The relationship between the president and vice president of the US is surely one of the weirdest in politics. On the surface, the two present themselves as a unified team, good friends with the closest of working relationships, the two most visible public faces of an administration.
In practice, the main formal duty of the vice president is to take over if the president dies or becomes incapacitated – meaning otherwise their job is largely to sit around. But the VP is rarely, if ever, chosen based on that criterion. Instead, a campaign team picks whoever it thinks might provide some electoral advantage or cover a political weakness.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, for example, barely knew one another before he selected her as VP, and she had publicly savaged him on the campaign trail. But Biden had promised to select a woman as his vice president, and Harris came through vetting as the most qualified, and so – boom – they’re a team.
Against that backdrop, then, the bar is set fairly low for Donald Trump and JD Vance’s relationship. It would hardly be unprecedented for it to be a troubled one, especially given what happened to Trump’s first vice president: Mike Pence became a declared enemy of the Trump regime after refusing to play along with the President’s plan to declare the 2020 election results invalid. As a result, Maga supporters online have called for Pence to be hanged, and threatened violence against him.
