Analysis: Vance had 2 high-profile opportunities to prove himself. Both fell flat | CNN Politics

In the latter half of 2025, Vice President JD Vance’s future as the next Republican presidential nominee was looking fairly promising. That culminated in December, when potential rival and Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled he wouldn’t even challenge the VP if Vance ran. But since then, events — and Vance’s handling of them — have raised more and more questions about that possibility. Including a pair of high-profile failures over the weekend. In the span of just a few days, Vance was dispatched to stump for Hungarian President Viktor Orbán in his country’s parliamentary elections and to negotiate a peace deal with Iran in Pakistan. Orbán’s party was soundly beaten in this weekend’s elections. The Trump administration has made a habit of involving itself in foreign elections, and it had a pretty strong track record recently. It supported the winners of elections in Poland in June, Argentina in October, Honduras in December and Japan in February. (Making the foreign interventions more problematic, the administration also often put its thumb on the scale — like by dangling a $20 billion bailout in front of voters in Argentina.) But it went very wrong in Hunga