JD Vance: America's Least Wanted

JD Vance's approval rating reached record lows this week as he failed to secure an Iran ceasefire deal and crashed Viktor Orbán's campaign, while seven Democrats voted to continue the war

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The GOP’s 2028 problem has a name, and that name is JD Vance. Let’s talk about it.

JD Vance: The Republican Party’s Least Popular Export

Despite what his AI photos suggest, Donald Trump is human. He’s not going to live forever. And the GOP is going to have to find who comes after him.

The answer, if you ask the people currently jockeying for position, is JD Vance. The answer, if you ask voters, is: please anyone but JD Vance.

The Vice President’s approval ratings hit a historic low this week. He is currently one of the least popular politicians in America, and apparently also around the world. After Vance flew to Hungary last week to headline a MAGA-style rally for far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, betting markets showed Orbán’s chances of winning plummeting. Orbán then lost in a landslide.

Social media has spent the better part of a year cataloguing what’s been dubbed the “JD Vance Effect”: the pattern in which everything the Vice President touches immediately gets worse. He dropped the College Football Playoff National Championship Trophy at a ceremony. He went to Pakistan last weekend to negotiate a ceasefire with Iran and came home with nothing. His Turning Point USA event in Georgia on Tuesday was attended by tens of people.

And, depending on how superstitious you are, he may or may not have caused Pope Francis’ death.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio went from 3% to 35% in the CPAC straw poll in the span of a year. Vance dropped from 61% to 53%. Rubio wasn’t even in the room, he’s just the guy who isn’t Vance.

There is also the matter of Vance, “devout Catholic,” being publicly rebuked by not one but two popes. He converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has leaned into the identity heavily, only to argue that Americans owe nothing to migrants and refugees because your compassion belongs to your own people first. Vance’s faith is between him and his chosen deity, but this version of Catholicism feels less authentic and more of an aesthetic.

Voters aren’t buying the image Vance tries to project, because the core issue isn’t message discipline. The core issue is that he reads as someone who wants to be powerful more than he wants anything specific to do with that power.

Vance famously called Trump “America’s Hitler” in private before later becoming his running mate. Republican primary voters cheered it because it was useful, and because Trump endorsed it. But they weren’t cheering for Vance himself – they were cheering for his submission.

The theory among conservative insiders is that Vance can inherit the MAGA movement more or less intact. It’s a theory that ignores one critical variable, which is that the MAGA base does not want a movement. It wants a guy. Specifically, it has wanted one guy, for ten years, and Vance is not him.

What remains of the GOP without Trump is a party full of people who learned to win by being obedient to one man, now competing with each other to seem like the most authentic version of someone they were all pretending to be.

DeSantis already tried it and got eaten alive. Rubio is trying it, and has the political energy of a beige wall. Vance is trying it, and voters are responding by making jokes about him having intimate relations with couches.

The 2028 primary is going to look less like a succession and more like a yard sale. It’s still unclear what JD Vance is worth, but unless something changes, the voters won’t be buying.

Seven Democrats Voted For War

Democratic voters wanted the party to stop a war. The party sent John Fetterman on Fox News. Close enough?

This week, the Senate voted on Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block military bulldozers and bombs from going to Israel. While 80 percent of Democratic voters hold unfavorable views of Israel, seven Senate Democrats looked at all of that and voted with the Republicans anyway.

Those seven are Chuck Schumer, Chris Coons, Catherine Cortez Masto, Kirsten Gillibrand, Richard Blumenthal, John Fetterman, and Jacky Rosen.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, the top Democrat in the chamber, voted to keep the weapons flowing to a government actively using them to demolish Palestinian villages and wage an expanding regional war. Nearly 100 protesters had been arrested outside Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices earlier in the week urging them to vote yes. Both voted no.

Meanwhile, the war powers resolution would have required Trump to get congressional authorization to keep fighting a war he started without asking anyone. It failed 213 to 214, because centrist Democrat Jared Golden of Maine voted with Republicans against it.

One vote. One Democrat.

Golden is retiring at the end of his term, which means he torched the resolution on his way out the door with nothing at stake, no constituents to answer to, and no consequences to face. He just didn’t want to do it, so he didn’t. The war continues.

In the Senate, John Fetterman was the sole Democrat to vote against the war powers resolution. This makes him the only member of his caucus to vote both to keep the war going and to keep the weapons moving.

The base showed up in 2022, 2024, and is being asked to show up again in 2026. At some point, someone is going to have to explain what exactly they’re showing up for.

Mark Zuckerberg Would Like You to Stop Using a Certain Word

Facebook and Instagram quietly updated their Community Standards this week to add new restrictions around the word “antifa.”

Not a post calling for violence. Not a threat. The word.

Meta slipped the revision into a subsection of its “Violence and Incitement” rules, tucking it in alongside bans on ads for assassins. Good company.

This is not a coincidence. It follows Trump’s executive order last year designating antifa, a contraction of the word “anti-fascism,” as a terrorist group. It is not an actual group. Meta, which has been dismantling its fact-checking program and cozying up to the administration, has decided that saying you are against fascism is the kind of content that needs to be carefully managed.

The practical effect is that a word describing opposition to a political ideology is now flagged as potentially violent on platforms used by three billion people. The word for that is censorship. Meta would probably prefer you not use that word either.

This is exactly the kind of story that gets buried. Not dramatic enough for cable news, not salacious enough to go viral. Just a quiet rewrite of the rules that govern what you’re allowed to say in public, and who decided you couldn’t say it.

That’s what AlterNet America exists to cover. We don’t have corporate advertisers to protect or billionaire owners to keep happy. We have readers. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, upgrade your subscription and become one today.

We’re independent, we’re reader-funded, and unlike Facebook, we will never flag the word antifa.

See? We just said it.

–Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America