The San Siro stadium, in Milan, during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. Seventy-five thousand people in the cold Lombardy. The torch has just been lit, the athletes parade. On the giant screen, a figure appears in a dark suit, next to a woman in a beige coat. JD Vance, Vice President of the United States, stands with his wife Usha in the grandstand. Whistles come from the stands.
Vance cashes in. A few rows away, Giorgia Meloni keeps smiling. A few hours later, Donald Trump put things into perspective from Washington: “ People appreciate it. He’s not normally booed in this country. » Normally. The boy from Middletown, raised in industrial Ohio by a demanding grandmother, doesn’t move an inch. He takes the whistles from the San Siro as sarcasm from the establishment.
Defense of the West
In the morning he met Meloni. She celebrates “the ideals that unite Italy and the United States”. He answers methodically on “the spirit of friendship, rules-based competition and coming together around common values”. Behind the Olympic formula, he hammers home his message on the defense of Western heritage.
Three days later, Air Force Two, the Boeing 757 assigned to the vice-presidency lands in Yerevan, Armenia, in this fracture zone where Russian, Turkish and Iranian influences intersect. Vance arrives there with concrete files: announcements of security cooperation, progress in civil nuclear power, promotion of an east-west transit corridor intended to bypass Moscow and Tehran.
At the Tsitsernakaberd memorial, he lays flowers. Evoked “a horrible thing” about the genocide. An official tweet mentioning the term disappears a few hours later, a diplomatic concession made to Ankara. Vance continues to Baku, meets with President Ilham Aliyev, seals strategic partnership and says relationship with Azerbaijan “is made to last”. Two rival capitals in forty-eight hours.
The vice president goes to coal alone to speak on behalf of the country
The U.S. Constitution gives the vice president little. Presidential confidence can give him everything else. Vance occupies a space that few of his predecessors have filled with this intensity, with the exception of Dick Cheney, who for two terms dictated George W. Bush’s foreign policy. For a long time, we joked about the improbable role of the number two in the executive with this formula: “Technically, the vice president is only asked to do two things: decide the votes in the Senate and stay alive. » John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president, summed up his role even more bluntly: “Not worth a bucket of hot piss.” »
In just one year, and unlike Mike Pence during Trump’s first term, Vance has swept away his image as an intellectual, shy person relegated to the Senate galleries and TV sets. He established himself as a mobile executive, sent to the front line of internal crises, mandated in sensitive diplomatic theaters and politically exposed.
Far from the Epstein files
At the end of January, Minneapolis gave the measure. Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, are shot by ICE agents, the federal immigration police, during a large-scale operation in Minnesota. The city is on fire. That’s where the administration sends Vance. Not a secretary of state, not an advisor. The vice president arrives in the burning city, meets local authorities, represents the federal line. In a country without a Prime Minister, when the executive wants to signal that it takes a crisis seriously while refusing to back down, it sends its number two to the front. This is a completely new role. The child from Appalachia goes alone to the coal to speak in the name of the country.
And that’s good at the moment. Because its name is proper. Far from the Epstein files. A chubby, pimply teenager, then a young soldier deployed to Iraq before starting a career as a lawyer: he never approached Little Saint James. His popularity rating is holding up amid the turmoil that is sweeping away Republicans and Democrats, and he is, by far, the best placed to win the 2028 primaries. Not yet a candidate, neither a poster boy nor an understudy, Vance has been training for a year.
