Donald Trump and his closest comrades landed on Time magazine’s most influential people list of 2026—with the noticeable exception of his second-in-command.
Notably, JD Vance, 41, was snubbed from the highly coveted list, which named Trump, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine as “Leaders” of the world.
While the vice president was absent, Rubio—who has repeatedly been pitted against Vance as a 2028 contender—was lauded as being “at the center of some of the biggest moves of Trump’s second term,” and even positioned as set to “possibly inherit the Trumpist movement in 2028.”
Trump, for his part, was said to have instilled “a new global order” bent by “the will of a single man.”
Wiles was praised as “the last person Trump listens to before making his biggest decision,” and even New York real estate billionaire Witkoff, Trump’s longtime golfing buddy, was noted as tackling “some of the globe’s most intractable conflicts.”
The vice president was featured on last year’s version of the list, where he was described as having taken “a leading and contentious role on foreign affairs.” Now, in contrast, he has been fielding criticism for failing to broker a peace deal with Iran, for dooming the re-election campaign of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and for being heckled during a free Turning Point USA event that reportedly drew thousands of empty seats. The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance’s representatives for comment.
It’s been a rough few weeks for the isolationist vice president, who has reportedly been at odds with his boss over the bombardment of Iran, which Trump launched in coordination with Israel—without congressional approval—on Feb. 28.
A bombshell New York Times report on Tuesday revealed that Vance was the loudest—and only—voice of opposition within the White House against launching a full-scale attack, calling it “a huge distraction of resources” and “massively expensive.”
His opposition, however, hasn’t stopped his own approval ratings from plummeting alongside the president’s. CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten said Monday that the numbers show Vance is “historically the least popular vice president at this point in their vice presidency,” with his net approval rating 18 points underwater.
Now, the Ohio native’s absence from the Time100 is likely to spur rumors that he’s no longer the frontrunner to succeed his 79-year-old boss in 2028.
Meanwhile, the president seems to enjoy egging on the competition between Rubio and Vance. In February, within hours of his first strikes on Iran, Trump reportedly asked guests at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, which of his appointees he should endorse as his successor.
Speaking to NBC on the condition of anonymity, one attendee said, “It was almost unanimous for Marco.”
As Trump and Israel’s bombardment of Iran has waged on, the president has seemingly favored advice from the former Florida senator over his second-in-command.
However, that hasn’t seemed to stall Vance’s efforts to curry favor with potential 2028 donors. In March, the vice president was spotted at the Four Seasons hotel in Nashville for the spring summit of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive, right-wing donor organization co-founded in 2019 by Vance and conservative publisher Chris Buskirk, according to CBS News. Tickets to the event were reportedly priced at $100,000 per head.
