The man widely expected to lead the Republican ticket next says he has never once asked his boss for the endorsement that would seal it.
The clear front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination says he has never once asked President Donald Trump whether he would back him — and the president tells it the same way.
Trump declined Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, to say whether he would support Vice President JD Vance in a 2028 campaign, fielding the question from reporters in the Oval Office while Vance stood directly behind him.
A reporter had begun asking about remarks Vance made in an interview a day earlier when Trump cut in before the question was out. He praised Vance’s talent and character, then said the two of them had never discussed the matter at all. “I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it. You know, who would believe that?” Trump told reporters. Vance agreed from behind him and nodded along.
Trump framed the whole question as far too early: the midterms come first, he said, and everyone would see how that goes. The event itself had nothing to do with 2028 — the president was announcing a new whistleblower reward program.
Why He Wouldn’t Call It Weird
Vance’s interview aired Monday, Oct. 19, on “2WAY TONIGHT,” taped aboard Air Force Two with journalist Mark Halperin. Halperin put a panel’s prediction to him: Vance 99 percent to 100 percent certain to run, and Trump likely to sit on an endorsement for a long while, to toy with him and play the game out.
Asked whether the endorsement would come the moment he announced, Vance said, “I would think so, but I don’t know, man,” and, “I haven’t talked to him about it.”
Halperin pushed: wouldn’t it be strange for a sitting vice president to tell the president he was running, only to be told the president needed time to think it over? “No, I don’t think it’d be weird,” Vance replied. “Again, I think I would get his endorsement.”
He continued: “But I also think there’s something to be said for people actually running their own race, and because the president’s endorsement is so dispositive, you could absolutely see a scenario where the president says, ‘You know what? We need to let, like, this race play out and not, like, preemptively prejudge the results.’”
Because he had never raised it with Trump, Vance said he could not speak to the president’s thinking. He said he could turn out to be terrible at parts of a presidential campaign he has never faced — the media scrutiny, the pressure, the policy proposals — and said his mind is not made up about 2028 at all. His focus, he said, is electing as many Republicans as possible in early November.
Trump has repeatedly encouraged a competition between Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for the nomination, a dynamic Vance once joked about by invoking Trump’s old reality show, “The Apprentice.” The former Ohio senator has also said there is a chance he doesn’t run at all, citing Second Lady Usha Vance, who is not a big fan of politics, and the couple’s four small children.
He Wouldn’t Touch Israel’s Election
Vance also split with Trump over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom the president backed in a Truth Social post ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election. The vice president said he would not follow, that he endorses American candidates and that the midterms have his attention. “I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections,” he told Halperin.
Earlier in 2026, Vance traveled to Budapest, Hungary, to support Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Trump had endorsed. Orbán lost.
The same day his interview aired, Vance campaigned at a rally at Hyder Warehouse in Hendersonville, N.C. Both men are crisscrossing the country for Republican candidates in the final stretch before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Not His Concern, Then His Praise
Campaigning for the Republican ticket in Cincinnati on Oct. 21, Vance was asked about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad attacking Ohio gubernatorial opponent Amy Acton. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said.
Later that day, at a rally with Ramaswamy, he praised him for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out like it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.” He said he was “a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining” about the ad.
A Biographer Tells Republicans to Go Home
Trump biographer Michael Wolff offered a bleaker read at a live taping of the podcast “Inside Trump’s Head,” where Joanna Coles asked whether Vance inherits the MAGA base or Trumpism fizzles without Trump. “Without question, it is the latter,” Wolff said, according to remarks he recapped in his Substack as of Oct. 24. He predicted Trump will withhold support from any Republican successor. “If I were any of the Republican candidates, I would just go home. Trump is not going to allow the next president to be a Republican, thereby superseding him,” Wolff said.
The numbers point the other way for now. As of Oct. 19, Polymarket traders gave Vance roughly a 20 percent chance of becoming president, the highest of any figure, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez second at about 13 percent. A polling average tracked by Race to the WH put Vance ahead of Ocasio-Cortez in a hypothetical head-to-head, 44.9 percent to 42 percent, and he leads comfortably among Republicans in a New York Times aggregation of recent polling.
Whether the endorsement comes, and how quickly, remains unresolved. Neither man says he has had the conversation with the other.
