USA Today notes in two articles that Donald Trump is signaling he may not endorse Vice President J.D. Vance in the Republican primaries.
The newspaper recalls Trump’s remarks in a recent interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” in which the president said he might not endorse any of the candidates seeking his party’s nomination in the 2028 presidential election.
A few days earlier, Trump told USA Today that he had not spoken with the vice president about endorsing his candidacy in the primaries.
“I’m not even sure Vance has that option,” a person close to the vice president told the newspaper.
“If (Vance) tried to distance himself from Trump, he would knife him,” the USA Today source added.
On Friday, The New York Times assessed that distancing himself from the president after the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections would be advisable to improve Vance’s electoral chances, but also very difficult.
The situation is all the stranger because the vice president himself said in an interview that he expects Trump’s endorsement if he decides to run, the newspaper reports.
After the Republicans lost the election, however, the vice president posted on the social platform X, saying the cause of the defeat was the war with Iran. In the view of the Bulwark website, Trump is therefore signaling that he may punish him.
The day after the midterms, the president told reporters that “maybe Vance won’t run.”
Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and still a very influential figure in the party, concluded after the election that the scale of his party’s defeat is so great that there are no front-runners in the race for the GOP nomination, USA Today reports.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that by the end of 2027 “Trump may already be such a toxic brand” that Vance, even if he won his party’s nomination, would face “very great difficulties” in the presidential campaign.
Newsweek reported recently that, according to an October poll, 44% of respondents view the vice president unfavorably. CNN, meanwhile, noted that Vance is on a downward slide: Since taking office, he has lost 18 percentage points in polls, and as many as 30 points among independent voters, and he is the least popular Republican vice president at this stage of a term.
Source: PAP
