Hillbilly Elegy

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, March 06, 2026

 

Resolved: J.D. Vance would have been better off being passed over for vice president and remaining in the Senate.

 

I’ve spent the past week kicking that around and have decided that it’s incorrect, although not so flagrantly incorrect that it qualifies as a hot take. A case can be made that Sen. Vance would be more likely to become president in 2028 than Vice President Vance is.

 

It’s not complicated. If Donald Trump’s term spirals into disaster, his vice president will inherit every bit of political baggage that the president amasses. That’s a lotta suitcases potentially.

 

America is losing jobs, due in part to unpopular tariffs that Trump pigheadedly persists in imposing despite the exit ramp that the Supreme Court created for him. The White House’s best issue, immigration enforcement, has been mishandled so atrociously that 50 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE. As of last Friday, we’re waging an unauthorized war in the Middle East against an enemy whom even George W. Bush declined to tangle with, launched by an administration that sold itself fraudulently as the “pro-peace” alternative to Democrats in 2024.

 

Even if the worst thing that happens to the United States because of that war is no more horrifying than a surge in gas prices, the inflationary consequences could plausibly wreck Trump’s approval and pile one more heavy trunk onto his successor’s back.

 

Vice President Vance will have to carry it. Sen. Vance would not have.

 

It gets worse. For committed nationalists like Tucker Carlson, having Vance as Trump’s right-hand man was meant to be a sort of insurance policy against the president falling under the sway of zombie Reaganism. The new VP would keep the big guy on the “America First” straight and narrow—no new wars, of course (especially against Iran!), but also more federal aid for the working class and fewer giveaways to the business class and U.S. allies overseas.

 

He’s failed at almost every turn, as The Atlantic noted earlier this week. “Vance’s nomination as vice president was not a concession to the Republican Party of old, but a promise of the Republican Party to come, of Trumpism after Trump,” author Idrees Kahloon observed. “Instead, he has receded in importance in the past year.” With the natcon wunderkind at his side, Trump bombed Iran not once but twice and championed a Big Beautiful Bill that was mostly standard establishment tax-cutting fare. So much for the new Republican Party.

 

To all appearances, the vice president wields considerably less influence over the president’s thinking than Secretary of State Marco Rubio does. If you had told Tucker in 2024 that Trump would be posting things like “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!)” less than 14 months into his second term, how successful would he say the “J.D. as insurance policy” experiment had been?

 

Vance’s failure to prevent his boss from becoming the neocon messiah is so total that some of his fellow doves have—gasp—begun to question his sincerity. “This is a guy who has converted from atheism to Catholicism, the guy who called Trump ‘Hitler’ who is now his vice president,” one told Politico. “Am I confident that he is entirely moored or tethered to any one perspective or worldview? No.” Right-wing isolationists’ dreams of remaking the GOP into an anti-war party are up in smoke because of the vice president’s ineffectiveness.

 

And there’s nothing realistically to be done about it apart from clamming up and hoping no one notices. (Normally a prolific tweeter, Vance hasn’t posted anything since Monday as I write this. People have noticed.) The VP is on a voyage of the damned, forced to spend his days until January 2029 dutifully wolfing down whatever policy sh-t sandwich Trump feeds him and burbling for television cameras about how delicious it is. His status as heir apparent depends entirely on maintaining unwavering loyalty; no matter where this ride goes, Vance is stuck on it.

 

Sen. J.D. Vance would have been blissfully untainted by comparison. In fact, he’d be teed up to challenge Vice President Marco Rubio in 2028 on a “true right-wing nationalism has never been tried” platform. President Trump did wonderful things, he might have said, but we spent too much money on war during his term and not enough on making Americans better off. He could have pitched himself as “the promise of the Republican Party to come,” in Kahloon’s words, and many Republican voters dissatisfied by Trump’s second term would have been intrigued.

 

But Vice President Vance? How could he present himself that way at this point without voters laughing in his face?

 

I’m almost convinced that he did the wrong thing in hindsight by joining the 2024 ticket. Almost.

 

A bucket of warm spit.

 

If you had to bet on who’s more likely to be president in 2029, on whom would you bet? J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley?

 

I mention Hawley because he’s the closest analogue to Vance ideologically in the Senate. He’s very much a nationalist in his economic preferences, frequently challenging conservatarian policies for not prioritizing the working class. And he’s enough of a dove to have called for the U.S. to end aid to Ukraine during the Biden administration. If you’ve been searching for someone to take up the banner of “America First” against the now-compromised Vance in a 2028 primary, your search is over.

 

But if that contest happened, I’m guessing you wouldn’t wager on Hawley to win. I sure wouldn’t.

 

Contrary to what I said earlier, being in the Senate will not completely protect an ambitious young Republican from having to tote the president’s considerable political baggage. In a normal party, there would be some (although not limitless) room politically for a lawmaker to oppose the leader of his faction, even on a matter as momentous as war. Witness the late Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican who supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq initially, came to regret it by 2007—and won election to the House six more times anyway.

 

That’s unthinkable in a political cult like the modern GOP and Josh Hawley knows it, which is why he keeps finding excuses not to disappoint the president. Last year he voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act despite the steep cuts it made to Medicaid, then lamely turned around and tried to reinstate that funding via a new bill that he knew would fail. In January he backed a Democratic war powers resolution that would have limited Trump’s authority in Venezuela; when that caught the president’s attention, Hawley hastily reconsidered.

 

This week he cut straight to the chase and opposed a new Democratic resolution that would have prevented further military action by Trump in Iran. “If there’s not a use of ground troops involved, the president has 60 days to conduct operations,” the Yale Law grad and former state attorney general insisted, blatantly misstating what the War Powers Act says.

 

Had J.D. Vance stayed in the Senate, he’d be living the same nightmare Hawley is living right now, repeatedly forced to find pretexts for betraying his own beliefs out of fear of getting crosswise with Trump. It’s true that he wouldn’t have “owned” Trump’s policies to the same degree that he does as vice president, but he still would have been forced to squander much of his nationalist credibility as “the promise of the Republican Party to come” due to constant pressure to prove his loyalty to the White House on war votes.

 

Essentially, Sen. Vance would have been forced to take all of the same positions he’s taken as vice president over the last 14 months but without the phenomenal name recognition and political connections that being on a winning presidential ticket has brought him. Trump’s baggage but without the “heir apparent” halo: That’s his life right now on Earth 2, where he’s still a senator.

 

Consider the possibility too that being in the White House rather than the Senate might, paradoxically, help shield Vance from the disgruntlement some voters feel about Trump’s agenda. Hawley’s failure to oppose the president’s worst policies reads as what it is, a matter of political cowardice by a member of Congress with a meaningful vote. His behavior tells “America First-ers” something about his mettle and the strength of his convictions. But Vance’s role is different, that of a glorified PR flack, and everyone understands that. When he carries the president’s water, he’s merely doing what his job requires.

 

And so, if you’re a nationalist who yearns to believe that “the real J.D.” is still the committed postliberal he claimed to be and would govern as one as president, convincing yourself shouldn’t be hard. He’s in a position that famously isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit; that he faithfully reads the scripts he’s handed proves nothing about his resolve or beliefs. I even wonder if having to defend Reaganite policies might not help him on balance in a future Republican primary, as doing so will reassure the center-right that he’s “reasonable” while the far right gives him a free pass on grounds that he’s simply saying what Trump wants him to say.

 

Still, in the end, the case for why Vice President Vance has a better chance of becoming president in 2029 than Sen. Vance would have had is probably this simple: Although the Trump-stink he’ll bear as a general election candidate might overpower swing voters, it will smell like the sweetest of bouquets to the Republican primary electorate. Being the president’s designated successor will make J.D. Vance all but unbeatable as the GOP’s next nominee, I think, even if Trump’s presidency hits the rocks.

 

If you doubt it, go watch CNN data analyst Harry Enten marvel over the resilience of Trump’s support on the American right. He’s at 86 percent support within his own party; at this point in their second terms, Bush and Barack Obama were at 77 percent. Of the three, the current president is the only one who has/had a clear majority of “strong approval” from his own party. And when you drill down to his core base of self-described “MAGA Republicans,” as Fox News did in its latest poll, you get numbers that resemble Saddam Hussein’s in an Iraqi election. No typo: 98 percent of that cohort told Fox that they approve of Trump’s performance.

 

To say that the modern right is easily led understates its mortifying devotion to Trump considerably. The 2028 Republican primary is apt to look less like a political contest than Muhammad announcing who’ll succeed him as prophet. That means Vice President J.D. Vance is almost certain to be leading the ticket in November 2028, with no worse than a 1 in 3 chance of winning even in a truly rotten electoral environment. As a senator, he’d be nowhere.

 

I know what you’re thinking, though. What about Tucker Carlson?

 

2016 redux?

 

“If Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 in part because of Republican voters’ disenchantment with the GOP leadership that attacked Iraq,” Washington Post columnist Jason Willick warned last weekend, “watch out for a failed war of choice in Iran boosting Carlson’s chances of taking over the party.”

 

In any discussion of how Vance might feasibly run into trouble in a 2028 primary, Carlson’s name is the one that reliably comes up. There are other nationalists who could enter the race and try to stake out the “America First” ground to Vance’s right but none are as formidable as the Father Coughlin of our time. Steve Bannon has all the postliberal malevolence the chud right could want but lacks the charisma. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, having morphed into an outspoken Trump critic, would be unpalatable to too many MAGA voters to pose a real threat.

 

Only Carlson combines the malevolence, charisma, blowhard mojo, and name recognition that a party run by and for unserious demagogues craves. And because he’s the most vocal isolationist in MAGA media, our unfortunate new war has created an obvious political opening for him. Last weekend, with the first bombs falling on Iran, Carlson called the war “absolutely disgusting and evil” (something he’s rarely, if ever, said about Russia’s terror campaign in Ukraine) and noted provocatively that “This is going to shuffle the deck in a profound way.”

 

He might even have a personal reason to enter the race if Vance looks poised to skate through unchallenged. No one in right-wing infotainment did more than Tucker to promote the VP’s fledgling political career in 2022 and help make him a national figure before he landed on the GOP ticket two years later. Carlson might consider Vance’s complicity in Trump’s “neocons gone wild” foreign policy a personal betrayal, with no allowances made for the proverbial bucket of warm spit.

 

So I take Willick’s point. If one “America First” Joker was able to leverage the right’s disgruntlement over foreign policy to seize the GOP from its discredited establishment 10 years ago, why couldn’t another do it in 2028? In a party of fascists, cultists, cowards, and crooks, no one is too extreme to catch fire politically. Why, Greene sounds gung ho for Tucker 2028 already.

 

And yet, as long as Donald Trump is alive, I find it impossible to imagine his flock defying his wishes on a matter as momentous as who his successor as GOP God-emperor should be.

 

That successor won’t be Carlson if Trump has his way. “I think that MAGA is Trump—MAGA’s not the other two,” the president said this week in an interview about criticism from Tucker and Megyn Kelly over the war. Later, speaking to ABC News, he hit harder. “Tucker has lost his way,” he told Jonathan Karl. “I knew that a long time ago, and he’s not MAGA. MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”

 

Trump would regard Carlson challenging Vance in 2028 as an act of supreme disloyalty, an attempt to convince “his people” that his presidency was a failure and that they should depose him as leader. He would look to crush Tucker to prove his abiding domination of the right the same way he crushed Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primary (and tried, but failed, to crush Brian Kemp in the 2022 Georgia gubernatorial primary).

 

He would accuse Carlson of wanting Shiite fanatics to have nuclear weapons. He would warn Republicans that Tucker’s insane Jew-baiting will split the right and destroy the GOP’s chances in the general election. (In a postliberal party, moral outrages are unacceptable only if they weaken the party’s grip on power. Besides, the VP should be anti-anti-Nazi enough to satisfy actual Nazis.) He would cajole and threaten every prominent Republican in America to marginalize Carlson by endorsing Vance full-throatedly, and virtually all would—most without needing much persuasion, given the alternative.

 

Trump would not sit by and risk losing a battle for right-wing influence with the highest political stakes to a rival demagogue whom he knows hates him passionately. And I can’t imagine that he would lose. Only if he died before 2028 or if the Iran war went so stupendously badly as to shake even MAGA’s faith would a Carlson candidacy gain real traction. And of course, if Trump died, Vice President Vance would be President Vance by the time the next primary is held. Good luck winning in that case, Tucker.

 

Carlson knows what he’s up against. When he was asked yesterday about the president’s criticism, he replied meekly, “There are times I get annoyed with Trump, right now definitely included, but I’ll always love him no matter what he says about me.” On a scale of political bravery, with Josh Hawley a 0 and Liz Cheney a 10, that’s about a 2.

 

That said, I’m prepared to revisit all of this in late May depending on what happens in Texas.

 

That’s when the runoff will be held in the Republican Senate primary between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton. Trump is preparing to back the establishmentarian Cornyn, three sources told the Washington Post, and announced a few days ago that he expects whichever candidate doesn’t receive his endorsement to drop out immediately so as to spare the GOP another three months of intraparty feuding.

 

MAGA diehards, who naturally prefer the amoral Paxton, are unhappy about it and have begun agitating against the looming Cornyn endorsement on social media. Paxton himself said in an interview this week that he won’t drop out, then amended that to say that he’ll consider it if Senate Republicans pass the SAVE Act—which almost certainly won’t happen.

 

He’s preparing to defy Trump, in other words, at a moment when right-wing nationalists have an axe to grind with the White House over foreign policy. If Paxton wins the runoff despite the president endorsing Cornyn, when every Republican voter in Texas knows how risky Paxton would be as a general election candidate, that’s when I’ll start believing that a hard-right insurgency against Trump’s handpicked successor stands a chance of succeeding in 2028. But not before.

 

It’s a cult until it isn’t. Sorry, Tucker. Congratulations, J.D.