JD Vance’s 2028 strategy: Be even worse than Trump

Writing fair headlines in an era of rising fascism is always a challenge, but the New York Times whiffed it spectacularly on Sunday in their weekend coverage of AmericaFest, the alarming Turning Point USA conference. “Vance Refuses to Take Sides in G.O.P. Fight Over Bigotry,” the Gray Lady declared. While that may be true in the most surface sense — Vice President JD Vance has insisted that the MAGA coalition includes “all of you” and denounced “purity tests,” which are presumably exclusive — for those who understand the context, Vance very much did choose a side. He has chosen antisemites and other outright bigots.

As the Times article notes, AmericaFest revealed serious and growing tensions within the MAGA movement over the inclusion of people like Nick Fuentes, “a Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite,” and Candace Owens, a conspiracy theorist who once said Adolf Hitler’s goal “to make Germany great and have things run well” was “fine,” but that his mistake was invading other countries — a comment that, accidentally or not, implies the Holocaust was an acceptable domestic policy.  

Vance may say he’s not taking sides, but that is impossible in this situation. “White nationalists: good or bad?” is a binary question, and by accepting neo-Nazis and other far-right groups into the MAGA tent, the vice president is inherently rejecting everyone who thinks that’s a bad move. As Donald Trump himself learned in 2017 when he described folks who marched with neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” there’s simply no way to side with Nazis and not side against the people they hate.

Unlike Trump, Vance can’t hide behind the assumption that he’s too ignorant to know better. Instead, the vice president’s rhetoric and ideology appear to be part of a long game of advocating the ideas and philosophies of overt racists within the Republican Party, even as he continues to use coded language to conceal this radicalization from the mainstream press to avoid negative coverage. Even more than the 79-year-old Trump, Vance seems to feel that far-right radicals who espouse nakedly racist views are the future of the GOP. As he starts to collect endorsements for a 2028 presidential bid — including from TPUSA CEO and chair Erika Kirk on Dec. 19 — he’s focused on pandering to the loudest, most shameless bigots in the country and putting a pseudo-intellectual gloss on their hatreds.

In July, Vance gave a speech at the Claremont Institute in which he laid out his blood-and-soil vision of America, arguing that people who have ancestors living in the U.S. during the 19th century “have a hell of a lot more claim over America” than newer arrivals. The vice president has also praised a 1920s-era law that blocked most immigration of non-white people, a law that would prevented his own wife’s family from moving to the U.S.

Vance’s rhetoric is a barely cleaned-up version of the “heritage Americans” idea that white nationalists are peddling, which argues that the only legitimate Americans have ancestry that predates the Civil War. It only takes about three seconds of examination to see, however, this is just a tortured way to justify a belief that only white people are real Americans. C. Jay Engel, who popularized the euphemism “heritage American,” acknowledges that most Black Americans do have roots going back centuries, but he argues “the majority of Blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and insists that this conception of Europeaness is the foundation of America. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic on Sunday, there’s a growing movement on the right to denounce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which banned slavery and created birthright citizenship, allowing former enslaved people to have citizenship.

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Vance probably is sincere in his racism, and certainly takes glee in racist “jokes” and smears, like claiming Haitian immigrants eat cats and dogs. But he is also a nakedly ambitious striver, which means he is likely moving in this direction because he thinks it’s what will get him elected president in 2028.

Vance is probably not wrong about that. When it comes to the youngest generation of Republicans, overt fascists are where a lot of the energy is originating. As Candace Owens is becoming even more loudly antisemitic, her audience is only growing. A recently leaked text chain from the Young Republicans of New York shows members praising Hitler and using racial slurs, behavior Vance defended by pretending they were teenagers instead of professionals in their 20s and 30s.

Last week, the urban-policy magazine City Journal published the results of a focus group of twenty-somethings who voted for Trump, most of whom said they supported Vance as the next president. The attendees also had plenty of nice things to say about Hitler. “I think he was a great leader,” said one woman. While she allowed that he did “terrible” things, she was impressed with the Nazi’s “very strong leadership values.”

Another young man insisted, “I don’t think we should be killing people or doing mass genocide.” Then he went on to congratulate Hitler for taking “Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.” (In this context, he means white people like himself, not Indigenous people.)

These people are ignoring the truth of the Third Reich, of course. Hitler left Germany a smoking shell of a country, which is not the mark of a great leader. There is also no way to “take back” a nation for one race without violence, which is why most people who try — including the Nazis — start with deportations and quickly end up with concentration camps and genocide. But the focus group showed that the relentless drumbeat of white nationalism and Holocaust denial — which is also being mainstreamed by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — is taking hold with the youngest Trump voters. This fact is no doubt why Vance thinks that’s the direction of his party — and why he’s racing to meet them there.

The vice president’s bet here is a bad one, I suspect. While young Republicans appear to be increasingly eager to embrace overt racism and fascism, that is likely an artifact of the party driving away everyone else who is more moderate. We’ve seen this same phenomenon in white evangelical churches. As denominations and congregations become more radical, they lose membership. In the short term, having a smaller but more intense group can be effective, because energy counts for a lot in politics.

But politics is ultimately a game of addition, not subtraction — especially around election time. Trump’s peculiar magic was convincing large numbers of Americans he didn’t mean all the racist stuff he said. It’s harder to imagine Vance will be able to pull that trick off, no matter how much he relies on coded language in his speeches. He doesn’t have Trump’s bizarre — admittedly though fading — charisma.

Of all people, grifter and pseudo-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is now running for governor of Ohio, gave a speech at AmericaFest laying out how Vance’s embrace of extremists is not “inclusive” or “big tent” politics. “The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy told the crowd.

This is not just a policy disagreement, or even an ideological one, as Vance has implied. White nationalism is inherently exclusionary; it’s an either/or proposition. If the GOP is a white nationalist party, then both people of color and white people who oppose racist restrictions on citizenship cannot be part of the coalition. This is too fundamental a question to put it into the “agree to disagree” category. 

Ramaswamy is an immoral, cynical operator, but he’s got the math right. Trump won in 2024 by tricking just enough Black and Latino voters that he’s not really racist, and that anyone who says otherwise has “Trump derangement syndrome.” But now that Trump is turning racist rhetoric into racist action, he’s rapidly losing the voters of color he added to the MAGA coalition in 2024.

The movement’s in-fighting over these issues is only fracturing the coalition further. Ben Shapiro used to be a wildly popular influencer on the right, but his opposition to antisemitism — likely in combination with his own Jewish identity — has caused a lot of the base to turn on him. He’s losing audience share and, when he spoke out against antisemitism at AmericaFest, many in the audience booed him.

Vance may pretend there’s a way to include both bigots and the people they hate in a single coalition. But even if such alliances can exist for a short period of time, they tend to break both from the anger and lack of logic that such tensions cause.