JD Vance is attempting to write his political future. His boss has other ideas 

Being vice-president is one of the trickiest jobs in the business. It requires a deft hand at appeasing the big boss while not looking too hungry for their job. But for JD Vance, the juggling act reached new heights in June as he faced his toughest task so far – negotiating peace with Iran while subtly trying to distance himself from a president with nosediving approval ratings.

The Apprentice parallels are plentiful, as Donald Trump promises (jokingly, Vance claims) that his vice-president will take the fall should the Iran deal fail. Trump is even said to be quizzing his closest allies about whether they think Vance has what it takes for the top job – and dropping hints that he might prefer secretary of state Marco Rubio as his successor. But the 41-year-old deputy appears unfazed as he starts positioning himself, ever so slightly, apart from the man who supercharged his political career. 

On 16 June, Vance released a new memoir that The New York Times called “a running start on defining his political philosophy just as the 2028 presidential race… begins to take shape”. The book, Communion, is ostensibly about his journey away from the nondenominational Christianity of his chaotic childhood in rural Ohio and his conversion to Catholicism. That childhood was the subject of Vance’s hugely successful debut book, Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed his mother’s struggles with drug addiction and his upbringing by his larger-than-life grandmother. It became the must-read tome of 2016 among conservatives and liberals alike, as people sought to understand the grievances that had sent voters from the rural working class into the arms of Trump.

Communion doesn’t quite pull off the same feat. In the intervening years, Vance has gone from feted author to Maga darling, taking his working class, up-by-the-bootstraps political brand and hitching it to the Trump bandwagon. No one thinks of him as a representative of the rural poor anymore. 

While the book details his adoption of Catholicism, his other conversion from never-Trumper who called the president “America’s Hitler” to attack-dog-in-chief for the president is perhaps more interesting. If the account in Communion is to be believed, it was not naked ambition that prompted this U-turn but a conscious decision to prioritise policy over his disapproval of Trump’s combative style. 

Policy aside, Trump gave Vance’s political career a major boost, supporting his successful 2022 bid for Ohio’s US Senate seat and then naming him as a presidential running mate two years later. On the page, Vance repays that loyalty. Trump is mentioned 40 times (The New York Times counted), all in fawning tones. After all, those hoping for a promotion would be loath to denigrate their boss.

But Vance positions himself as a different political beast from the president, as well as someone guided by deeply held moral and religious convictions. Counter to Trump’s wealthy New Yorker persona, Vance presents himself as a regular guy, with regular work-life balance concerns such as finding the time to brush his daughter’s hair before they go to church on Sunday. In the book, he seems to be striving for some middle ground, advocating for putting Christianity at the heart of government while also saying that a person does not have to be a Christian to be a good American (which his wife Usha, a practicing Hindu, will be pleased to hear). 

The promotional tour for the book looked very much like a practice run for the campaign trail. On a variety of media outlets he attempted to present the warm and fuzzy side of a man who can come across as both awkward and aggressive. There was contrition for the “childless cat ladies” comments of 2021, which alienated huge swaths of women and cat lovers – he concedes it was a “boneheaded” statement. 

All the work to sell himself as a likeable candidate for America’s next president could be undone, however, if he fails to secure a lasting deal with the Iranian regime. As the US and Iran continue to trade strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, Vance has been in Switzerland hammering out the details of the end of the war, which has been deeply unpopular in the US. Yet even though most Americans support its end, less than half of the Maga faithful think that the US-Iran agreement is in the country’s best interest. 

Anything less than a perfect deal that favours the US could be “career ending” for Vance, says Thomas Whalen, associate professor at Boston University and an expert on vice-presidential dynamics. “That has always been a traditional role of vice-presidents,” he adds. “The president doesn’t want to receive the criticism, so [he’ll] get the vice-president to take the flak for him.”

But even if Vance does weather the current storm, Whalen believes that he is in an impossible position. The greatest hurdle to a JD Vance presidency could be Trump himself, whose capricious behaviour has proven that he can turn on his allies in a second. “It’s like Trump is the whale,” says Whalen, “and [Vance] is the little insignificant pilot fish in his wake, waiting to get crushed.”