The US is the land of the free and the home of the world’s most expensive, and most excruciatingly drawn-out, elections. In most democracies, the election cycle lasts just a few weeks or months. In most democracies there are strict laws regulating how long politicians can campaign, and how much money political parties can accept. But the US is not most democracies.
Which is why, despite the fact we’re not even a full year into Trump 2.0, there’s already chatter about 2028. Assuming Donald Trump doesn’t find some sort of legal loophole that lets him run again (not unthinkable!), JD Vance is widely seen as his heir apparent, with Trump saying a presidential ticket with Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio would be “unstoppable”. Meanwhile, Rubio, it was recently reported, is telling his inner circle he’d support Vance for president.
In his role as vice-president, Vance is already under constant scrutiny. But, as 2028 approaches, he will be put under the microscope. And if he wants to get the top job there are a few liabilities that he should probably sort out.
His personality is one of them: Vance can come off as smug and obnoxious. But that’s something he can work on. This is a man, after all, who has changed his name many times; a former atheist who converted to Catholicism in 2019, a few years before running for political office. A man who once called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” and now calls him boss. Vance is adept at shape-shifting.
A liability that might be rather harder to shake off, however, is his ties to the shadowy $450bn technology company Palantir. Vance would not be where he is today were it not for the mentorship of Peter Thiel, the company’s billionaire co-founder. Thiel encouraged the hiring of Vance at his investment firm Mithril Capital in 2016, then spent $15m on Vance’s senate campaign. Some people see Vance as a sort of avatar for Thiel in the White House. Which is worrying because Thiel has said he doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”.
It’s hard to explain exactly what Thiel’s firm does in non-buzzwordy language, but here are a few examples. The company has a multimillion-dollar contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help improve “deportation logistics”, and has been building an “ImmigrationOS” that, according to a contract seen by Business Insider, will include “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation”. Palantir, which has been called “the AI arms dealer of the 21st century”, also works very closely with Israel’s military. A June report from the UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese says there are “reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology” to Israel – which is as dystopian as it sounds – as well as “core defence infrastructure”. When the Palantir co-founder Alex Karp was heckled by a pro-Palestine protester in May and accused of killing Palestinians, he shrugged it off with: “Mostly terrorists, that’s true.”
Many potential Vance voters don’t give a damn about Palestinians. But they are suspicious of big tech and the surveillance state – and they are very wary of the Trump administration’s deepening ties to Palantir. The podcast bros who helped get out the vote for Trump in 2024, for example, have repeatedly voiced concerns about the company. On a 9 September episode of his podcast Joe Rogan referenced an article from the financial news site Benzinga about the Trump administration employing Palantir to gather the “personal data of American citizens” and called it “kinda creepy”. Rogan went on to quote the article’s comments about Palantir creating “detailed profiles of American citizens” and asked, alarmed: “Who signed off on this?” Over a dozen other rightwing influencers, including Tucker Carlson, have worried aloud about Palantir’s capabilities and its objectives for the US.
All this is a big problem for Vance because, as he recently acknowledged while speaking to university students: “I get asked about Palantir a lot because there’s this internet meme out there that somehow I am super in bed with Palantir.” Meme or not, it’s hard to ignore the links between the two, which are, increasingly, generating headlines. You’ve made your bed, Vance; now you’ve got to lie in it.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
