The Wall Street Journal's editorial board has launched a sustained campaign of columns targeting Vice President JD Vance's 2028 ambitions, and the criticism is coming from inside the house that Rupert Murdoch built.
A series of recent opinion pieces from WSJ editorial board members Kimberley Strassel and Allysia Finley, along with at least one unsigned board editorial, have taken aim at Vance on multiple fronts: self-promotion, foreign policy judgment, political thin-skinnedness, and what they cast as premature maneuvering for the presidency. Axios reported that the columns amount to an early, coordinated editorial argument against the vice president's presumed inside track to succeed Donald Trump.
The broadside matters less for what it says about Vance than for what it reveals about the fault lines still running through the Republican coalition, and about who is trying to shape the 2028 field before voters get a word in.
Strassel, one of the Journal's most widely read conservative columnists, opened the offensive by accusing Vance of using his office to build a personal brand rather than advance the president's agenda. "Mr. Vance is promoting a book," she wrote, referring to Vance's recently published bestseller, Communion.
Her critique went further than the book tour. Strassel argued that Vance's media appearances and public positioning were undermining the broader Republican effort.
"What experienced legislators wish the newbie Mr. Vance would understand is that his résumé polishing is doing no one any favors, not the party, not the president, not even himself."
When Vance supporters pushed back on the column, Strassel doubled down in a follow-up piece. She offered two possible explanations for the aggressive response from Vance's camp.
"One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his 'national conservative' ambitions for the GOP aren't landing."
That second line is the sharper one. Strassel was not just needling Vance's temperament, she was questioning whether his ideological project has a constituency beyond the online right. For a columnist who helped define the Journal's post-Reagan conservatism, that framing is deliberate. It positions Vance's brand of national conservatism as a niche product, not a governing majority.
Vance, who has publicly reflected on his own missteps in the past, did not personally respond to Strassel's columns. His office declined to comment beyond confirming that Vance had been present in Congress over two dozen times since becoming vice president, a point apparently meant to rebut any suggestion he was neglecting his constitutional duties.
Allysia Finley, another WSJ editorial board member, took a different angle. She focused on Vance's defense of the memorandum of understanding with Iran, the deal Trump signed that, by the Journal's account, "quickly unraveled." An unsigned WSJ editorial on the Iran matter included a pointed jab: "We promise that wasn't Mr. Obama or John Kerry speaking."
Comparing a Republican vice president's foreign policy to Obama and Kerry is about as hostile as a conservative editorial page can get without using profanity. The implication is clear: Vance's position on Iran put him closer to the progressive foreign policy establishment than to the hawkish consensus that has defined Republican orthodoxy for decades.
Finley also went after Vance's relationship with Tucker Carlson. She wrote that Vance "has spent the Trump presidency trying to curry favor with Mr. Carlson as part of laying the ground for a 2028 presidential run." She described Carlson's diplomatic outreach as "bizarre given how the pundit has made common cause with the far left" on Israel.
That line of attack serves a specific constituency: pro-Israel conservatives who view Carlson's skepticism toward Israel as disqualifying and who worry that a Vance presidency would tilt Republican foreign policy in a non-interventionist direction. Whether that constituency is large enough to matter in a primary is an open question. But it is well-funded and well-connected, exactly the donor class that reads the Journal's opinion page over morning coffee.
In an April column, Strassel made the contrast explicit. She pointed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the model Vance should follow.
"Mr. Vance might follow the example of a current prospective rival. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is pursuing the [former VP Mike] Pence model: Put your head down, do the work, let the results speak."
Rubio has said he will not run in 2028. But the Journal's editorial page is clearly keeping the door open for him, or at least using him as a measuring stick to make Vance look small by comparison. The Pence comparison is loaded, too. Pence was the loyal, quiet vice president who waited his turn, and his 2024 presidential campaign collapsed before Iowa. The Journal may admire the model, but GOP primary voters showed little appetite for it.
Vance, by contrast, has taken a more public approach to the vice presidency, speaking openly about his personal life, promoting his book, and staking out positions that go beyond the standard vice-presidential portfolio. Whether that constitutes "résumé polishing" or simply a different theory of the office depends on where you sit.
The WSJ editorial page does not operate in a vacuum. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, lobbied Trump not to select Vance as his running mate during the 2024 cycle. That fact, combined with the current editorial offensive, raises an obvious question about whether the opinion page is carrying out institutional policy rather than independent editorial judgment.
The bestselling book Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, captured a revealing moment: when Trump asked Murdoch for his assessment of Vance and Rubio, with both men awkwardly nearby, the News Corp. boss said Vance "has the potential to be great" but called Rubio "brilliant." Faint praise for one, enthusiastic endorsement for the other.
Murdoch clashed with Trump repeatedly, during his first campaign and again early in the 2024 cycle, before ultimately falling in line both times. That pattern suggests the Journal's editorial page may be fighting a rearguard action it has already lost once before. The WSJ opinion section tried to stop Trump a decade ago. It tried again in 2024. Republican voters chose Trump anyway.
Now the same editorial page is training its fire on the man Trump elevated to the vice presidency. GOP donor Ken Griffin added fuel last month when he told Axios he would back Rubio over Vance in a primary, a signal that at least some of the party's biggest financial backers share the Journal's skepticism.
Vance's orbit is not treating the WSJ offensive as a crisis. A top Vance ally framed it as a political asset:
"No one in Vance's orbit is concerned or surprised about being attacked by the literal beating heart of the pre-Trump GOP establishment. When the Wall Street Journal ed board hits him, it only sends the exact signal to our base that we want.... These guys are doing our work for us."
A Trump administration official who served in both the first and current terms was blunter. The official called the editorial board "a relic of a bygone era" and dismissed its columns as "globalist screeds" that "haven't carried weight among GOP voters in the real world for years and only appeal to a small group of establishment never-Trumpers in D.C."
That response tells you everything about the strategic calculation inside Vance's camp. They believe the Journal's criticism helps them with the voters who actually decide Republican primaries, the same voters who ignored the Journal's advice on Trump twice. In this framing, every Strassel column is a free advertisement for Vance's populist credentials.
Whether that calculation holds depends on whether 2028 looks more like 2016, when the establishment lost control of the nominating process, or like the pre-Trump era, when donor-class preferences still shaped outcomes. Vance is betting on the former. The Journal is betting on the latter.
The vice president has built a public identity that extends well beyond policy debates. He has spoken candidly about his faith journey and family life in ways that resonate with culturally conservative voters, the kind of voters who are unlikely to take their cues from a New York editorial board.
The criticism lands where three groups overlap: pro-Israel hawks who distrust Vance's Iran stance and his Carlson ties, traditional pre-Trump Republicans who prefer a Rubio-style candidate, and the Murdoch media empire, which has institutional reasons to prefer a vice president it did not oppose from the start.
None of these groups is powerless. They control significant donor networks, media platforms, and institutional relationships. But none of them has demonstrated the ability to move Republican primary voters against a candidate who carries Trump's implicit endorsement.
The Journal's editorial page remains one of the most influential opinion platforms in American media. Its writers are serious, and their criticisms of Vance, on Iran, on self-promotion, on political maturity, are substantive enough to deserve engagement rather than dismissal. Vance's defenders have not yet answered the Iran question on the merits, preferring instead to attack the messenger.
But influence in Republican politics has shifted. The editorial page that once helped set the party's ideological boundaries now finds itself arguing from outside the walls. Vance's allies know this, and they are happy to let the Journal keep writing.
Usha Vance, for her part, has shown she can handle hostile media coverage with composure, a skill the entire Vance operation may need if the editorial offensive continues through 2028.
The Journal's case against Vance is early, deliberate, and well-argued on its own terms. Strassel and Finley are not hacks. They are making a genuine conservative argument that Vance is too inexperienced, too self-interested, and too ideologically narrow to lead the party after Trump.
Vance's camp is making a different argument: that the Journal represents a Republican Party that no longer exists, and that its disapproval is proof of Vance's alignment with the party's actual base.
Both sides could be right about parts of this. Vance may well be positioning himself too aggressively too early. And the Journal may well be speaking for a coalition that has already been outvoted twice.
The 2028 primary will settle it. Until then, the editorial page can write all the columns it wants. The question is whether anyone outside a certain Manhattan zip code is reading them as marching orders, or just as confirmation that the old guard still has not made peace with where the party went.
