Vice President JD Vance has attacked several conservative icons in recent weeks, unnerving many in the Republican Party’s old guard ahead of the 2028 presidential primary.
Last month, Vance criticized British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, an ally of Republican President Ronald Reagan, for economic policies that he said moved the country “further away” from prosperity and Christinianity. Vance said it was “obviously a good thing” that the American right was distancing itself from Milton Friedman, long regarded as the intellectual godfather of modern conservative economics.
And at an event Friday in Ohio, Vance intensified this battle, calling The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board “the voice of big business” that wanted “to ship your jobs overseas” and “let anybody who wants to come into the United States of America with no vetting and no care.”
These broadsides have provoked fresh resistance among the Republican Party’s orthodox economic conservatives, many of whom had long hoped to reassert their free market agenda after the departure of President Donald Trump. Even some Trump supporters now see Vance’s alleged ideological heresies as disqualifying.
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“You can’t be the Republican nominee for president if you actually think Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman are not the future direction of the party,” said Stephen Moore, a Reagan acolyte who has served as an outside adviser for Trump. “He’s off message right now and that’s going to be a big problem for him.”
It “is very concerning” that Vance was listening to “people who are not Reaganite Republicans and not even Trump Republicans,” Moore said. Vance’s allies dismiss these critics as a narrow elite almost entirely confined to Washington, pointing to the vice president’s high approval rating among Trump supporters.
The skirmishes, primarily playing out on social media, provide an early window into the factional rifts on the right expected to burst to the surface next year once there is an open contest for leadership of the Republican Party.
A spokesman for Vance declined to comment. The vice president’s allies, however, say they relish a confrontation with what several referred to as the “rump” wing of the Republican Party that defied Trump in the 2016 and 2024 presidential primaries.
“The president helped save the Republican Party in large part due to his populist economic message. If he had not come along, the Republican Party would be on the brink of extinction,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a political adviser to the president.
Most polling thus far suggests Vance is highly popular among the president’s supporters, and Trump has faced similar criticisms for his insistence on using tariffs in defense of America’s industrial base.
“The same forces who fought against Trump in 2016, who said he’s an antisemite and a leftist and pro-abortion — all these establishment types are back 10 years later, and now they’re just older, uglier, dumber and with less influence than ever before,” Bruesewitz said.
Vance has broken with conservative economic dogma on a greater scale than Trump, pushing family benefit policies, questioning bedrock assumptions of U.S. monetary policy and suggesting that economic growth has been overrated by policymakers. On Friday, he renewed his attacks on American elites “from both political parties” who “spent the last 40 years telling you it didn’t matter if we made things right here or whether we made them in overseas countries,” an implicit rebuke to the pre-Trump view of trade on the right.
Phil Kerpen, president of the conservative group American Commitment who described himself as “90%” a supporter of Trump, said Vance has been “clearly trying to be as transgressive against the free market ideological wing of the party as possible as a way to distinguish himself. I think it’s substantively wrong and destructive.”
Already many traditional Reaganites reconciled themselves to supporting or working for Trump despite the president’s support for high tariffs and resistance to cutting entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Vance takes conservative politics further away from the template Reagan set in the 1980s, said Vance Ginn, who served as chief economist in the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term.
“As a classic free-market guy, I’ve been pretty concerned about the direction we’re going down for a while now. With JD Vance, it’s on steroids,” Ginn said. “Yeah, I’m nervous about it. Definitely.”
Vance’s precise policy convictions remain inscrutable on a number of issues, in part because of his relatively short time as a public figure before rising to the vice presidency in which he has marched in lockstep behind the president’s agenda. He has fallen in line behind Trump’s policy positions on taxes, trade, regulation and immigration, leaving his personal positions a matter of some speculation.
When he has taken policy stands of his own, he’s shown a desire to break from conservative orthodoxy. Vance has not just been a staunch defender of the president’s high tariffs but gone out of his way to affiliate himself with some of the policy’s most ardent defenders, including Oren Cass, founder of the think tank American Compass.
Where Trump mollified many Reaganite conservatives by passing into law two of the largest tax cuts in modern American history, Vance’s tax positions have been more heterodox.
In 2024, Vance pushed for the elimination of a tax break for large corporate mergers. As a senator, he pushed for a penalty on executives of large failed banks, endorsing legislation with prominent progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts).
Perhaps most strikingly, Vance in 2024 called for the Child Tax Credit to be boosted from $2,000 per child to $5,000. During debates about the tax bill, he also expressed openness to raising the top rate on the richest taxpayers.
As a senator, Vance expressed openness to a $20 minimum wage and called for Google to be broken up. He praised Lina Khan, who was appointed by President Joe Biden to lead the Federal Trade Commission, and who infuriated conservatives by pursuing an aggressive antitrust policy.
In one 2023 clip recirculated among conservatives earlier this month on X, Vance expressed opposition to the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. The world’s banks and governments hold their financial reserves in dollars, which makes it more expensive than other currencies. This depresses domestic manufacturing by making American exports more expensive, but also means that the federal government can run large deficits, which help subsidize consumer lifestyles.
Vance’s call to upend this balance, in place for more than 80 years, has baffled the conservative policy community, though Trump has also expressed ambivalence about the strong dollar policy.
“I am not convinced by his current arguments — trade, monetary policy, getting rid of the reserve currency. All of that is a recipe for things to be very expensive in the U.S., and we have an affordability crisis as it is,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, who served as a senior policy adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Arizona) 2008 presidential campaign. “This is absolutely being discussed — though one of the beauties of all these discussions is they’re usually way ahead of schedule and totally irrelevant in the end.”
Despite the hand-wringing on the right, Democrats say Vance’s populist instincts are largely for show.
The vice president has long been close with billionaires in Silicon Valley. Vance ultimately supported Trump’s 2025 tax bill, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will result in 10 million people losing their health insurance. The legislation, the largest safety net cut in modern American history, also slashed food stamps for lower-income households.
“Vance may try to distance himself from neoclassical economics on his press tours, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen any action from him that’s any different,” said Liz Pancotti, vice president of policy, advocacy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank. “He talks a big game, but falls to the exact same corporate interests that the party is beholden to.”
On the other side, some conservatives are also holding out hope that the Republican Party turns on Trump’s policies, whether in the 2028 primaries or sooner.
Most Republican members of Congress, as well as most Republican governors, remain more aligned with Reagan economic principles than either Trump or Vance. It is also possible that a disastrous 2026 midterm outcome for the Republican Party, caused in part by high prices, would intensify internal criticism of the president’s tariff policies.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a potential 2028 contender, has already broken with the president’s trade agenda. Former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another potential presidential candidate, is similarly widely viewed as articulating a more business-friendly agenda than Trump or Vance.
“I don’t think you’re going to see people attack Trump, but you could see people really sharply break with his policies,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, who has been critical of the president’s economic policies on trade and spending.
The Republican base might not be interested in going back to the traditional conservative views, though. Voters without a college degree comprise a far higher share of the Republican Party under Trump than they did several decades ago, and it is unclear whether they would support a candidate who bucks Trump’s economic views.
“The incipient ‘Never Vance’ campaign is a precise rehashing of ‘Never Trump’ from 2016,” Michael Knowles, a conservative political commentator, said. “It seems to me a small group, albeit one with outside visibility since it’s clustered in the Beltway. All of which is probably good for the vice president if he does indeed run in 2028, as it more firmly establishes him as the authentic successor to Trump.”
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