Petrol more than $4 a gallon? Don’t blame JD Vance! | Arwa Mahdawi

. UK edition

JD Vance is standing behind and to one side of Donald Trump, with what looks like a disapproving expression.
Giving him the side-eye? JD Vance with Donald Trump. Photograph: Aaron Schwartz/Pool/CNP/Shutterstock

The US vice-president still dreams of succeeding Trump in 2028. No wonder he’s desperate to distance himself from the price rises caused by the war with Iran, writes Arwa Mahdawi

Bombing little kids in the Middle East? Whatever. Immigration agents killing US civilians in the street and terrorising local communities? Meh. The Epstein files still not being released in full? Annoying, but there’s probably an explanation. Gas prices blowing past $4 a gallon (80p a litre) because of the war on Iran? An outrage!

There are a lot of things that Maga can forgive the dear leader for, but high fuel prices? In a country addicted to cheap energy, that’s a red line. A month into the reckless and unconscionable war on Iran, Donald Trump’s popularity is sinking. According to a national poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the president’s approval rating has fallen to 33%, the lowest during his second term. His base is still behind him, but if gas prices keep rising, along with the cost of everything else, even it could turn.

Trump doesn’t seem too bothered about the cost of living, but I’m sure JD “I wanna be president next” Vance is. His ratings are mixed, but the vice-president is the favourite to be the 2028 Republican presidential candidate. This doesn’t mean much, of course, if the economic fallout from Iran makes the Republican party toxic. Someone concerned about their career trajectory might try to distance themselves from the Iran mess.

Funnily enough, that is exactly what is happening with Vance. While the VP has been tight-lipped on the war, “anonymous sources” have been doing a lot of talking, with a steady stream of articles stressing that Vance has always been against the war. Last week, the news website Axios reported that Vance had chided Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for pulling the US into battle. “Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was,” a US source told Axios. “And the VP was clear-eyed about some of those statements.”

I would take reports of tense phone calls between Netanyahu and American politicians with a pinch of salt. There were endless articles, for example, about Joe Biden having angry phone calls with Netanyahu as Israel flattened Gaza – all of which seemed to be for PR purposes only, since Biden did nothing meaningful to stop the carnage. Still, all these sources talking up Vance’s anti-interventionist credentials are illuminating. They show that, if the VP is clear-eyed about anything, it’s the fact that he may need to point to headlines like these during election season and say: “See, I was always against the war!”

Vance had better hope that framing himself as the only adult in a room full of war mongerers works out for him, because he certainly can’t rely on charisma to get elected. The man can’t even order doughnuts without the interaction coming off as deeply awkward.

Meanwhile, his apparent attempts to pander to the conspiracy-theorist segment of Maga just make him look unhinged. He recently appeared on The Benny Show podcast, for example, where he told the conservative commentator Benny Johnson that he was “obsessed” with UFOs and thought aliens were “demons”. He added: “I think that one of the devil’s great tricks is to convince people he never existed.” (Personally, I’m convinced that hell is empty and all the devils are in DC.)

During the interview, he was asked to respond to the podcaster Joe Rogan’s remarks that Maga supporters are “dorks”. Johnson asked: “Do you consider yourself a dork?” Vance laughed before saying: “I think we have many, many fewer dorks than the far left, but everybody’s got some dorks.” Inspiring stuff.

Forget the demons, dorks and Iran, however. The way you can really tell that Vance is gearing up for 2028 is the fact that his wife, Usha, is on a PR blitz of her own. On Monday, Usha, who is pregnant with her fourth child, launched a podcast, Storytime With the Second Lady, aimed at little kids. Or, more to the point, their mothers – Maga has been very busy trying to win over women. Last week, Usha sat down with NBC News to promote the podcast in a softball interview full of humanising anecdotes about how much she loves family trips to Costco. You won’t hear about demons on her podcast; instead, you can listen to her read The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Yes, it seems the whole family are big fans of fiction.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist