Does JD Vance Have the Juice?
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a single weekend, JD Vance managed to flunk out of peace talks with Iran and hitch the Trump wagon to Victor Orban’s star just in time for it to implode. Like Kamala Harris before him, the vice president is getting all the hard, unpopular assignments – and also like Harris, it could cost him his political future.
Guest: Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political correspondent with Zeteo, co-author of “Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump's Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington.”
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Heads up, today's conversation gets a little colorful, like there are a few swears. |
| 0:07.5 | Pop in some earbuds. |
| 0:14.4 | Zateo's Asa Wins-Sub-Seng has got a lot to say about Vice President J.D. Vans. |
| 0:26.0 | Swin lives in Ohio. So for a brief moment, |
| 0:32.3 | Vance was his senator. When I asked Swin about the first time he'd interviewed Vance, he inhaled sharply, and then told a story about the time he and Vance chatted, on the record, at a urinal. |
| 0:40.4 | What I'm alluding to here is Swin is not a casual observer of the vice president. |
| 0:47.0 | And that has led him to developing this theory. |
| 0:51.9 | Back in 2024, right after Donald Trump was elected to office again, you had a nickname for J.D. Vance. What was it? |
| 1:02.0 | Boy Kamala. You heard that right. Swin started calling Vance boy Kamala. He'd watched his Kamala Harris got |
| 1:09.9 | weighed down by all of President Biden's bad |
| 1:12.8 | press and border flubs and an economy everyone seemed to be sick of. And he just couldn't imagine |
| 1:19.5 | J.D. Vance avoiding the same fate. So right after the election, Swin started floating his theory |
| 1:26.4 | whenever he'd get drinks with Vance allies. |
| 1:29.5 | I just started telling them that having a very elderly, visibly physically declining white guy, old man boss with a stagnant inflation riddled economy is very likely going to come and bite him in the |
| 1:46.4 | ass and drag down his future presidential aspirations. Did they accept your analysis? |
| 1:51.1 | Some of them were weirdly antagonistic and bitchy. |
| 1:56.0 | But this week, this theory of Swins, it seemed to reach escape velocity. |
| 2:01.9 | I was not even factoring into my analysis at the time. |
| 2:04.9 | Like Trump, he's going to launch this hellish, disastrous, illegal war on Iran that J.D. Vance himself didn't really even want to do in the first place. |
| 2:13.7 | That would then be something that J.D. Vance would also be inextricably tied to. |
| 2:17.9 | And J.D. Vance's whole post-Trump MAGA political brand, so much of that is wrapped up in him |
| 2:24.2 | declaring himself allegedly very anti-war and not your daddy's neocon. |
... |
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