Today ends the first year of President Trump’s second term. Only extreme partisans will deny that 45-47 has written many victories on the wall in the past year — the closed border, “eight-and-a-quarter” peace negotiations, the “one big beautiful bill,” Operations Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve and the wonderful combination of falling inflation and rising wages and, of course, rising domestic oil and gas production and the move toward small, modular nuclear reactors. (President Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright don’t often make headlines about our energy outbreak, but AI and our nation’s national security depend on its continuation and expansion.)
What matters most to the world is his achievements in his first year back: President Trump is not only the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in history, he also knows how to use it. Trump restored the American deterrent lost by our collapse in Afghanistan by becoming “The Punisher.”
Iran, Islamist terrorists across Africa from Somalia to Nigeria, and Nicholas Maduro have all suffered devastating blows that have punished them for behavior outside the guardrails President Trump has set. Iran is likely still on the receiving end of another massive, but swift and devastating blow that could leave Kharg Island and other oil export facilities in Iran in ruins and the Ayatollahs and the IRGC deprived of any means to finance their massive killings.
TRUMP SAYS JD VANCE ‘WOULD PROBABLY BE THE FAVORITE’ FOR THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION IN 2028
It turns out that it is not wise to ignore Trump’s demands on issues he considers essential to America’s national security.
Today also marks the first year that Vice President J.D. Vance has been the only other official elected nationwide. Take a moment to zoom in on the 41-year-old former Ohio senator, investment banker, Yale-educated lawyer and Marine.
The vice president has been the ideal number two in his first year: he supports his boss, messages him, gives his best advice and is willing to go where dutiful vice presidents should go: Europe and wherever the president sends him.
But Vance also emerged in the first year of President Trump’s second term as the John Wick of Sunday shows and Euro gabfests.
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Vice President Vance’s communication skills have been well known since he eviscerated Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during the 2024 vice presidential debate. Elected officials with these specific skills will obviously attract some attention from many directions, but other than Vice President Cheney in the year after September 11, I can’t think of any other #2 with the level of media attention Vance has received in his first year. (The asterisk marks the moment when Vice President Harris became the nominee after President Biden’s poll collapse following his disastrous debate with President Trump, in which the weakness could no longer be hidden and 45-47 deftly underlined how Biden had fallen into incoherence.)
An example of the “Vance Effect”: Nearly every group I speak to, and certainly every group focused on the Republican Party I speak to, includes comments or questions that assume Vance will be the 2028 nominee (with Secretary Rubio as his running mate), and at least some segments of the Republican donor class are also confident that it will be an eight-year stint in the presidency for Vance. (Every time these questions are asked, I go back to the Republican Party in Switzerland, because there’s no point in covering the news if you’re a political Calvinist. I also know that frontrunners often falter and fall aside at this point in the cycle.)
The vice president’s public appearances are “well known.” Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can watch the tape or read the transcripts and see the veep’s verbal knifework on traditional media, or actually talk to Republican groups outside the Beltway to learn what activists in the donor class think is unfolding. What is on the record, or available with even a modicum of factual reporting, is not up for debate. The vice president is a “five-star prospect,” according to the vocabulary of college football recruiting.
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But the vice president must find it strange that so many people are putting pen to paper or voicing their opinions on cable and claiming to “know” what he thinks about topics he has not discussed publicly, even topics and controversies on which he has never commented.
Some reporters and “analysts” even claim to know what he’s doing and who he’s talking to and — the greatest of all ridiculous speculations — what Vance is thinking, beyond his public appearances, on-the-record interviews and the occasional cameo in an Oval Office presser or meeting.
Vance is the opposite of mysterious. He has spent about half of the past five years running for the Ohio Senate seat, which he won in 2022 and began campaigning for in 2021, or for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. He has been my guest 25 times since 2016 and has been available to media and voters for years. Since being sworn in a year ago, Vice President Vance has made more than 100 public appearances, with nearly 50 official interviews since Inauguration Day. He is the opposite of a ‘known unknown’.
President Trump has blasted the Veep a few times regarding both appearance and interview statistics, but that’s par for the course. The second-in-command doesn’t even want to come close to overshadowing the boss and never wants to contradict him, at least not in public. Vance accepted the rules of this constitutional and political arrangement and brought it to fruition.
That’s what makes the negative obsessions with Vance so bizarre. Rarely a day, and almost never a week, goes by without someone in the political press attributing to the vice president views and policy positions that he has not taken publicly. Many journalists over the past year have claimed to be aware of the advice the vice president gave the president privately. Some suggest from whom the vice president derives his policy preferences, as if there is anyone other than the president who provides such cues.
Why? Because the traditional media seems invested in making Vance unelectable in 2028 by trying to give him “own” positions not held by President Trump, by portraying him as an isolationist or a “restrainer.”
The attempt is nonsense. No one can read minds, and unnamed “sources” are usually that way, because identification would destroy any illusion of expertise about the veep’s thinking. The “sources” on the VP almost always seem to provide ammunition for negative criticism of him, as leverage to pry Trump and Vance apart or to push Vance into categories that could make it easier for Governor Gavin Newsom or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to defeat him, if Vance is indeed the Republican nominee in 2028. (Again, I’m not predicting that, because such a gamble marks the gambler as ignorant of history. Judgment on predictions three years after the elections.)
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However, the “Vance-is-actually-worse-than-Trump” campaign is very real and has appeared on every platform online. The consistent drum sound of all kinds of attacks on Vance started much earlier than I can remember.
Vance had a great first year, but obviously played a supporting role in the president’s return to the Oval Office. As the “commander in chief” works to reorder the world without sending tens of thousands of ground troops anywhere, Trump’s critics have become deeply concerned that “America First” is more than a temporary glitch in American politics, an exception to the rule of left-wing canards about the “right side of history.”
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President Trump’s many second-term successes have left progressives concerned that his policies cannot be reversed in the short term. If Vance, or anyone else who endorses Trump’s belief in an “American millennium,” emerges more strongly as Trump wins, the left and its supporters in the traditional media will intensify attacks on Vance and anyone else who squarely supports Trump.
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