the elephant in the room

You might not imagine that Vice President JD Vance is a man plagued by introspection and internal conflict. After all, in 2016 he was a self-identified “never-Trump guy” who privately described the soon-to-be president as “America’s Hitler”. In The New York Times, he was unequivocal: “Mr Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” Now he is Trump’s vice president and loyal and stalwart defender – and, he must hope, heir apparent to the Maga movement.

On Sunday, Vance attended the inaugural Mass of Pope Leo XIV in St Peter’s Square in the Vatican City. The Vice President’s office made a strikingly terse announcement, noting that “Pope Leo XIV is the first American Pope. Vice President Vance is the first Catholic convert to serve as Vice President.”

The elephant in the room – fittingly, as the Republican Party’s symbol is an elephant – is that the former Cardinal Robert Prevost, who was elected pontiff by the Sacred College of Cardinals 10 days ago, is no soulmate of the Trump administration. He has frequently been critical of the President and of Vance on social media, a few months ago tweeting “JD Vance is wrong”.

Despite his often-affirmed and cited Roman Catholicism, Vance could easily have stayed away from Rome this weekend. Although Joe Biden, then vice president, inevitably attended the inauguration of Pope Francis in 2013, George W Bush sent his brother Jeb to the ceremony for Benedict XVI in 2005; when St John Paul II was inaugurated in 1978, the United States and the Vatican City did not even have formal diplomatic relations.

Not only did Vance attend Pope Leo’s inaugural Mass, he was seen shaking hands with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. It is still not three months since the men sat in the Oval Office and Vance told Zelensky he was being “disrespectful” and asked him if he had ever thanked the United States for its military and financial assistance. But this barely registers as a volte-face for someone of the Vice President’s political and ideological suppleness. He is not a stupid man; he knows full well what he is doing.

Assuming that President Trump does not attempt to take an axe to the Twenty-Second Amendment and somehow seek a third term in office, Vance must currently be regarded as the favourite to receive the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2028. That will depend on a great deal of conspicuous and performative loyalty in front of the cultish section of the Maga movement, for whom virtue is measured only by devotion to President Trump and the repeated recollection of his greatness and achievements.

There is another force at play, however. Although he has rallied slightly in recent weeks, Trump has had sometimes historic disapproval ratings consistently above 50 per cent since at least the beginning of April. His “Liberation Day” tariff regime has not been a success, and his attempts to reach a peace settlement between Russia and Ukraine have not only floundered, but President Putin, whom he has blatantly favoured, has shown himself to be rapacious and intransigent.

Vance knows that he must create a degree of distance between himself and Trump. If the two men are lashed together, the sinking of one will drag the other down, but if the Vice President can stay even a single cable’s-length away, he will have much more flexibility. If that means shaking the hand of a man he sought to berate and humiliate before the world’s media a few weeks ago, it is a small price to pay.

So too is attending a Mass which cannot have been a comfortable experience. Leo XIV’s sermon condemned an economic system which exploits “the Earth’s resources and marginalises the poorest”, called for a “just and lasting peace” in Ukraine and offered prayers for Gaza, where “children, families, the elderly, survivors are reduced to hunger”. The Pope let the spotlight shine on several areas over which he and Washington have very different approaches and some fundamental disagreements.

More than half of America’s Catholics voted for Donald Trump. A third of the President’s cabinet apart from Vance are Roman Catholics, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Robert Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, and CIA director John Ratcliffe. Like Catholic Americans across the country, if confronted by a choice between Trump and the Pope, some will go one way and some the other. The Vice President knows that because he will feel it himself.

Contemporary American politics does not feel like an atmosphere of nuance and careful calibration. Donald Trump is a man of primary colours, bright lights and certainty, of winning or losing, a political Manichaean. Vance can play that game, and has done, but he is also a trimmer; if he were not, he would not now be Vice President. His presence in Rome this weekend is not by itself dramatic, but it is indicative. It shows the narrow path he will have to tread if he is to reach the Oval Office in a few years’ time.