"War Room" host Steve Bannon in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 30, 2024 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Reporter Chris Whipple penned a column for Vanity Fair about Vice President JD Vance and his political transformation at Yale Law School, prompting The Bulwark's Sam Stein to question how Vance's relationship will likely unfold for the 2028 presidential election. Whipple made it clear, he thinks Trump will "destroy" Vance "come next year."
Speaking on the Wednesday podcast, Whipple said that when people in the White House were still talking to him, he recalled Vance defending Trump's remarks about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
"He told me, 'No! The media got that totally wrong!' I don't know what the media got wrong about Trump referring to 'very fine people on both sides' who were marching with neo-Nazis with tiki torches chanting 'blood and soil,'" said Whipple.
"But I think Vance is in a really difficult, fraught position because, as one person put it to me on background, at a certain point he's going to start to get traction," Whipple said. "Vance is, if he is indeed the frontrunner, he's going to start to run ads. He's going to start to have rallies. People will pay attention. Trump will not be able to stand that. Trump will not be able to share that spotlight. And come next year, he will destroy him. He will take him down."
He added that he's spoken with Steve Bannon about Vance as well and Bannon agrees that it won't go well.
"Bannon told me that he thinks this relationship is only going to go south in a hurry," Whipple said.
Stein questioned whether there's any relationship that Trump has "in politics that hasn't eventually gone south" at one point.
"I mean, there's no amount of, you know, loyal. The loyalty is usually in one direction and you can be one of the great suck-ups of the world. You can acquiesce as much as you possibly can, but eventually those relationships go south," Stein said.
"Almost inevitably, almost inevitably," Whipple agreed.
The other question Stein asked was whether Vance cares about anything other than his own advancement.
"It seems to me there are two schools of thought about JD Vance. One is that we've already discussed, which is the notion that he's a cynical opportunist who will just go with the wind. But the other school of thought is that he is unlike Trump, who has no convictions or beliefs and is transactional about everything," said Whipple.
"Vance is actually a true believer in a post-Trump MAGA ideology, a worldview that is more authoritarian, and is in fact a kind of Catholic theocracy. And it goes back to this guy, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame," Whipple said.
He noted that both Vance and Peter Thiel both have been influenced by Deneen. Thiel is searching for a more apocalyptic, anti-regulation world than a church-run state. He argues that an “Antichrist” could emerge as a seemingly benevolent global authority that uses fears about AI, climate change, nuclear war and safety to centralize power, restrict technology and impose a one-world government.
"That's a real worry about Vance — is that he actually believes in this stuff. And that he has the intellectual shock troops in place," Whipple said. "But there are people who think that Vance is actually a true believer in something that is much more ideological than MAGA."
Stein doesn't buy it. He said that a person "can't go from secretly advising Jake Sullivan on how to clean up the 'deplorables' so that Trump won't win, to now believing in this stuff. Like, something seems a little bit off-kilter."
Whipple thinks both options could also be true.