As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.
His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).
The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing — two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee. The unusual nature is a product of the central role that social media plays in today’s political discourse, as well as the high stakes as Republicans prepare to select a new standard-bearer after Trump, Vance allies and critics say.
Vance’s political team remains dismissive of the social media onslaught and its impact on Republican voters, believing that many of the attacks are not organic, a close ally of the vice president told the Washington Post — a sentiment echoed by two other people with knowledge of Vance’s strategy. The ally and other advisers spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Vance’s allies are keenly aware of and monitoring the online attacks, but his team says the criticism sends a signal to the conservative base that establishment Republicans and opponents they label as neoconservatives hate Vance. That, they say, could ultimately strengthen his standing in a GOP primary.
“Loud Washington establishment voices form an online cacophony,” said Steve Cortes, a conservative commentator supportive of Vance, “but they do not remotely represent the consensus views of Republican voters.”
Vance, whose brand of politics is populist and skeptical of foreign wars, has remained the front-runner in 2028 Republican primary polling. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the favorite of many more traditional, business-minded Republicans, has gained ground in recent months, however, although Rubio has insisted he will support Vance if he runs.
The knives have long been out for Vance within the GOP, since before Trump selected him as his running mate. At the time, hawkish donors and conservative media personalities lobbied for Trump to reject Vance in favor of Rubio or Doug Burgum, now secretary of the interior.
Polling of Republican voters shows Vance’s favorability within the party as roughly on par with Trump’s.
Intense criticism from some Republicans, largely over Vance’s foreign policy views, has ebbed and flowed since the start of the second Trump term. The criticism reached a first peak in the fall as neoconservatives and pro-Israel activists portrayed Vance as antisemitic for sympathizing with figures who expressed skepticism over the U.S. relationship with Israel. More recently, attacks ticked up again after Vance sat for a nearly three-hour interview July 15 on Joe Rogan’s widely watched podcast.
During the show, Vance described himself as a “reasonable moderate” in the debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship. He also cited a recent Time report about an online pro-Israel influence operation run by a former Trump campaign official, through which Vance said he was being attacked “in dishonest ways” by paid influencers.
“You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance told Rogan. “I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first, and that’s the way that I’ve tried to do this job.”
Pro-Israel conservatives erupted. A Washington Post analysis of conservative influencers’ posts on X found that criticism of Vance spiked immediately after his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.
Critical posts poured in from prominent commentators including Ben Shapiro, Marc Thiessen, and Batya Ungar-Sargon, as well as online right-wing influencers and little-known X users whose anti-Vance posts quickly gained traction. Some of the users who pledged to oppose Vance and support Rubio in 2028 had profiles that strongly suggested they aren’t American voters and are based in other countries.
It was “obvious to anyone with an IQ above 70″ that the barrage of attacks has been “totally inauthentic and probably coordinated to a certain extent,” the close Vance ally said.
The upsurge in online criticism “hasn’t been reflected in any data correlating with Vance’s image among GOP voters, which currently tracks President Trump’s image to a T,” the person said. “If it were organic, authentic, or effective,” Vance’s favorability rating with Republican voters would have cratered over the past nine months, since the intense online criticism first peaked, the person said. “And that just hasn’t happened.”
A spokesperson for the vice president said Vance’s only focus is “fighting for the president’s agenda and delivering wins for the American people,” and that he is not concerned with social media.
Vance allies have pushed back publicly against some of the attacks, at times calling attention to common language used among those posting insults.
Jon Schweppe, a Vance supporter and senior adviser at the American Principles Project, who worked for Trump’s Federal Trade Commission until earlier this year, posted a chart on X last week that showed the vice president’s favorability among Republicans had remained steady despite an “anti-Vance op.” His post quickly received dozens of replies from accounts that didn’t follow him — all attacking Vance. Schweppe described the response as curious, since his post had not been shared by any high-follower accounts.
“Primary season — I guess it’s beginning before the midterms this year,” Schweppe said, adding that Vance’s detractors are “trying to create a divide and separate him from the president.”
“There’s going to be folks within the party structure, within the influencer structure, who are going to try to knock him down a few pegs in hope that a challenger can emerge to beat him, and that’s just what we’re seeing,” Schweppe said. “But it’s absolutely organized.”
The intense focus on the vice president is unusual. Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, didn’t face intense backlash from Republicans until the final weeks of his term, as the president and his supporters blamed Pence for failing to act to overturn the 2020 election results. Before that, Pence had been widely liked by Republicans, with few prominent conservatives raising their heads to harshly criticize him.
For a significant stretch of her vice presidency, Kamala Harris faced a version of the succession anxiety now surrounding Vance. Democratic donors, strategists, and commentators questioned whether her low favorability ratings, uneven political performance and widely reported management problems left her prepared to become president — an especially consequential concern given President Joe Biden’s age.
But there are significant differences: Vance is confronting a public, ideological revolt from prominent figures within the conservative coalition. The criticism of Harris, by contrast, generally was framed around competence and electability with jabs at what critics considered misstatements and gaffes. Few major Democratic figures publicly demanded that Biden remove her.
Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Pence in the White House, acknowledged that the attacks against Vance are far more intense than what Pence endured for nearly four years in office — at least until Trump turned against him at the end of his term.
Pence, however, was adamant throughout that term not to show any distance between himself and Trump, even to staff or other cabinet officials, Short said. Vance has at times signaled a different perspective regarding the war with Iran, he noted.
Trump has confirmed that Vance is “philosophically a little bit different” than him on Iran, and “maybe less enthusiastic about going” to war, although Vance has publicly expressed support for Trump’s decisions.
“I think that there’s been a difference in the way that the current team has made clear their policy differences,” Short said. “So I think that does create more scrutiny when you do that.”
