MORNING GLORY: President Donald Trump has become the 'punisher-in-chief'
The first year of the second term of President Trump concludes today. Only extreme partisans will deny that 45-47 hung a lot of wins on the wall this past year — the closed border, "eight-and-a-quarter" peace negotiations, the "One Big Beautiful Bill," Operations Midnight Hammer and Absolute Resolve and the wonderful combination of falling inflation and rising wages and, of course, rising domestic oil and gas production and the march towards small, modular nuclear reactors. (President Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright don’t often get the headlines for our energy breakout, but AI and our country’s national security depends on continuing and expanding it.)
Most important to the world of his achievements in his first year back: President Trump is not only the commander-in-chief of the mightiest military in history, he knows how to use it. Trump restored America’s deterrence that had been forfeited by our collapse in Afghanistan by becoming "The Punisher."
Iran, Islamist terrorists across Africa, from Somalia to Nigeria and Nicholas Maduro have all suffered devastating blows that punished them for behavior outside the guardrails that President Trump set. Iran is still on the likely receiving end of another massive, but rapid and devastating, hit that could leave Kharg Island and other oil export facilities in Iran in ruins and the ayatollahs and the IRGC bereft of any means to finance their massive murdering sprees.
TRUMP SAYS JD VANCE WOULD BE 'PROBABLY FAVORED' FOR 2028 REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATION
It turns out that it is not wise to ignore Trump’s demands on matters he defines as vital to America’s national security.
Today also marks Vice President J.D. Vance’s first year as the only other official elected by the entire country. Spare a moment to zoom in on the 41-year-old former senator from Ohio, investment banker, Yale-trained lawyer and Marine.
The vice president has been the ideal #2 in year one: He supports his boss, messages for him, provides his best advice and is willing to go where dutiful vice presidents have to go: Europe and anywhere else the president sends him.
But Vance also emerged in the first year of the second term of President Trump as the John Wick of the Sunday shows and Euro-gabfests.
MORNING GLORY: PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS PLACED AMERICA’S ADVERSARIES ON NOTICE
Vice President Vance’s communication skills have been widely known since his evisceration of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in the 2024 vice presidential debate. Elected officials with this particular skill set are going to attract some attention from lots of directions as a matter of course, but other than Vice President Cheney in the year following 9/11, I don’t recall any other #2 with the level of legacy media attention that Vance has received in his first year. (The asterisk is when Vice President Harris became the nominee after the collapse in the polls of President Biden after his disastrous debate with President Trump wherein the infirmity could no longer bet hidden and 45-47 deftly underscored how Biden had lapsed into incoherence.)
One example of the "Vance effect": Almost every group I speak to, and certainly every GOP-inclined group I appear before, includes comments or questions that assume Vance will be the 2028 nominee (with Secretary Rubio as his running mate), and some segments of the Republican donor class at least are confident as well that it will be an eight-year run in the presidency for Vance. (I go back to GOP Switzerland whenever these questions are posed, because there’s no point in covering the news if you are a political Calvinist. I also know that front-runners at this point in the cycle often falter and fall aside.)
The vice president’s public appearances are "known knowns." Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can watch the tape or read the transcripts and see the veep’s verbal knife work done on legacy media or actually talk to Republican groups outside the Beltway to learn what activists in the donor class think is unfolding. What is on the record, or available with even a little bit of actual reporting, isn’t debatable. The vice president is a "five-star prospect" to borrow from the vocabulary of college football recruiting.
WHITE HOUSE RACE UNDERWAY: WITH 2026 LOOMING, BOTH PARTIES ARE ALREADY PLAYING FOR 2028
But the vice president must find it odd how so many people putting pen to paper or opining on cable who claim to "know" what he is thinking on topics he hasn’t addressed in public, even topics and controversies on which he has never commented.
Some reporters and "analysts" even purport to know what he is doing and with whom he is talking and — biggest of all ridiculous speculations — what Vance is thinking apart from his public appearances, on-the-record interviews and the occasional cameo in an Oval Office presser or meeting.
Vance is very much the opposite of mysterious. He’s been running for office for about half of the last five years — whether for Ohio’s Senate seat, which he won in 2022 and for which he began campaigning in 2021, or for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. He’s been my guest 25 times since 2016, and has been available to media and voters for years. Since being sworn in a year ago, Vice President Vance has notched over 100 public appearances, with nearly 50 on-the-record interviews since Inauguration Day. He is the opposite of a "known unknown."
President Trump has lapped the Veep a couple of times on both the metrics of appearances and interviews, but that is the normal order of things. The second-in-command doesn’t want to even come close to overshadowing the boss, and never wants to contradict him, at least in public. Vance has accepted and thrived within the rules of this Constitutional and political arrangement.
Which makes the negative obsessions with Vance so bizarre. Rarely a day, and hardly ever a week, passes without someone in the political press attributing to the vice president views and policy positions that he has not taken in public. Many journalists over the past year have purported to know the advice the vice president has given to the president in private. Some suggest who the vice president takes his policy preferences from, as though there is someone other than the president giving such cues.
Why? Because the legacy media appears invested in making Vance unelectable in 2028 by attempting to make him "own" positions not held by President Trump, to cast him as an isolationist or a "restrainer."
The effort is silly. No one can read minds and unnamed "sources" are usually that way because identification would shatter any illusion of expertise on the veep’s thinking. The "sources" on the VP seem almost always to provide ammunition for negative takes on him, as levers to pry Trump and Vance apart or to push Vance into categories that might make it easier for Governor Gavin Newsom or Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to vanquish him, if indeed Vance is the GOP nominee in 2028. (Again, I’m not predicting that because such a guess marks the guesser as ignorant of history’s verdict on predictions three years out from an election.)
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION
The "Vance-is-actually-worse-than-Trump" campaign is very real, however, and has emerged online on every platform. The consistent drumbeat of attacks on Vance of all sorts has begun far earlier than anything I can recall.
Vance had a great first year, though, of course, it has been in a supporting role to the president’s return to the Oval Office. As the "punisher-in-chief" goes about reordering the world without dispatching tens of thousands of ground troops anywhere, Trump’s critics have grown very worried that "America First" is more than a momentary blip in American politics, an exception-to-the-rule of the left’s canards about the "right side of history."
President Trump’s many second-term successes have frightened progressives into fearing that his policies can’t be reversed in the near term. If Vance, or anyone else who approves of Trump’s belief in an "American Millennium," emerges stronger as Trump racks up wins, the left and its adherents in legacy media are going to ramp up the attacks on Vance and anyone else standing squarely behind Trump.
"Trump Derangement Syndrome" has birthed "Vance Derangement Syndrome." Neither will abate in the second year of Donald Trump’s second term.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.