The Biggest Threat to JD Vance Is Spencer Pratt

There are only three real threats that could complicate Vice President JD Vance’s path to the Republican nomination in 2028.

One would be a spectacular betrayal by President Donald Trump. America’s gossip-in-chief has played enough 2028 parlor games with friends and aides to ensure a stream of stories about Trump considering alternatives to Vance — chiefly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. There is a long way between Trump’s kibitzing and actually intervening to wipe out his loyal deputy.

The second would be a grisly scandal that implicates Vance, specifically, with smoking-gun evidence. It would have to be indefensible even for the Trump administration. Vance has given us no reason to expect that kind of demise.

The third threat to Vance is Spencer Pratt.

The reality-soap performer has emerged as a disruptive force in the race for mayor of Los Angeles, churning up the city’s inert politics with performance artistry, authentic grievance and high-tech vapor.

Pratt, 42, has delivered a slashing message about Democratic mismanagement of homelessness and crime, and an evocative-if-embellished personal story about losing his home in the Palisades wildfire. Boosted by campy AI videos and slobbering TMZ coverage, he has drawn close to Mayor Karen Bass in polls of the first round of voting.

A runoff in the liberal city would be much harder.

“While Pratt’s campaign has attracted national attention, it is unlikely a Trump-aligned Republican could win over a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly four to one,” my colleague Jeremy B. White wrote.

Pratt has managed all this without any training to lead an important city. Unlike other entertainer-politicians, like California’s own Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan, Pratt did not build a long record of activism or partisan advocacy before running for office. He exploded into the Los Angeles election from the margins of public life, a minor celebrity who became an avatar of dissatisfaction with Bass.

The comparisons to Trump are inevitable and inadequate. Trump was one of the most recognizable people alive before he ran for president — a self-branded icon of American wealth and tabloid notoriety, a dabbler in local and presidential politics for decades before the “birther” crusade against Barack Obama that vaulted Trump toward the 2016 campaign.

Who was Spencer Pratt, until he became a major candidate for high office?

And that is what Vance should worry about: Not Pratt himself, but the success of a screwball candidacy made from little besides artifice and anger.

The barriers to entering politics have fallen so low that it no longer requires Trump-sized talent to crash a big campaign. Thousands of Americans have bigger public platforms than Pratt did at the start of his race. All of them have access to the same AI hype tools his campaign uses.

So, if there’s going to be a challenge to an orderly handover of Republican leadership in 2028, it is far less likely to come from one of the usual suspects — Rubio, Ted Cruz, Glenn Youngkin and so on — than from a Pratt-like fireball aimed at Washington.

The national political environment is awfully inviting for such a candidate.

Without a dramatic change in the country’s trajectory, the next presidential campaign will start next winter with the electorate in a foul mood, contemptuous of both parties and rightly upset about the federal government’s failure to address the national cost-of-living crisis. The Trump White House, like the Biden administration before it, has been as passive and ineffectual on affordability issues as most California Democrats have been on housing and crime.

An economy-focused outsider on the right — railing about how damn expensive everything is, unburdened by the need to defend Trump’s trade wars and his role in spiking energy prices — might make things uncomfortable for any 2028 contender from inside the current administration.

The conservative political ecosystem works in many ways to the advantage of a candidate like this one.

The Trump-era GOP is a relatively simple machine: not a jumbled-up coalition like the Democrats, who are subdivided to their detriment into countless ideological and generational and racial factions, but a movement of people with largely overlapping values and impulses and media consumption habits.

Trump has made it so, first by purging dissenting voices and then by failing to lock in support from working-class racial minorities who voted for him in 2024. He has built a party optimized for its attraction to a certain kind of neon-lit anti-politician.

Is Vance that man, for 2028?

Close enough, probably. The vice president is a canny operative who has navigated the GOP’s cultural and political currents with skill. Someone who rode a mega-bestseller into the Senate, and now maintains a Twitter tail gunner persona in the country’s second-highest office, won’t be easily surprised by the appetites of the Republican base.

Still, the risks to him are real if the cost of living keeps spiraling and the Trump White House keeps skidding.

And there is only so much Vance can do if voters are less drawn to “Hillbilly Elegy” than to “The Hills.”

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