J.D. Vance's strange role
The difference between prominence and power
The saying, “Children should be seen and not heard” traces back to a book of sermons compiled by John Mirk in the late 1380s.
Mirk was a priest in Shropshire, in western England. His book, titled “Festial,” was so popular it was hand copied more than 40 times and, after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, printed in more than 20 editions.
“In the original form it was specifically young women who were expected to keep quiet,” according to the Phrase Finder. Mirk wrote that there was an Old English saying, “A mayde schuld be seen but not heard.” A “mayde” was a young girl, although the term could also refer to celibate men.
As parental advice, the saying is horrendous. As guidance for U.S. vice presidents, the idea of being “seen and not heard” is virtually a job description.
By tradition, vice presidents are expected to never disagree publicly with POTUS. They represent the White House at ribbon cuttings and funerals, their statements carefully vetted in advance to avoid even a hint of daylight appearing between their stated views and the president’s.
That’s why the opening months of J.D. Vance’s vice presidency have been so striking. He walloped European allies with his analysis of what’s broken in their societies, initiated the attempted humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and appeared to subtly criticize President Donald Trump’s understanding of foreign policy in the “Signalgate” text chat that administration insiders expected to stay private.
Visiting a U.S. base in Greenland last month in a green parka several sizes too large, Vance put forth Trump’s case for wresting the territory away from Denmark. And during a family vacation/working trip to Rome, Vance visited briefly with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday, hours before the pontiff’s death due to a stroke.
His visit rekindled discussion of tension with the Vatican over the vice president’s stance on immigration. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, had argued that church doctrine was consistent with the Trump administration’s deportations, an interpretation the Pope rejected in a February letter to U.S. bishops.
Speaking out
In one way, it’s not a surprise that Vance has been an unusually outspoken vice president. He came to national attention in 2016 with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which the then 31-year-old former Marine, Yale Law School graduate and venture capitalist harshly criticized his own clan.
“The truth is hard, and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves,” wrote Vance. The Kentucky town where his ancestors lived, he wrote, “is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.”
He expressed gratitude to Mamaw, his grandmother, who made it possible for him to survive childhood in a dysfunctional family. But he wasn’t at all shy about calling out character flaws and failings in his own culture. Not many people would take that step, particularly because it risks reinforcing unfair stereotypes about one’s ethnic group.
Speaking out paid off for Vance and eventually put him a heartbeat away from the presidency.
The veep problem
Former vice presidents haven’t been shy about the job’s basic problem: the lack of a significant constitutionally mandated role aside from succeeding a dead president and breaking tie votes in the Senate.
Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, discovered how an essentially ceremonial duty, that of presiding over the certification of the Electoral College results, put his life in jeopardy and made him a MAGA pariah.
But few vice presidents get that level of attention, unwelcome as it was.
George Washington’s veep John Adams called it “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.”
John Nance Garner, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first-term vice president, said the job is “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Lyndon B. Johnson seethed at his marginalization under President John F. Kennedy. Yet, in more recent administrations, veeps such as Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Dick Cheney have managed to carve out influential roles, with their presidents’ encouragement.
The relationship between President Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, had moments of high tension. In 2012, Biden famously endorsed same-sex marriage before Obama announced his backing. The president said that was fine, while adding that Biden had “got out a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit.”
And as the Wall Street Journal noted last week, “Biden harbored a lasting grudge against Obama” for helping anoint Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. “Biden seriously considered entering the race that year and felt insulted when Obama asked him, ‘How do you want to spend the rest of your life?’ He took it to mean that Obama didn’t see him running for president as an option, [Jonathan] Allen and [Amie] Parnes report. After the debate fiasco in 2024, Biden was again infuriated when Obama asked him, ‘What’s your path?’”
Vance’s path
Vance may be able to walk a different path. He’s 38 years younger than the 78-year-old president, which is in itself unusual. According to Pew Research, the median age gap between presidents and vice presidents is less than seven years.
He is the closest thing to a designated successor as leader of the MAGA movement, but that is an uneasy position to occupy.
Trump’s personal hold on his followers suggests that the mercurial leader could pick someone else, perhaps his son Donald Jr., to carry the torch after he returns to Mar-a-Lago. It’s even possible that he will try to avoid designating a successor at all in 2028, since Trump says he is looking at ways to run for a third term.
Claiming that the 22nd Amendment only forbids a two-term president from running for a third term, but not serving a third term, some Republicans have suggested Vance could run for president in 2028 with Trump as his vice presidential running mate and then immediately resign from office. He would thereby surrender the job to Trump, who could then nominate a candidate to fill the vice presidential vacancy.
Such a self-effacing, even humiliating role, is hard to reconcile with Vance’s evident ambition. But he has to operate within the constraints of a movement that adores Donald Trump above all.
The more immediate question is how Vance plans to navigate the rest of the four-year term, with Trump clearly in the top spot.
Will Trump continue to find Vance’s trolling of world leaders and liberals a plus? Will he clip his wings?
LBJ and JFK
A look at a much different presidency suggests the extremes to which the relationship between the top two officials can go.
In 1960, Americans elected the youngest president ever, the 43-year-old John F. Kennedy. His running mate was Lyndon B. Johnson, who was 8 years older. The gap in their Washington careers was even bigger: Kennedy was a second-term senator from Massachusetts, prominent largely because of the clout of his family. By contrast, Johnson had immense power in the Senate, having served as majority leader and learned to get his way in matters large and small.
In Master of the Senate, Robert Caro painstakingly documented how LBJ became one of the most powerful legislative leaders in U.S. history. But it is his follow-up volume in the Johnson biography series, Passage of Power, that offers a devastating chronicle of the downsizing of the Texas politician during his time as vice president.
As a biographer, Caro is a kind of Leonardo da Vinci. Through meticulous research, he applies layer after layer to the portraits he paints. In this telling, incident after incident pile up to show how the Kennedy White House systematically and relentlessly deprived Johnson of any real power.
At the outset of the administration, Johnson imagined that he could reshape the role of vice president, elevating it far above the historical reality of the job. As Robert Dallek wrote, “Johnson was mindful of the observation made by Thomas R. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's V.P., that the Vice President "is like a man in a cataleptic state. He cannot speak. He cannot move. He suffers no pain. And yet he is conscious of all that goes on around him."
Fearing that fate, Johnson submitted a proposed presidential order that would have given him extraordinary control over parts of the government. Not surprisingly, JFK brushed it aside.
Johnson even tried to retain control over the Democratic majority in the Senate, but his former colleagues there bristled at the idea.
As Caro wrote:
As always, he had a vivid phrase to describe what had occurred. "I now know the difference between a caucus and a cactus," he told [aide Bobby] Baker.
"In a cactus, all the pricks are on the outside." But no words could hide the pain. "Those bastards sandbagged me," he told Baker.
Far from giving Johnson a prominent role in the administration, Kennedy’s team excluded him from key meetings, including during the Cuban missile crisis.
Johnson was required to pre-clear all his speeches with the White House and even to get advance approval for any flights on government planes.
“Lyndon Johnson, who had devoted all his life to the accumulation of power, possessed now no power at all,” wrote Caro, “and as Vice President the only power he would ever possess was what the President might choose to give him.”
There was a level of cruelty in the Kennedy set’s attitude toward Johnson. At social events, Caro noted, they tossed around a nickname for Johnson: “Rufus Cornpone.” Some journalists “who, as members of the in-group, were at the parties would hear a West Winger laughingly refer to ‘Lyndon? Lyndon Who?’ and references to the situation would creep into print.
Johnson took all of this very badly. He lost weight, he couldn’t sleep, he didn’t speak up in meetings, he chafed at the treatment he was getting.
And as the months went by, his greatest fear came into view. While LBJ had accepted the vice presidency as a route to the Democratic nomination for the top job in 1968, he began to worry that the Kennedys had two things in mind: dropping him from the ticket in 1964 and running the president’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, to succeed JFK in 1968.
Bobby Kennedy, who was the Attorney General, had barely hidden his contempt for Johnson and did what he could to marginalize the Texan.
Johnson’s fears about his future were not groundless. Caro noted that Jackie Kennedy wrote in a private letter of JFK’s “steadily diminishing opinion” of his vice president. "As his term progressed, he grew more and more concerned about what would happen if LBJ ever became President. He was truly frightened at the prospect."
On November 22, 1963, everything changed. An assassin killed John F. Kennedy as he rode in an open-topped limousine on a Dallas highway. Johnson took the oath of office as president on Air Force One hours later. A shocked Jacqueline Kennedy, still wearing the dress stained with the president’s blood, stood beside him. LBJ was suddenly the most powerful leader in the world.
Vance’s role
During his time as vice president under Kennedy, Johnson soon learned not to mistake the prominence he had for actual power.
Vance is far less experienced in the ways of Washington than LBJ was. As Sabrina Eaton wrote for Cleveland.com:
Passing legislation through the U.S. Senate can take years. Scoring political points there takes a few minutes. Ohio’s JD Vance has had way more success with the latter than the former in less than two years as a U.S. Senator.
The Cincinnati Republican hasn’t passed any of his standalone legislation since taking office in 2023, but his use of the institution’s bully pulpit to excoriate Democratic President Joe Biden and extoll GOP candidate Donald Trump delivered a huge prize last month: Trump’s decision to make Vance his vice-presidential running mate.
Vance seems to have leeway to stake out controversial positions on his own. His patronizing speech to European leaders in Munich burned bridges with U.S. allies. His outburst against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office shocked many people.
Outside Trump’s base, Vance’s vice presidency is off to a mediocre start. His approval rating in recent polls has been on a par with Trump’s, which is historically low for a president early in his term.
Big mistake
But perhaps the most damaging mistake Vance has made was to criticize Trump in the back-and-forth with other administration officials over the missile attacks on the Houthis, the rebel group in Yemen that has targeted global shipping.
Vance had no way of knowing that the chat on Signal was being shared with a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic. And so he probably figured that Trump, let alone the public, would never see his comments. But still, allowing the perception of a policy difference with the president to circulate among his aides was a risky misstep.
As NBC News wrote:
“I think we are making a mistake,” Vance wrote in the Signal chat, later published by The Atlantic. Vance argued that although Trump wanted to send a message with the strikes, “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” He did say, though, that he was “willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,” but went on to say “there is a strong argument for delaying this a month.”
Minutes later, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller shut down the conversation, writing, “As I heard it, the president was clear.”
Trump claims he has the power to fire commissioners of the FTC and of other “independent” administrative agencies. He even argues that he can oust Fed Chairman Jerome Powell before his term expires. The Supreme Court is due to hear a case on the extent of the president’s power to fire people.
Yet one thing is clear: Trump can’t fire J.D. Vance.
But he can definitely make his life miserable.
If Trump had half a brain, he'd bury Vance so deep in meaningless, nanoscale vice-presidential duties that he'll never be heard from again. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump does not have half a brain.