While President Trump is away, JD Vance is venturing into some foreign territory himself.
The vice president is embarking on a media blitz beginning this morning to promote a new book about his faith. At 11 a.m., he is set to appear on the ABC daytime talk show, “The View.”
The seven women on that show are about as hostile toward the Trump administration as “Fox & Friends” is chummy (Mr. Vance already hit that show earlier Tuesday morning). The vice president’s decision to appear on “The View” is notable because his boss has been warring with ABC for the better part of two years.
In December 2024, the network agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump. In April of this year, Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, both demanded that ABC fire the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for a joke he made about Mrs. Trump having “a glow like an expectant widow.” ABC ignored them that time. And then, last month, the network accused the Federal Communications Commission of threatening its station licenses as part of a campaign of “unconstitutional retaliation and coercion.”
Mr. Vance is also scheduled to sit down with Megyn Kelly, whom the president recently attacked for being an overrated, “Low IQ person.” She has been among the most searing critics of his war with Iran.
Mr. Vance’s book tour coincides with the administration’s drawdown of that conflict. The vice president has made himself the face of the peace negotiations and is sure to get many questions about it this week, especially while the president is in France at the Group of 7 summit. While some members of the MAGA base are happy that the fighting seems finally to be coming to a close, more hawkish types are growing fitful in the absence of any clear details about what a deal might entail.
The vice president will also face questions about his ambitions for the 2028 presidential race. On Sunday, he and his wife, Usha Vance, were asked about that during an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” (on another network that paid the president millions of dollars to settle one of his lawsuits).
“I have no doubt that the president of the United States is going to be very supportive of anything that I ultimately decide to do,” Mr. Vance said. “But we really just haven’t talked about what that thing will be.”
He said that in his conversations with the president, “I never bring it up. But sure, the president brings it up a lot, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately. You know, the president’s a political animal. He loves this stuff. He’s very fascinated by it.”
