The clear front-runner for the next Republican presidential nomination has never once raised with his boss the endorsement that would all but settle the race.
President Donald Trump declined on Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, to say whether he would back Vice President JD Vance in a 2028 campaign, telling reporters in the Oval Office — with Vance standing directly behind him — that the two of them had never discussed it.
The exchange came at an Oval Office event announcing a new whistleblower reward program, when a reporter asked about Vance’s remarks in an interview a day earlier, in which the vice president said he expected Trump’s endorsement if he ran. Trump cut in before the question finished, praised Vance’s talent and character, and then said the subject had never come up between them.
“I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it. You know, who would believe that?” Trump said. Vance agreed from behind him and nodded along. Trump added that it was far too early, that the midterms came first, and that everyone would see how that goes.
The Question Aboard Air Force Two
Vance sat for the interview with journalist Mark Halperin aboard Air Force Two, and it aired Monday, Oct. 19, on “2WAY TONIGHT.” Halperin relayed a panel’s prediction that Vance was 99 percent to 100 percent certain to run, and that Trump would sit on an endorsement a long while, to toy with him and play the game out.
Halperin asked whether the endorsement would come the moment Vance announced. Vance’s answer was blunt: “I would think so, but I don’t know, man.” He went on: “I haven’t talked to him about it.”
Halperin pushed on the strangeness of a sitting vice president telling the president he is running and the president needing time to think it over. “No, I don’t think it’d be weird,” Vance said. “Again, I think I would get his endorsement.” He continued: “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, like, this race play out and not, like, preemptively prejudge the results.’”
Vance said he had no view on Trump’s thinking, having never raised it with him. He also said he could turn out to be terrible at the parts of a presidential campaign he has never faced — the media scrutiny, the pressure, the policy proposals — and said his mind is not made up on 2028. His focus, he said, is electing as many Republicans as possible in early November.
A Pass on Netanyahu’s Race
Trump threw his support behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Truth Social post ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election. Vance told Halperin he would not follow, saying he endorses American candidates and that the midterms have his attention. “I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections,” he said.
Earlier in 2026, Vance traveled to Budapest, Hungary, in support of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Trump endorsed Orbán, who lost.
The Ohio Ad Vance Defended
Both men are campaigning in the final stretch for Republican candidates around the country before the Nov. 3 midterms. Vance was at a rally at Hyder Warehouse in Hendersonville, N.C., the same day his interview aired, and on Oct. 21 he campaigned in the Cincinnati area for the Ohio Republican ticket.
Asked by reporters about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring gubernatorial opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, who calls her daughter a liar, Vance said its contents were “not really my concern” and that he was “a little bit disgusted when I see Republicans across the country who are whining” about it. Later, at a rally with Ramaswamy in Sharonville, Ohio, he praised him for having “the audacity to run a TV commercial which calls it out as it is and calls Amy Acton a liar.”
A Biographer Tells Republicans to Go Home
Michael Wolff, a Trump biographer, was asked by Joanna Coles at a live taping of their podcast, “Inside Trump’s Head,” whether Vance inherits Trumpism or Trumpism fizzles once Trump is gone. “Without question, it is the latter,” Wolff said, in remarks reported Oct. 23. He went on: “If I were any of the Republican candidates, I would just go home. Trump is not going to allow the next president to be a Republican, thereby superseding him.”
The former Ohio senator leads comfortably among Republicans in a New York Times aggregation of recent 2028 polling, the clear front-runner for the nomination.
Trump has repeatedly encouraged a competition for the nomination between Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a dynamic Vance once joked about by invoking the president’s old reality show, “The Apprentice.” Vance has said there is a chance he doesn’t run at all, citing Second Lady Usha Vance, who is not a big fan of politics, and the couple’s four small children. Whether the endorsement comes, and how quickly, turns on a conversation neither man says he has had with the other.
