JD Vance Is Positioning Himself for a Presidential Run
The 2026 midterms are looking increasingly ominous for the Republican Party.
The Iran War has been dragging down the popularity of President Trump and the GOP. There’s a feeling that the 25% price increases across the board, dating back to the Biden era, are here to stay. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a friend of the administration, was roundly defeated in parliamentary elections on Sunday after serving for 16 years as prime minister.
Unsurprisingly, polling looks increasingly bleak for Republicans in November. Trump will almost certainly face a third impeachment should Democrats win back the House—which looks likelier by the day—though the possibility of a conviction even if they somehow regain a majority in the Senate is almost nonexistent.
Rifts between Trump and the podcaster class are widening, causing division on the Right at a critical time. Former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted Trump’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV, whom he called “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy,” and the controversial AI-generated picture of himself as Jesus healing a man. (Just a year ago, however, Greene herself appeared to celebrate Pope Francis’s death and claimed that Satan controls the Catholic bishops.) This has obviously heightened online feuding between Catholics and Protestants, which has become noticeably more vociferous over the past few weeks.
One political angle the president should consider in all of this is how to keep enough Catholic voters in the fold to prevent the worst outcome in the midterms. Though nowhere close to the support that white evangelical voters give to the Trump-led Republican Party, Daniel McCarthy notes that Catholic voters have supported the president in past elections. They “accounted for more than 1 in 5 of his 2024 voters,” with Trump besting “Kamala Harris among Catholics by a commanding 12 percentage points.”
Another thing to consider is the repercussions this could have for Vice President Vance, a convert to Catholicism who is preparing for the 2028 presidential election.
Amid Trump’s fight with the pope, Vance has adopted a Gallican-like view—which is similar in some ways to the historic Protestant position as spelled out by Martin Luther and other Reformers. During a Fox News interview, Vance exhorted the pope to keep to matters of morality and theology and to avoid commenting on public policy.
Some of the most influential voices in the Catholic hierarchy since at least the 1970s have adopted political views on a panoply of matters, including immigration, capital punishment, and war, that are difficult to distinguish from the modern liberal consensus. Meanwhile, right-wing views, including denaturalization, immigration restrictionism, and law and order, are explicitly or implicitly condemned as un-Christian.
Vance also pushed back specifically against Pope Leo’s version of just war theory. “God does not bless any conflict,” read a post on the pontiff’s X account, because no Christians should ever be on “the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Vance contended that this is plainly out of line with traditional doctrine. And he’s right. The vice president is pointing to a real problem: the pope, along with some anti-war commentators and podcasters who are ostensibly on the Right, has often backed into mouthing leftist platitudes in their condemnations of the U.S.’s war with Iran.
To make sense of this, let’s turn to someone who knew something about just war theory: Thomas Aquinas, whom Pope Pius V named a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church in 1567. In Question 40 of his Summa Theologica, Aquinas wrote, “Those who wage war justly aim at peace, and so they are not opposed to peace, except to the evil peace, which Our Lord “came not to send upon earth” (Matthew 10:34).” Unlike the pope, who seems to adopt a pacifist stance that obliterates the very idea of just war in principle, Aquinas clearly thought that wars can in fact be just. For that to be the case, he outlined three general conditions that must be met: war must be declared by a sovereign, be for a just cause like answering an attack, and aim at a good intention (that is, “the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil”). Nothing in Aquinas’s presentation here leads to the conclusion that conducting war or using violence is against Christianity in principle.
To bolster his argument, Aquinas cited St. Augustine, who taught,
“Those whom we have to punish with a kindly severity, it is necessary to handle in many ways against their will. For when we are stripping a man of the lawlessness of sin, it is good for him to be vanquished, since nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners, whence arises a guilty impunity, and an evil will, like an internal enemy.”
These are not the musings of a person who bought into the tenets of anti-war liberalism in seed form. Instead, these views far more closely correspond to those of Vance and other Catholics in the Trump administration. Border czar Tom Homan, a cradle Catholic, told a gathering of the media that he wishes that the pope and other high-ranking Catholics would “stay out of immigration…. If they understood the atrocities that happen on an open border, I think their opinion would change.”
Vance’s strategy to respectfully disagree with the pope makes sense given the Protestant inclinations of many American Catholics. Even the most online TradCath apologists largely follow their Protestant counterparts in choosing a specific church to worship at, passing by multiple Novus Ordo churches to attend a specialty parish every Sunday morning.
Few American Catholics are ultramontanists. They regularly disregard the pope’s instruction—and also their church’s official teachings—on many subjects, from politics to theology.
Pew found that just 29% of Catholics attend mass weekly, and a clear majority—nearly 60%—believe abortion should be legal. Political scientist Ryan Burge has discovered that extremely few Catholics—incredibly, just 0.9%—agree with what their church teaches on abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia. And the same trend continues in theological matters. Only 31% believe in transubstantiation, a central dogma of the Catholic faith, though that number is likely higher when considering congregants who regularly attend Mass.
In any event, Vance is spurning the strategy taken by some close friends of his, including integralists, who unstintingly back the pope’s every utterance. The vice president is openly disagreeing with Pope Leo XIV and calling on him to stay in his area of expertise, which could help drive a wedge between Vance and some of his TradCath supporters.
What may prevent this from happening is Vance’s noninterventionism. Catholic voters are far more split politically than their evangelical counterparts—his more guarded foreign policy could be the key to bringing more Catholics to the GOP in 2028. Despite President Trump’s decision to go to war with the Iranian regime, Vance has stayed true to his foreign policy bona fides. An in-depth article that traced how Trump decided to take the U.S. to war described Vance as sticking to his noninterventionist approach throughout the buildup to the war.
Vance will eventually have to deal with the podcasters as well. Though their reach has been overstated, they still represent an important slice of the electorate. How will Vance, for example, deal with those like Tucker Carlson who have a tunnel-vision focus on making sure that Israel has no influence on U.S. foreign policy above all else? Tucker Carlson Network’s social media account, for instance, posted that “The people in charge don’t want you to know this, but Muslims love Jesus,” a clear rhetorical strategy that’s part of Tucker’s larger campaign.
Whether JD Vance wins in 2028 depends on his savvy, political instincts, and skill, which he looks to have in spades. Counting him out now would indeed be a big mistake.
