JD Vance’s bad week gets worse

Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on August 5, 2026. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

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Hi readers, happy Friday! What a week, right? 

My colleague Caitlin Dewey has spent the last two days unpacking some of the midterm results and their implications for you, and there will be lots more of that to come. But before we head into the weekend, I’m going to take a quick second to look ahead — to 2028. 

Specifically, to the future of the Republican Party, which just found itself on the wrong end of what may be the biggest electoral landslide since 1976. It’s a comprehensive, crushing repudiation — and one that has already cast the future of MAGA’s heir apparent, Vice President JD Vance, into doubt. 

Vance has long looked like the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2028, with the clearest claim to President Donald Trump’s legacy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also considered a potential 2028 candidate, has previously said he would defer to Vance were Vance to run. 

But that may be changing. The downside to being so closely linked to the president, after all, is that it’s hard to run very far when the president gets hit with Electoral Ragnarok. Vance didn’t help his case on Wednesday, with a strange and lengthy post on the social media site X blaming the Iran war for his party’s electoral woes. 

Also implicated in questions about Vance and the 2028 primary is a bigger question about the future of the MAGA movement. Specifically: Is MAGA dead?

No more MAGA? No, more MAGA! 

If you ask conservative writer and Vance ally Rod Dreher — and we did! — the answer is easy: Yes, after a historic electoral thrashing, MAGA as a political movement is dead. And it is possible that, as a vote-getting enterprise, MAGA is at the end of the road. But the Trump White House has no plans to let up on the MAGA agenda. 

We got our clearest post-midterms sign of that fact on Friday afternoon, in the form of one Stephen Miller. Trump, in a post to Truth Social, announced that Miller would take over as White House chief of staff starting Monday, replacing current chief of staff Susie Wiles. 

Miller’s ascension is a foreboding sign: Through one and a half Trump terms, he’s been the driving force behind many of Trump’s cruelest and least popular policies — some of the same policies, particularly around immigration, that helped Republicans lose the midterms in a blowout. 

Trump’s decision to promote Miller, with just a little over two years left in the White House, means that we can expect the administration to double down on those same policies, with predictably unpopular results. 

That all spells more bad news for Vance, already limping out of the midterms after tying himself tightly to failed Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was behind one of the ugliest attack ads in recent political memory. 

And it may embolden other potential contenders, like Rubio (who is reportedly eyeing an exit from the administration in an attempt to save face) and even outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who Dreher described to Vox as “the only national Republican politician not tainted by Trumpism.” (Mostly because he got flattened by Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, but never mind that now.)

One link for later

➨ Here’s how to protect your family from convincing AI scams. “As AI gets better and cheaper,” my colleague Adam Clark Estes writes, “we’re all becoming easier targets” — even if you think of yourself as skeptical, tech-savvy, and hard to fool. But there are some straightforward steps you can take to keep yourself and your family safe, including setting up a verification system to confirm when you’re actually talking to a family member and not an eerily accurate AI replica of their voice.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Sweden is really, really good at assembling modular homes out of prebuilt components? (Think Ikea, but for the whole house and not just a bed frame.) Unfortunately, Marina Bolotnikova reports, US building and zoning codes stand in the way of doing the same thing here.
• Today’s trivia: What’s the title of Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Ricky Martin’s biggest hit? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you which planet takes about 165 Earth years to orbit around the sun. That would be Neptune, where one year is a little more than 60,000 days.