— If you want to understand Trump’s Washington, you need to understand Vance’s place in it. We pull back the curtain.
— First in Playbook: Allies of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are worried that his “laundry list of scandals could lead to his downfall” — and that more shoes will drop soon, Rachael Bade scoops.
— British PM Keir Starmer prepares to press Trump on Scottish soil.
VANCE WITH THE ONE WHO BRUNG YOU: VP JD Vance’s first six months in office have been an exercise in stealth.
Yes, he’s had a very public role as vice troll-in-chief on social media. He’s proven an effective messenger to the base. He ruffled feathers — all the right ones, his allies would argue — with his speech at the Munich Security Conference chastising the EU. He has broken seven ties in the Senate. He navigated dicey MAGA coalitional tensions ahead of the military strikes in Iran. And today at noon, he’ll speak at a steel plant in Canton, Ohio, as he talks up the benefits of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in his home state — his second time doing so in the Rust Belt in recent weeks.
At the administration’s six-month mark, there were no sweeping profiles of Vance in major publications — none of the sort of buzzy check-in pieces you might expect.
That under-the-radar approach is by design. There is no incentive for Vance to get out ahead of President Donald Trump. But if you want to understand how Trump’s Washington really works, you need to understand the unique role Vance plays. And that means pulling back the curtain on the private Vance: how he has navigated his early months in office, how he operates and how he’s thinking about — if not talking about — 2028.
Vance has studiously eschewed a portfolio, multiple people familiar with the matter tell Playbook — careful to avoid the mistake of his immediate predecessor Kamala Harris, whom Joe Biden saddled with the politically thankless task of focusing on the root causes of migration, opening her to attacks on the issue.
Instead, he’s focused on a more amorphous task: Being MAGA’s trusted internal peacemaker. And that may pay long-term political dividends.
He has won over high-level MAGA influencers, is on a text chain with Charlie Kirk and has maintained close ties to Tucker Carlson, according to two people familiar with the relationship. “JD is doing a masterful job of having the president’s back and explaining that to the base,” Kirk told Playbook.
That was tricky enough with foreign policy, when Trump’s interventionism in the Middle East seemed to contradict the “America First” ethos. In those moments, “Vance helped keep the MAGA coalition together,” one Republican close to the White House tells Playbook. Both with Yemen and Iran, when Trump ordered strikes, Vance publicly backed the administration despite whatever his private views were. (On Yemen, his personal disagreements with the policy spilled into public view because of Signalgate.) “You can deploy him across the media,” says the Republican close to the White House. “You saw the full swath of his communications ability.”
But it’s been an even more delicate task in the wake of the Epstein files fallout. Vance has been squeezed on the topic by both the podcaster Theo Von and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in recent days. Though he called for the release of the Epstein files prior to being elected VP, Vance has largely steered clear of addressing the underlying tensions within MAGA on the matter — though he purportedly privately talked to podcaster Tim Dillon about it, according to Dillon; a Vance spokesperson declined to elaborate). He has instead attacked the WSJ on its reporting — and was the first major administration figure to do so on X.
First in Playbook — The top cop: Vance has also acted as a kind of intra-administration cop, POLITICO’s Rachael Bade reports this morning. After MAGA heavyweights including Carlson and Megyn Kelly began interviewing ousted Pentagon employees “proclaiming their innocence, some White House officials and people close to Vice President JD Vance privately asked for proof of Hegseth’s accusations, according to four people familiar with what happened,” Rachael writes. “Hegseth’s team indicated they did not have evidence, three of the people said.”
That’s not all: “There’s going to be more shoes to drop all around,” said one person close with Hegseth, and a handful of Hegseth allies have “engaged in something of an intervention with the secretary,” and have implored him to “rethink surrounding himself with people the White House distrusts.” He has yet to heed the warning.
Vance’s experience: “I’ve learned a ton, even in 130 days — 140 days, however long we’ve been in office,” Vance said in open press remarks last month as your Playbook author sat in on the Lima, Ohio, state GOP dinner held in his honor. “I think I’ve had more on the job training than I think any person of having a job for all of about five months.”
A spokesperson for Vance declined to comment.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: The one thing Vance has not done — even privately, according to multiple Republicans close to the White House — is talk about his plans for 2028, when Trump is constitutionally barred from another term. Two Republican White House allies tell Playbook that Vance will not make significant political moves of his own until after the midterms.
“For a guy that doesn’t talk about ’28 at all, he’s pitching a perfect game so far,” said a second Republican close to the White House. “If anyone tells you he does [talk about it], they’re lying.”
Still, others are talking about it on his behalf.
“JD Vance is clearly the front-runner to be the presidential candidate in 2028,” Laura Loomer, the influential MAGA figure and far-right activist who met with Vance at the White House complex earlier this summer, tells Playbook.
Other potential candidates loom, of course. Over the weekend, Lara Trump had a sitdown with Secretary of State Marco Rubio for her Fox News show. “You are talked about quite frequently as a possible contender in 2028. Do you have your sights set outside the State Department,” she asked. “Well, I think JD Vance would be a great nominee,” Rubio said, flashing a grin, “if he decides to do that. I think he’s doing a great job as vice president. He’s a close friend, and I hope he intends to do it.”
To be sure, the midterms are still many months away — let alone another presidential election. But some of this intraparty 2028 GOP talk is beginning to play out behind the scenes.
“After these next three-and-a-half years, that’s it. There’s not going to be another Trump administration. And so there’s nobody who could fill President Trump’s shoes,” Loomer tells Playbook. “And if people think that Cabinet members appointed by Trump are going to stay loyal to each other in the race to redefine what a post-Trump Republican Party looks like, they’re out of their mind. You’re going to see Cabinet members turn on each other, and I think that Cabinet members are already posturing through policy decisions and public statements in preparation for their 2028 campaigns.”
To that end, some Republicans close to the White House are anticipating — even rooting for — a big GOP primary. But they have a sense of how it’ll play out.
“JD will tear through those fuckers while they are all running at 0.5 percent, and I’ll send each one of them a fruit basket after they drop out,” the second Republican close to the White House tells Playbook.
TRUMP VS. WORLD
TODAY: Trump will host British PM Keir Starmer at his resort in Turnberry, Scotland, starting at 7 a.m. Eastern (noon, British Summer Time). He’ll have two big asks, per our colleagues at London Playbook: trying to get Trump to pressure Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu toward a ceasefire in Gaza, and getting clarity on implementing the U.S.-U.K. trade deal. They’ll chat with the press at 7:30 a.m., and Starmer will reportedly travel to Aberdeen with Trump later in the day, finishing with what our colleagues have heard described as a “private dinner.”
GAZA LATEST: Speaking last night in Jerusalem, Netanyahu denied the extensive and well-documented reports of mass starvation in Gaza that have beckoned the world to action to stave off a rapidly deepening humanitarian crisis. “What a bold-faced lie,” Netanyahu said at an event hosted by conservative pastor Paula White, per video from the AP. “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.”
Yesterday, Israel announced the start of a daily 10-hour pause in military operations in parts of Gaza to allow aid to flow in. “Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said on Sunday that the desperate crowds who rushed their trucks were fired on by the Israeli military,” NPR’s Joe Hernandez and colleagues report. “While humanitarian organizations said Israel’s pause was encouraging, they say the only way to really get in the aid that’s needed is if there is a ceasefire.”
TRADE AND: In Scotland last night, Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emerged from an hourlong discussion with a trade agreement between the U.S. and EU, successfully fending off the president’s threat to slap a 30 percent tariff on EU-made goods that was due to take effect this coming Friday. Markets are expected to sigh with relief today.
The gist of the deal: The U.S. will set a baseline tariff of 15 percent for European goods, including cars, while the EU agreed to buy $750 billion of energy products from the U.S. and to invest an additional $600 billion in the U.S. beyond what it had already planned, as WSJ’s Kim Mackrael and Natalie Andrews report.
The fine print: Additionally, the two sides “agreed to drop tariffs to zero on a range of goods including aircraft, plane parts, certain chemicals, certain generic drugs, semiconductor equipment and some agricultural products,” per the NYT’s Luke Broadwater. But the Journal notes that “neither side published the text of their agreement,” and Trump and von der Leyen “appeared to have different interpretations of some of the details,” including the tariff rate on steel and aluminum.
How Trump sees it: Comparing it favorably to his recent agreements with the U.K. and Japan, Trump described the EU deal as “the biggest one of them all,” per POLITICO’s Koen Verhelst and Myah Ward. In the context of Trump’s pursuit of trade deals on his own terms, it is a major victory.
Another way to see it: Yes, Trump bent the E.U. to his will. But 15 percent, even while lower than Trump’s threatened rate, still means that American consumers of European goods will pay substantially higher prices than they would’ve without the tariffs. (As Justin Wolfers, the influential economist, tweeted: “American President raises taxes on Americans across a wide range of goods; European Union President announces tax cuts for Europeans across a narrow range of goods.”)
What’s already frustrating Trump: At a moment when he’d prefer to enjoy the spoils of victory, he continued to be dogged by the story that won’t go away: At a press spray after the deal was announced, a reporter asked if “part of the rush to get this deal done [was] to knock Jeffrey Epstein’s story out.” “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding with that,” Trump said, sounding exasperated.
DANCE OF THE SUPERPOWERS: Top U.S. and Chinese economic officials will resume talks in Stockholm today, “aiming to extend [an economic] truce by three months and keeping sharply higher tariffs at bay,” Reuters’ David Lawder reports. “China is facing an August 12 deadline to reach a durable tariff agreement with President Donald Trump’s administration, after Beijing and Washington reached preliminary deals in May and June to end weeks of escalating tit-for-tat tariffs and a cut-off of rare earth minerals.”
FOR YOUR RADAR: American diplomats are in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, today in an effort to broker a ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand, Rubio announced last night. “President Trump said he had spoken to both leaders and that U.S. officials would not negotiate trade deals with either country unless the fighting stopped,” NYT’s Edward Wong and Sui-Lee Wee report. “At least 35 people have been killed since the combat began on Thursday, and hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled the border areas where it is taking place.”
BEST OF THE REST
ALL ABOARD THE MINIBUS: As the Senate hurtles toward August recess, Majority Leader John Thune is hoping to “make a dent in both the government funding process” by getting an appropriations package through his chamber “by the end of this week,” our colleagues at POLITICO’s Inside Congress newsletter write this morning. “To that end, GOP leaders are negotiating with members of their conference over a ‘minibus’ of three bills that would, collectively, fund the departments of Commerce, Justice, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs, as well as key military construction projects and the FDA.”
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Epstein files latest: One of Trump’s legal archnemeses is turning the screws on his administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files — and details about Trump’s potential mention in them.
Norm Eisen, the former Barack Obama-era White House ethics czar, and his States United Democracy Defenders Fund, have filed an expansive Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department and FBI, demanding the release of all Epstein-related files reviewed by AG Pam Bondi, her deputy Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino.
They’re also seeking any communications about how DOJ officials should “approach or address references to Donald Trump or Mar-a-Lago” appearing in the Epstein files, as well as records of meetings the senior DOJ officials had in which Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were the focus, and any records reviewed by Emil Bove, a senior DOJ official whom Trump nominated for a lifetime appellate judgeship. A final Senate vote to confirm Bove to the bench is expected imminently.
THE TRUMPIFICATION OF POLITICS: As Democrats search for a way out of the political wilderness, there’s an emerging fault line that is less about ideology than attitude and approach. And in that, some of the solutions being offered seem to reflect key characteristics of a man many of them loathe: Trump.
No traffic on the high road: In this, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) is “testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reports in a worthwhile feature profile.
Put simply: “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, tells Godfrey, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett says: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) “is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”
Everything, everywhere, all at once: Democrats have bandied about for a way to “achieve penetration into the culture that matches” Trump, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent writes this morning. In New York’s mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani is offering a vision of what that could look like by using digital platforms and unpaid social media videos. “The goal is to achieve a kind of Trumpian ubiquity: Andrew Epstein, the campaign’s creative director, says it’s designed to ensure that if you are ‘on your phone,’ you are ‘going to see Zohran.’” (Plenty more in the piece, including exclusive campaign data and interviews with top strategists.)
TRAIL MIX: Democratic Nevada AG Aaron Ford announced his candidacy for governor this morning. “Once a recipient of food stamps and Medicaid benefits, Ford now plans to run against Republicans’ cuts to those same programs, which he says will deeply impact Nevadans,” POLITICO’s Natalie Fertig reports. If he wins the primary, he’ll likely face GOP incumbent Gov. Joe Lombardo. … Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is expected to launch his Senate campaign today. He all but made it official over the weekend with a speech at the N.C. Dems’ “Unity Dinner,” during which he asked people to stand up if they were running for office in 2026. “Hey, I’m not sitting down, am I?” he said, prompting cheers, per the News & Observer.
IF ALL ELSE FAILS: “Democratic candidates are posting weightlifting videos in search of a midterm lift,” by CNN’s David Wright
PLAYBOOK METRO SECTION: “The last wholesalers of Union Market,” by WaPo’s Claire Healy: “The area is emblematic of the development that has transformed D.C. in recent years. … While some longtime vendors have tried to take advantage of the influx of potential customers or sell to the new restaurants, others have struggled with rising rents and are considering moving to Maryland.”
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Daniella Gibbs Léger is joining SquadBuck Consulting as a partner. She most recently was executive VP for comms and strategy at the Center for American Progress.
TRANSITIONS — Juven Jacob is now principal of his own practice, Juven Capitol Strategies. He previously was a senior adviser at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD — Kaylee McGhee White, editor-in-chief of Independent Women Features and Fox News contributor, and Lane White, a project manager at Meridian Homes, welcomed their first child, Rowan Daniel, on July 21, 2025. Pic … Another pic
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) … NBC’s Courtney Kube … former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) … Huma Abedin (5-0) … WaPo’s Ruby Cramer and Beth Reinhard … Mark Meadows … CNN’s Kate Bolduan and Annette Choi … Richard Haass … Scott Pelley … Kathy Dedrick (5-0) … Josh Bell of Rep. Ron Estes’ (R-Kan.) office … Abigail Kane … Patrick Boland … Kirsten Fedewa of Kirsten Fedewa & Associates … Tanya Snyder … former AG Michael Mukasey … Steve Deace … former Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) … Stacy McBride of HB Strategies … Michael Herald of Sen. Todd Young’s (R-Ind.) office … Mandy Snapp … POLITICO’s Megan Ednie … Betsy Werronen … Lacey (White) Peterson
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