When JD Vance, the US vice-president, looks towards the next presidential election, he has to consider a prospect that to some in the Maga movement seems unfathomable: who and what comes after Donald Trump?

The US president, the author of so much controversy and so many news cycles, has monopolised the attention of the political class like nobody else in recent history – and has been doing it for more than a decade.

Still, Mr Vance is better placed than most to imagine life post-Trump.

He rose to prominence as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir about his upbringing in Rust Belt Ohio, which became the bible for understanding the president’s first shock election victory in 2016.

Mr Vance, now widely seen as Mr Trump’s political heir, released his second book last month. Communion, ostensibly about Mr Vance’s journey to faith, also sets him up as the natural choice to lead the Maga movement.

Hillbilly was a lament; Communion is a manifesto.

He is midway through a media tour for his book lasting several weeks. During this he has positioned himself as the Trump administration’s most prominent isolationist and chief Israel critic.

Strategists warn that in staking out his ideology so starkly, Mr Vance cedes ground to potential Republican challengers such as Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz.

It’s out of character for Mr Vance, a man who changed his name twice and morphed from branding Mr Trump “America’s Hitler” into being his most effective attack dog, to let himself be pinned down.

However, others like Marc Short, a veteran Republican adviser, believe his political skills allow him to be “flexible on his convictions – if he has any”.

Mr Vance has detected a change in the Republican Party and the country at large.

Like Richard Nixon, a man whom he openly admires and in some ways resembles, he senses a silent majority he can speak to.

Whether that majority can carry Mr Vance to the White House remains to be seen, but he seems prepared to risk it all.

Mr Vance could be less than a year away from launching a presidential campaign, but some still see him as a walking mass of contradictions that would crush him if he stayed still long enough.

The vice-president is a populist intellectual, a former military journalist who routinely derides the media. He’s a Catholic who has criticised the Pope for wading into US politics, the isolationist attack dog who savaged Volodymyr Zelensky but tucked his tail between his legs and disappeared when the Iran War broke out.

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He’s one of the most powerful men in the country who pushes conspiracy theories about the deep state. He made his name as a Trump critic but built his career as a Trump supporter.

Still, to govern is to choose, and Mr Vance has acquired plenty of baggage from his brief time at the top of American politics.

Many vice-presidents are given borderline-impossible tasks that become electoral millstones during campaigns. Depending on your point of view, they’re given a chance to prove themselves or function as convenient scapegoats.

Kamala Harris, for example, was tarred as a failed “border tsar” as she struggled to tackle the causes of illegal migration from Central America.

Mr Vance will surely hope he isn’t merely the latest in a long line of political casualties, as he leads negotiations with Iran to end a war he never supported in the first place.

Doves are an endangered species within the Trump administration, after the departures of Tulsi Gabbard, the former director of national intelligence, and her counter-terror head, Joe Kent, her counterterror chief.

“The vice-president is now in the position of looking like a political loser … even though it seems to me he was trying to protect the US from a greater disaster of Trump’s own making,” said Rod Dreher, a former Vance adviser.

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) that Mr Vance agreed to with Iran in June has been deeply controversial. Mr Trump appeared to enjoy passing responsibility for overseeing peace talks between Mr Rubio and Mr Vance, and it was during one of Mr Vance’s turns that the fighting came to a stop.

Under its terms, Tehran could make around half a trillion dollars through unfrozen assets, lifted sanctions and a “reconstruction fund”.

“Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea,” Mr Cruz, the Texas senator, who is widely thought to be gearing up for the 2028 contest, said at the time.

It’s easy to see how that could be sharpened into an attack line come primary season.

Mr Vance braved the backlash as he embarked on a media tour to sell the deal. If he had ended the war, he could have taken credit for stemming a growing economic crisis while burnishing his isolationist bona fides, potentially tempting disillusioned Maga voters back into the fold.

But the MoU has collapsed after three weeks, as the US and Iran exchange rapidly escalating tit-for-tat strikes and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is once again choked off.

Mr Dreher, a conservative writer whom Mr Vance has credited with playing a critical role in his career, suspected the vice-president was “shocked” when Mr Trump launched the war on Feb 28.

“Unfortunately for Vance, he has the political albatross of this unpopular war around his neck,” he said.

Perhaps the vice-president has managed to distance himself from the war as the man trying in vain to bring it to a close. Being a failed negotiator might have more upsides than risking being seen as a warmonger.

But others argue Mr Vance has severely underestimated the party’s appetite for interventionism.

“The non-interventionist wing of the GOP has grown in the Trump era. There’s no question about that,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant associated with the party’s moderate wing. “But I don’t believe it’s a majority.”

John Bolton, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser and one of the party’s hawks, went further and accused Mr Vance of catering to a “tiny minority”.

Members of Congress are “overwhelmingly” interventionist, in the mould of Ronald Reagan, he argued, although he claimed they had been cowed into silence by the president’s “intimidation” tactics.

Even if the war is unpopular with the wider American public and the DC crowd is increasingly sceptical of it, polling shows it is backed by Mr Trump’s Maga base in overwhelming numbers.

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The vice-president has no qualms firing back at critics. Appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Wednesday, he twice hit out at Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s first vice-president, accusing him of backing endless bombing with no strategic endpoint.

Mr Pence had been “nothing but supportive of JD” but has been “name-checked” several times, said Mr Short, his former chief of staff.

“I think it shows an enormous insecurity,” he said. “Perhaps there’s a sensitivity that his effort to appease the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism isn’t working.”

Mr Vance has set about butchering the Republicans’ sacred cows with something close to enthusiasm. While attempting to negotiate peace with Iran, which many warn is a blind alley, he has publicly accused Israel of undermining those talks.

Speaking at the White House in June, he warned Israel that its leadership had become an international pariah and that the US was the country’s only friend left in the world.

“If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left,” he said.

In a New York Times interview, published the same day, he warned Israeli ministers they “can’t just kill their way out of… every single national security problem that you have”.

He went back on the offensive on Rogan’s podcast, claiming the country had mounted influence operations to push the US into a forever war by “manipulating and trying to change American public opinion”.

Support for Israel was once an article of faith on both the Left and Right: the real “special relationship”, as Christian Turner, Britain’s ambassador to the US, suggested in February.

James Baker faced savage political attacks for comparatively inoffensive comments as George H W Bush’s secretary of state, when he said the US and Israel had “common” though not “identical” interests.

But times have changed. There is mounting concern, particularly among young voters, about civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, which has been slowly prising away the base of American support on both the Left and Right.

Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews running the world have increasingly filtered into the mainstream. Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist streamer with a significant following among young Republicans, has expressed support for Adolf Hitler and criticises “organised Jewry”.

Mr Vance has never gone that far, but he is a self-declared conspiracy theorist and, like Nixon, appears to have a paranoid streak. Where the 37th president railed against the “establishment”, the vice-president sees the machinations of the “deep state”.

Speaking to Rogan, he claimed the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – whose scandal has shaped much of Mr Trump’s second term – had links to the “highest level” of American and Israeli intelligence.

“Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state,” he said at one point.

More broadly, Mr Vance has argued that “America First” means putting its interests before those of its allies, even Israel.

“On the Israel question, there can be no doubt that Vance is more in touch with the way the party is changing,” said Mr Dreher. “As a supporter of Israel, I regret that, but it’s simply true, and it does people like me no good to deny it.”

“I think it’s going to be a miscalculation,” said Rick Tyler, a former aide to Mr Cruz who worked on the senator’s 2016 presidential campaign.

“A smaller, more vocal, younger group is sympathetic to [Mr Vance’s] message about Israel. An older cohort is not. They are not vocal, and they vote in much larger numbers.”

At the same time, young men formed a central part of Mr Trump’s electoral coalition in 2024. Research from Tufts University suggests they favoured the president by a 14-point margin over Kamala Harris: Mr Vance will have to find a way to appeal across the generational divide.

Among members of Congress, Republicans seem in lockstep in support of Israel. When Thomas Massie, a GOP firebrand, brought an amendment on Wednesday to end US aid, he was the only member of the party who voted for it.

Democrats, under pressure from their grassroots supporters, split 103-98 in favour of the measure.

Mr Vance has also been willing to buck GOP orthodoxy in domestic politics as well. The key theme in Communion, which he returns to constantly, is that the US is in a state of civilisational decline.

The country, he argues, has drifted from its founding Christian principles, abandoning family and faith for glittering objects such as career advancement and prestige. The wealthiest nation on earth has no shortage of material enrichment, but it’s spiritually impoverished.

“Republicans are far too willing to worship the market and assume that free commercial transactions inevitably lead to good,” he writes in the epilogue. “We ought to stop worshipping such false idols and get back to worshipping God.”

It’s another of Mr Vance’s apparent contradictions that his philosophy was formed by Silicon Valley billionaires: notably Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and, according to the vice-president, “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met.”

Mr Vance also criticises libertarians who “worship at the altar of commerce”, arguing the economic system has produced a decline in birthrate and made abortion a logical choice for couples looking to get ahead.

As if in symbolic repudiation, he is having his fourth child with his wife, Usha, who is expected to give birth in late July.

Having documented the communities decimated by the exodus of manufacturing jobs in Hillbilly Elegy, he has hardened into one of the Republicans’ most zealous proponents of protectionism and critics of free trade.

That, too, provides a vacuum for Mr Vance’s potential rivals, who can position themselves as Mr Trump’s true heirs.

Voters gave the president much higher marks on the economy when he governed as a traditional Republican in his first term, rather than as a born-again protectionist in his second.

Mr Tyler compared the vice-president to Jimmy Carter, who argued that Americans had turned to the meaningless “worship” of “self-indulgence and consumption” in his “malaise” speech of 1979. He was defeated by Reagan a year later.

“On the matter of economics, I would like to think that the GOP is changing in a more Vance-like way, but it’s impossible to say for sure at this point,” Mr Dreher said.

“If he distinguishes himself meaningfully from the Trump administration on economics, he will run the unavoidable risk of angering Trump, whose cult of personality remains strong with primary voters,” he continued. “It’s going to be a difficult needle for him to thread.”

Many of Mr Vance’s predecessors have been dogged by this “vice-presidential curse”. They want to distance themselves from the failures of their administration, but in doing so, they are seen as disloyal and isolate the commander-in-chief.

Mr Trump is more vengeful than most presidents, and his endorsement, as the cliché among party strategists goes, is the most powerful force in US conservatism. Republican politics is littered with the shattered careers of everyone from traditional Republicans to Maga purists who thought otherwise.

What’s more, the president has delighted in playing off Mr Vance against Mr Rubio, taking informal polls of confidants and asking crowds to cheer for their favourite option.

Perhaps he calculates that the longer his successor is in doubt, the longer he can monopolise the spotlight. Perhaps he simply enjoys the drama and enjoys pitting his subordinates against each other, like an episode of The Apprentice.

Either way, Mr Vance will struggle to claim the Republican nomination or inherit what remains of the coalition that swept Mr Trump back to power in 2024, without the president’s blessing.

Mr Short knows something about the dilemma that confronts vice-presidents running for higher office, having advised Mr Pence when he mounted a brief campaign for the Republican nomination in 2024.

Mr Trump’s first vice-president bore the brunt of his anger when he resisted pressure to dispute the results of the 2020 election, instead certifying Joe Biden’s victory. However, Mr Vance will prove lighter on his feet if he is not weighed down by the same scruples, Mr Short believes.

“It’s a difficult wire to walk, but I think that JD has shown himself to be pretty nimble and flexible on his convictions – if he has any,” he said.

Some caution that Mr Vance has made a fatal error if he believes he has found the essence of “Trumpism” and its supporters. It is a cult of personality based around the president, they claim, and in reaching for this mirage he will find only empty air.

Even though Mr Vance wants to succeed Mr Trump, he seems to view himself as a different political animal from the president.

Speaking at the Richard Nixon Foundation in California on June 25, he compared himself to the 37th president: both senators who became vice-president aged 40, both successful authors who believed themselves despised by the media and despise it back.

It also speaks to how Mr Vance, like the 37th president, sees himself as an outsider who has a grim dose of reality for a political establishment which understands Washington but not the rest of the world.

In the interview, he praised Nixon’s election victory in 1972, when the former president returned to the White House with a 49-state landslide as his “silent majority” cast their ballots.

Mr Vance argued that the “unbelievably durable” coalition survives today, despite the demographic changes of the last five decades.

The silent majority is still out there, the vice-president believes. Perhaps he will be the figure to speak for it – to “commune” with it, to use the language of his new book. Or maybe that, too, is a mirage.