, my friend, had kept his eye on the prize . . . the prize here for America, for all Americans, is that we can elect the first black man for the presidency.” For that, they would sacrifice anything and anyone. And so would Vance’s supporters. But if he insists on putting Tucker Carlson first and the presidency second, he may find that he has lost both.