Vice President JD Vance, 41, is actively creating daylight between himself and President Donald Trump as the 2028 race begins to take shape, according to Michael Wolff, the biographer who documented the tumult of Trump’s earliest days in power. Speaking on “Inside Trump’s Head,” a Daily Beast podcast he co-hosts with Joanna Coles, Wolff argued that the sitting vice president represents the clearest case of a Republican already maneuvering for a post-Trump future.
Wolff pointed to Vance’s recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan as the moment the split became unmistakable. During that conversation, Vance acknowledged that the administration had been “guilty” of botching its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files scandal, a rare admission from someone inside a White House scrambling to limit the damage.
That statement, Wolff told listeners in the episode released Tuesday, July 21, amounted to “basically publicly proclaiming his distance from Donald Trump.” He predicted that every credible candidate vying for the Republican nomination in 2028 would ultimately follow the same playbook, whether they acknowledge it now or not.
A Party Drifting Away
The vice president’s maneuver comes as Trump’s hold on his own coalition shows signs of strain. Wolff described the Save America Act, a priority the 80-year-old president has championed, as proof that congressional Republicans no longer fall in line automatically, though the legislation ultimately cleared the House of Representatives on July 23.
Lawmakers repeatedly told the president they couldn’t deliver votes, Wolff said, a rebuke that carries weight no matter how it’s framed. That resistance, coupled with frustration among Trump allies over Congress leaving for recess without advancing his agenda, signals a fracture that Wolff believes will only deepen. Republicans, he argued, are moving “further and further away from him,” and that exodus is already in motion.
Lessons From 2024
To underscore his analysis, Wolff drew a contrast with the previous election cycle. When President Joe Biden exited the 2024 race, advisers urged then-Vice President Kamala Harris to distance herself from the outgoing administration — counsel she mostly declined to follow. Vance, by contrast, is embracing separation, and he’s doing it well ahead of the primary calendar.
The political landscape gives ambitious Republicans little reason to remain tethered to Trump, Wolff suggested. He cited the president’s 37 percent approval rating and widespread dissatisfaction with his stewardship of the economy and the Iran conflict as factors that make independence more attractive than allegiance for anyone with their eye on the next election.
Two Pressures Closing In
Beyond the fractures within his own party, Trump faces a second source of trouble once the November midterms conclude, Wolff told Coles. Democrats are projected to retake the House, a development he described as certain to turn Capitol Hill into a daily torment for the administration.
Congress will serve as “an incredible noose around his neck, a burden on his shoulders,” Wolff said. He predicted that Democrats would seize every chance to obstruct and embarrass the president, though he conceded such strategies have sometimes backfired in the past.
The combination of legislative opposition and internal party drift leaves Trump squeezed between two unrelenting forces, Wolff argued, both of which will intensify as his term winds down.
A History of Hostility
The White House offered no immediate comment when contacted about Wolff’s latest assertions. The administration has never hidden its disdain for the author, however. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung has previously called Wolff a fraud and accused him of inventing stories, rhetoric the administration has used repeatedly to discredit his work.
That animosity dates back to “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Wolff’s 2018 book in which staffers reportedly compared the president to a child. At the time, Wolff told interviewers that aides characterized Trump as someone who “does not read, does not listen.” He also said on PBS News that those nearest to the president were “afraid” — for their jobs and for the nation.
Then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction,” and Trump attorney Charles Harder sought to block its release. It became a best-seller regardless. Prior to covering Trump, Wolff wrote for New York magazine and Vanity Fair and authored “The Man Who Owns the News,” a 2008 biography of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Whether Wolff’s predictions prove accurate or, as the White House insists, are simply another product of his imagination, the dynamics he describes are hardly invented. A president nearing the end of his term, a resurgent opposition and a would-be successor testing his independence — those forces tend to emerge on their own, with or without a chronicler to document them.