The Leopard Tamer

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, March 20, 2026

 

I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to make sense of these two paragraphs in the Washington Post.

 

While the political impact of the war could be significant, [Vice President J.D.] Vance has maintained in recent private conversations that he hasn’t yet decided whether he will seek the presidential nomination for 2028, according to two people who have recently discussed the matter with him. One of those people cited Vance’s fourth child, due this summer, and said the vice president has put a priority on his family life and is unlikely to make a final decision until he and Usha Vance see how another baby affects their lives.

 

If the U.S. involvement in the war goes on for months, say some people close to Vance, it will have a major impact and the next GOP presidential nominee, whoever it ends up being, will have to explain the war’s rationale to voters in the 2028 election.

 

J.D. Vance isn’t sure if he wants to run for president?

 

In six years, Vance went from wondering whether Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler” to insisting that the United States is in a “late republican period” that requires Trump to behave in ways that make conservatives uncomfortable, starting with defying Supreme Court rulings.

 

He’s rushed to defend bigots in order to prove how “based” he is to the chuds who dominate right-wing activism, including pulling his punches against racists who slurred his own Indian American wife as a “jeet.”

 

And he’s dutifully toed the White House line as Trump has gone about betraying pretty much every “America First” priority except mass deportation. (And soon maybe that too.)

 

No one this side of Elise Stefanik has sold their soul as shamelessly as Vance for the sake of political ambition and no one—period—got as much in return. From senator to vice president to frontrunner for his party’s nomination in a decade: 41-year-old J.D. Vance successfully outmaneuvered every other Republican politician in America to become the heir apparent to Donald Trump.

 

And now he’s … not sure he wants it?

 

Having struck a Faustian postliberal bargain that delivered him to the brink of imperial power, he’s thinking of letting Mephistopheles out of his end of the deal?

 

He prefers political oblivion in 2029 to rolling the dice on a national election in which the probability of him becoming president, even in a bad environment for Republicans, would be no worse than 45 percent or so?

 

There’s no way. I refuse to believe that Vance is earnestly wavering on running for president.

 

But it sure is interesting that he seems to want everyone to think that he is.

 

What would he stand to gain by letting it be known that he’s iffy about 2028? Let’s consider.

 

Theory one: Vance is signaling his misgivings about the war.

 

As noted earlier this month, the Iran war placed the VP in a singularly awkward position among Trump’s Cabinet.

 

More than any other official in the administration, the postliberal right expected Vance to steer the president away from new wars in the Middle East. He failed—badly. Now he finds himself trapped, forced to keep his yap shut about his opposition to the conflict yet without a portfolio that would allow him to directly influence the course of events.

 

He’s not Pete Hegseth or Gen. Dan Caine, planning military operations. He’s not Marco Rubio, the point man on potential negotiations with Iran’s regime. He’s not even Joe Kent, free to resign his position and go out in a blaze of Israel-bashing glory by martyring himself for the anti-war crowd.

 

Vance’s stature as heir apparent among most Republican voters rests entirely on him remaining loyal to the president no matter how verkakte this war gets. Yet the more verkakte it gets, the more pressure he’ll feel to reassure the right’s Tucker Carlson wing and the anti-war American majority that he opposes the conflict. Quite a pickle.

 

One solution (and maybe the only solution) is to have his allies start leaking, letting his feelings about the war be known while keeping his fingerprints off of them. Lo and behold, last week Politico published a buzzy scoop citing two senior White House officials keen for Americans to know that the vice president disliked the idea of a new foreign intervention from the start.

 

“Vance is ‘skeptical,’ is ‘worried about success’ and ‘just opposes’ the war on Iran,” one of those officials told the outlet. In hindsight, Kamala Harris would have benefited from seeding similar leaks early during the previous administration about any misgivings she might have had over Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

 

The chatter about Vance supposedly wavering over 2028 could be part of that grander leak strategy. Not only did he think the war was a bad idea, he wants us to believe, he thinks it’s such a bad idea that it might make the next presidential election unwinnable for the GOP. He’s not willing to offer himself up as a sacrificial lamb for his party in a doomed election after he counseled against doing the very thing that seems destined to doom Republicans.

 

“This war is so terrible that it’s making me reconsider my political future” is one way to drive home the depth of your opposition to it. Even if it’s insincere.

 

If nothing else, it might get Trump’s attention and lead the president to take Vance’s counsel about the conflict more seriously. Threatening to pull the plug on a 2028 campaign preemptively is a dramatic way to convey one’s belief that the war needs to end soon, before it becomes totally radioactive politically for the next Republican standard-bearer.

 

Theory two: Vance has lost the title of heir apparent to Rubio and he knows it.

 

Maybe the leak to the Post is the VP’s version of “you can’t fire me, I quit.”

 

With Venezuela under the president’s thumb, Iran in the crosshairs, and Cuba apparently next, Trump has plainly veered toward Marco Rubio’s nationalist twist on neoconservatism and away from Vance’s “America First” postliberalism. So it’s probably not a coincidence that “Rubio 2028” is catching on inside the White House, per recent reports by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News.

 

The president routinely surveys confidants about whether they prefer Vance or Rubio as the party’s next nominee, the two outlets alleged—a strange thing to do if in fact Trump has settled on his vice president as heir apparent.

 

So maybe he hasn’t. “Increasingly, Trump has shown fondness for Rubio, according to people who have spoken to the president, praising him in private and telling associates that he thinks the former Florida senator is electable,” the Journal claimed. “Trump’s second-term fixation on foreign policy has put Rubio at the center of the administration’s most high-profile moves, and the president often turns to Rubio for advice, the people said.”

 

The older and well-heeled donor class might also prefer a pre-Trump conservative like Rubio to the post-Trump nationalist arriviste Vance. At one gathering last month at Mar-a-Lago that included 25 Republican donors, the president asked the crowd who they wanted to lead the party in 2028. “It was almost unanimous for Marco,” one attendee told NBC News of the response. Another source who fundraises for Trump claimed that opinion is split 80-20 in Rubio’s favor among people in Trump’s orbit.

 

This quote from a Trump press conference on March 11 is also noteworthy. Asked about Vance’s position on the Iran war, the president replied, “He was, I’d say, philosophically a little different from me. I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going [to war], but he was still quite enthusiastic.”

 

If Trump were a different person, I’d read that as his attempt to do Vance a favor, confirming that the vice president is a war skeptic for the benefit of J.D.’s postliberal boosters. (Although the “quite enthusiastic” part sure doesn’t help.) But he isn’t a different person. He’s Trump, so I can only assume that he perceives Vance’s misgivings about the war as a form of disloyalty and felt moved to point them out because he’s peeved at him.

 

All of which is to say that we appear to be on track for the president to pull his running mate aside at some point early next year and say, “I want Marco to run, not you. It’s his turn.”

 

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent American history that a sitting president urged his No. 2 to stand aside in the next election for the secretary of state. Vance might find comfort in that, as it worked out okay for Joe Biden in the following cycle. Why not let Rubio be the sacrificial lamb for Republicans in 2028, the veep might reason, and reemerge in 2032 running on a platform of “true Trumpism has never been tried”?

 

He’ll be all of 48 years old on Election Day that year. He has time.

 

To return to the point, though: If Vance has an inkling that Trump is prepared to endorse Rubio instead of him, it’s in his interest to make that appear less like a snub and more like an outcome that Vance himself desired. Putting out the word early that he may want to spend more time with his family gives him a handy excuse later to claim that the president endorsed the other guy only because J.D. wasn’t interested.

 

That way, when he runs in 2032, he doesn’t look like a loser. Or not as much of one, I should say.

 

Theory three: Vance is triangulating.

 

If I still cared a whit about the Republican Party, I’d actually be terrified by the thought of a 2028 primary without J.D. Vance.

 

I say that as someone who obviously prefers Rubio. And I stand by the point I made in my last column about the coming primary: The president’s sway over his supporters is so cultish that whoever he endorses will be a heavy favorite to win the nomination, no matter who that person might be.

 

Still, Marco Rubio as MAGA heir apparent would present a political problem for the GOP that J.D. Vance wouldn’t. The chud right would be gunning for him intensely, far more than they would for the vice president.

 

Rubio is a potential “America First” villain straight out of central casting. For one thing, he’s an interloper—a “neocon” who was reborn as a Trumpist, insinuated himself into the president’s inner circle, then talked the big guy into adopting a foreign policy that looks suspiciously like neoconservatism. Rubio hijacked MAGA, postliberals will cry. We need to beat him and take back our movement.

 

Whatever right-wing backlash there is to the war will also land more heavily on the secretary of state than on the vice president given their differing enthusiasm for foreign interventions. Vance’s skepticism about attacking Iran is a matter of record dating back to before he entered the Cabinet, as is Rubio’s preference for being more confrontational toward the Islamic Republic. General election voters likely won’t distinguish between the two, finding them equally culpable for the conflict per their roles in the administration, but right-wing isolationists would. They’d fear that a party led by Rubio would be more likely to revert to Bushism (insofar as it hasn’t already) than a party led by Vance, and rightly so.

 

Also, as a simple matter of lowbrow “us and them” populism, one man is clearly more qualified than the other. Rubio is Latino, has been a professional politician for 25 years, and rarely stoops to the sort of dim-bulb demagoguery that makes modern Republican hearts flutter. Vance is Midwestern hillbilly stock, has been in politics for four years, and is never more in his element than when he’s accusing immigrants of stealing and eating people’s pets.

 

I wouldn’t bet against Rubio winning the nomination, and probably winning it easily, so long as the president is in his corner. But if you worry about a chud dream ticket of Tucker Carlson and Joe Kent jumping into the race and captivating the base with an “Oswald Mosley did nothing wrong” platform, Rubio as presumptive nominee would create far more space for that sort of candidacy than Vance would. Especially if one or more mainstream conservatives insisted on running and dividing the center-right vote with him.

 

Remember: Trump’s preference is usually determinative in primaries. But not always.

 

Maybe J.D. Vance is thinking about all of this and wants Republicans who prefer Rubio to start thinking about it too. Hence the leak to the Post: The surest way to force all of us to start wrestling with the implications of a vicious, chaotic Vance-less primary in 2028 is for him to hint that he might not run after all.

 

If the Marco fans at Mar-a-Lago are comfortable with that, fine. But it’s very likely that there will be a formidable postliberal candidate in the next primary, one way or another. Either it’ll be the vice president, who’s broadly acceptable to most Republicans and, for all his faults, hasn’t yet stooped to blaming Chabad for the Iran war. Or it’ll be a figure like Carlson or James Fishback whose ascension crosses a moral red line for conservatives and tears the party apart ahead of that year’s general election.

 

In theory, I mean. In practice, anti-anti-Trumpers would inevitably become anti-anti-Tuckers, cranking out op-eds in October 2028 rationalizing why being governed by a Jew-baiting Lindberghian is preferable to being governed by Josh Shapiro.

 

But I digress.

 

Under this third theory, Vance’s hesitation about running is a subtle way of triangulating between Rubio, whom postliberals will despise, and some Carlson type whom swing voters in the general election (and the remaining few right-wingers with a moral compass) would abhor. In a party full of populist leopards hungry for people’s faces, Rubio is at risk of being eaten and Carlson seems eager to set them loose on America. The vice president might be the only candidate who’s acceptable to the leopards and to all other Republican factions, guaranteeing an uneventful primary.

 

“Contemplate the horror of the next primary without a leopard tamer” is the point of the leak to the Post. I think.

 

But if I’m wrong and Vance really is considering passing on 2028, maybe this is just the next stage of his political, uh, evolution. Having sensed the winds blowing toward Trumpism a decade ago and reoriented himself accordingly, perhaps J.D. has sensed a shift away and is preparing to reorient again. After disappearing for a few years, he might reemerge in 2032 in some exciting new iteration that also just so happens to jibe perfectly with the right’s ideological mood at the time. My money’s on “anti-AI luddite calling for Butlerian jihad against his former friends in Silicon Valley,” but I’m excited to find out.