The Trump-Vance Shotgun Marriage for 2028….

Mr. Trump has long conducted running focus groups on his closest aides, and appears to enjoy needling them and keeping them off balance as a way of asserting his dominance. Several people in the president’s inner circle have been subject to his quasi-public questioning of their performance and their future.

But when it comes to Mr. Vance, the stakes are higher. As the default front-runner for the Republican nomination and would-be inheritor of the president’s political movement, Mr. Vance’s fortunes ride to a substantial degree on the enthusiasm of the support he gets from Mr. Trump. And Mr. Trump’s regular polling of people on whether they prefer Mr. Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become one of the most closely watched early indicators of how power in the Republican Party might pass to the next generation.

When he conducts those polls in private, Mr. Trump often compares Mr. Vance’s performance to his own achievements. He has told several allies that Mr. Vance has never won a tough race without his help. (Mr. Trump’s endorsement got Mr. Vance over the finish line in a tight race for an Ohio Senate seat.) He has brought up the number of vacations Mr. Vance has taken as vice president. (Mr. Trump does not generally take them.)

He has repeatedly mentioned the vice president’s initial oppositionto starting a war with Iran and has done so in front of Mr. Vance. (“I’m more of a peace person than you are — but I had to do it,” he has said to him.) The president has also questioned his decision to send a Vance-led delegation to a negotiation session in Pakistan that failed to end the war.

Mr. Trump, always keenly attuned to the optics of the presidency, has zeroed in on moments when Mr. Vance might not look the part. He has repeatedly brought up a moment from last spring, when Mr. Vance fumbled Ohio State’s national football championship trophy on the White House South Lawn. (Mr. Trump has said he is happy it wasn’t him.)

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Mr. Trump, who turns 80 next month, is generationally and stylistically different from Mr. Vance, a Midwestern millennial who rose out of a hardscrabble upbringing and made that struggle the animating force of his political brand. The president, a Queens-born real estate developer raised in wealth, prefers to be ensconced in gilded surroundings. When Mr. Vance is not in Washington, he enjoys taking his family home to Cincinnati or to Camp David, the woodsy presidential retreat that Mr. Trump has only visited once in his second term.

In meetings, Mr. Vance frequently scrolls his phone, and he uses social media to fight with his critics. The president frequently posts to Truth Social, but he does not spend time replying to people online, as Mr. Vance does.

Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, recently advised Mr. Vance to take a break from social media, as have other officials in the West Wing, according to people familiar with those interactions, because the fighting was beneath his office. (Mr. Vance said he took a break for Lent.)

Through it all, Mr. Vance has exhibited the one quality that Mr. Trump most prizes: loyalty. He has put aside his reservations about the war to back the president’s handling of the conflict and carried out the traditional No. 2 attack-dog role against Mr. Trump’s critics, even Pope Leo XIV.

He remains a popular figure among Mr. Trump’s MAGA base. Tony Fabrizio, a longtime pollster for Mr. Trump, said the president chose Mr. Vance as a running mate in 2024 because he appeals to those voters. In an interview, Mr. Fabrizio said that the president saw Mr. Vance as “a MAGA warrior who would go out every day and fight for the things the president wanted…

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To win the 2028 nomination, Mr. Vance must stay in good standing with Mr. Trump and reassure a Republican Party that has been molded in the president’s image but fractured by his choices. So far, like most vice presidents, Mr. Vance has prioritized his relationship with the president….

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Mr. Rubio spends more time with Mr. Trump than Mr. Vance does, as is typical of a national security adviser. Mr. Rubio frequently travels with Mr. Trump on Air Force One, and they have bonded over weekends in Florida. Mr. Vance, by nature of being vice president, does not travel on the same plane as Mr. Trump….

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According to a Quinnipiac poll published last week, some 73 percent of Republican voters still widely approve of the job Mr. Trump is doing. According to a poll released by Pew in February, 75 percent of Republican voters view Mr. Vance favorably.

They are both broadly unpopular, however. The president’s overall approval rating has sunk to a second-term low. According to Quinnipiac, Mr. Vance is similarly unpopular, with 39 percent of voters approving of the job he is doing.

Recently, Mr. Vance has faced criticism among conservatives for his support for the Iran war, and for engaging with Mr. Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo for speaking out against the war. Mr. Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at age 35, advised the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics to stick to religion.

Critics have characterized him as a political shape shifter…..

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