JD Vance Forced to Admit Trump Doesn’t Like Him All That Much

Vice President JD Vance isn’t so sure that the president will have his back in the 2028 election.

The 42-year-old is theoretically supposed to be Donald Trump’s right-hand man and political successor. Yet nearly two years into Trump’s second administration, the two still aren’t on the same page. In a sit-down interview with conservative commentator Mark Halperin on Air Force Two Monday, the vice president didn’t seem so confident that he would definitely obtain Trump’s endorsement.

Halperin posed two questions to Vance: first, if he planned to run for president, and second, if he would “definitely” obtain Trump’s endorsement.

“I’ll tell you Mark that I’m focused on the midterm elections and I want to get as many good Republicans elected in early November as possible,” Vance said.

“Look, I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028, I really haven’t focused on it,” he continued. “You and I have talked about that. Look, I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”

“Right away? Right at the beginning?” pressed Halperin. “In other words, the day you announce. He’d endorse you, right?”

“I don’t know, man, I haven’t talked to him about it,” Vance laughed.

“It would be kind of weird though if you said, ‘Mr. President, I’m going to run,’ and he said, ‘Let me think about it,’” Halperin said.

But Vance equivocated.

“No, it wouldn’t be weird,” Vance said. “I think I’d get his endorsement, 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 this race play out and not preemptively prejudge the results.’”

“Sometimes media scrutiny, pressure, policy goals—” Vance continued before Halperin interjected that he “might be horrible at it.”

“I would be terrible at it,” Vance said. “So I don’t know, having never spoken to the president about this, I can’t speak to his psychology on it. But my attitude is, if I run, I think the president will endorse me. But I also haven’t talked to him about it.”

President Donald Trump went on a late-night posting spree about debris and damage in his latest temper tantrum about East Potomac Park.  

“Here are pictures of Trash Island for the Judge to study. This is just a small area, and better than some!” Trump wrote on Truth Social overnight Monday, referring to a heavily overgrown area at the center of the course where the National Parks Service had already begun to fell dozens of trees. 

The president shared photographs of abandoned wooden pallets, construction equipment, large bins, and trucks for tree removal. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the debris was from the president’s stalled efforts to transform the public park into a high-end, exclusive golf course. 

He also shared images of damaged iron fences along the course and waterfront. “Collapsing Sea Wall—Very dangerous to one’s health!” Trump wrote, including a photograph of a fence that had been nearly swallowed by the Potomac.

Last week, District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the government from felling hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links, and tore into the Trump administration lawyer for claiming that tree removal is not part of the president’s renovation plans. The Department of Justice demanded that she step down, claiming that her outburst proved she was biased against the government. The judge refused, sending Trump spiraling on social media.

Trump’s posting may have already landed him in trouble. At a hearing Monday, the preservation group mounting the legal challenge against Trump’s federal takeover of the course introduced the president’s own Truth Social post as evidence that the government plans to proceed with renovations “IMMEDIATELY!”

The FBI was investigating South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn for a massive pay-to-play bribery scandal involving a Hawaiian naval defense firm. Then the FBI eliminated the team working on the case upon President Trump’s return to office.

New reporting from ProPublica details the dealings of the South Carolina politicians with Navatek executives, including CEO Martin Kao, who told the FBI that he was exchanging campaign donations and gifts for millions of dollars in naval contracts.

In March 2020, the late Senator Graham met with Navatek lobbyists at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C, and made a deal to give a $10 million government contract to Navatek in exchange for $100,000 in campaign donations, on top of the $40,000 he charged just for the meeting, according to Kao.

“This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Graham allegedly told Kao.

Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House, also met with Navatek leaders—and asked them to match Graham’s campaign gift of $100,000 in exchange for political favors. Fellow South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, a Republican, also allegedly made cash-for-contract dealings with Navatek.

Kao was eventually arrested for campaign finance violations in September 2020 and confessed to federal agents that Navatek’s entire business model relied solely on bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts. The agents working on the case told their superiors their investigation could eventually include the lawmakers involved, but they were fired as the Department of Justice took revenge on the public corruption team, which previously investigated Trump.

This reporting from ProPublica is a continuation of its investigation into Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, who also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Navatek in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. Collins’s PAC received $150,000 from Kao right after their own D.C. restaurant meeting in 2019, and two months later, Kao informed Navatek that Collins committed to giving it $32 million in naval contracts.

This had the potential to be one of the biggest political corruption scandals of the modern era, a tangible exposé of just how much influence lobbyists actually have in Washington and how eager our self-interested politicians are to take money from them. And the FBI knew that. But as soon as Trump returned to office in 2025, the case was killed. This move inadvertently prevented a bipartisan whale of a corruption scandal from fully coming to light. And while Kao remains in jail, none of the powerful senators the FBI was investigating have faced any kind of repercussions—thanks to Trump. The team can’t even file a new case.

“You gotta hand it to Trump: he holds the consistent position that, Republican OR Democrat, bribery is not a crime,” journalist Matthew Chapman wrote on X. “He’ll cook up any number of bogus charges to take down his political enemies. But he’ll never go after bribery, even if it’s his enemies doing it.”

Kao has made political donations to dozens of politicians from both parties, including Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, and Tulsi Gabbard. Clyburn, Graham, and Wilson’s offices all deny Kao’s quid pro quo allegations.

President Trump tried to defend Republican Senator Roger Marshall on Monday night at a rally in Park City, Kansas, but ended up using an antisemitic slur in the process.

“[Marshall] was given a bum rap because he was mandated by law to request strongly money owed from patients. You’re not allowed not to do it. You have to by law go after these people, and they made it, like, oh, he was some kind of a Shylock-type guy,” Trump said in a speech to the crowd.

The term refers to a Jewish character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice who is portrayed as a cunning moneylender, fueling stereotypes about the Jewish people. In a guide for educators, the Anti-Defamation League states “Shylock, and by extension, all Jews, are presented as money-hungry, conniving, and cruel.”

Trump used the term in a speech last year about a bill he was trying to pass, distinguishing between respectable bankers and exploitative ones.

“No going to the banks and borrowing from in some cases a fine banker, and in some cases Shylocks and bad people,” Trump said at the time. Following the event, when reporters questioned him about its antisemitic origins, Trump said he had “never heard that.”

Marshall, who was a doctor before entering politics, is under fire for suing hundreds of patients over unpaid medical bills, even pursuing criminal charges over debts as little as $101. His record has given Democrats an opening in the normally safe Kansas Senate seat, with Democratic nominee Adam Hamilton, a pastor, seizing the opportunity and polling neck and neck with Marshall.

“There are 2,000 verses in the Bible that speak to caring for the poor,” Hamilton said at a debate with Marshall last month. “This is not happening under this man.”

Eleven people with lawful permanent resident status were arrested in California Monday for alleged voter fraud. Hours later, First Assistant Attorney for California Bill Essayli admitted that they may not have even voted.

The arrests were announced in a Department of Justice press release, which lauded the capture of California residents as part of “Operation Protect the Vote”—an effort to purge voting rolls of alleged “noncitizens” ahead of November’s midterm elections. On October 14, the Trump administration gave the Golden State a flash drive of nearly 200,000 “likely noncitizen” voters it had identified. The method used to identify them remains unclear.

The administration then demanded that the state take “immediate action to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in the upcoming federal election.” If California refused, the administration said it would have “no choice but to seek emergency relief.

In reality, noncitizen voting remains incredibly marginal, and “Operation Protect the Vote” in California is a thinly veiled attempt to target immigrants, spread fear, and restrict voting access in a Democratic stronghold.

“Every illegal vote cancels out the vote of a lawful American citizen,” said acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. “Each of the 28 defendants charged today appears on the list of more than 20,000 likely noncitizen registrants we provided to California election officials last week. California refused to look at that list. Today’s charges show exactly what that refusal puts at risk. California must verify the citizenship of those more than 20,000 registrants before mail-in ballots are counted.”

“I think the majority did cast a vote in a prior election. Not all, but most did,” Essayli said in a press conference following the arrests, admitting that the DOJ’s “high confidence” list of fraudulent noncitizen voters is not at all foolproof.

These indefensible arrests are the latest chapter in the DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data and throw due process to the wind, using “voter fraud” as a blanket accusation for anyone the Trump administration doesn’t like.