President Donald Trump is in freefall. His political support is crashing to historic lows, and a White House insider is now admitting what many have feared: the president is imploding, and he is taking everyone around him down with him.
The most visible casualty so far is Vice President JD Vance, whose 2028 presidential ambitions are quietly falling apart alongside Trump’s crumbling presidency.
“Trump is imploding, and he’s probably going to take JD down with him unless there’s a course correction,” a source close to Trump told Zeteo on Monday, speaking under the condition of anonymity.
That single sentence, from someone inside Trump’s own circle, says everything.
Zeteo senior political correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng laid out the case in detail. He argued that Vance, long seen as the Republican Party’s best hope for 2028, has been stuck in a painful and very public losing streak ever since he became vice president.
The streak began in April 2025, when Vance met Pope Francis, who died shortly after. It then reached a new low just this past weekend, when Vance walked away from 21 hours of peace talks with Iranian officials in Pakistan completely empty-handed, without any agreement to end the ongoing U.S. war against Iran.
It was a high-stakes moment. And Vance failed to deliver.
Suebsaeng was careful to note that politics can shift fast. “Anything could happen between now and 2028,” he wrote. “Nobody should count Vance out of any possible presidential contest.”
But he did not stop there.
“As things currently stand, it is hard to imagine things going worse for the man President Trump has called his ‘handsome son of a b—-,’” Suebsaeng added. “And it’s almost entirely because Trump forced Vance into this position.”
That last line is the key point. Vance is not failing on his own terms. He is failing because Trump put him there.
The polling numbers make it even harder to look away. CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten recently revealed that Vance’s net approval rating has dropped by 21 points since January 2025. That stunning collapse makes him, in Enten’s own words, “historically the least popular vice president at this point in their vice presidency.”
No vice president in modern history has polled this badly this early. Not one.
And the damage is not just happening overseas. “Domestically and electorally, the outlook isn’t any rosier for the vice president,” Suebsaeng wrote, painting a picture of a man whose political future is shrinking by the week.
Trump’s own approval rating has also dipped below 40 percent for the first time, according to a Forbes analysis from late March 2026. The two men are now tied together in a downward spiral, and neither one appears to have a clear way out.
For Vance, the cruelest part of this story is that he did not choose this path. He was handed the Iran portfolio by a president whose instincts keep pulling his administration deeper into chaos. Every failure that carries Vance’s name was shaped, at least in part, by decisions made above him.
Whether that matters to voters in 2028 is another question entirely. But right now, the insider verdict is clear: Trump is imploding, the freefall is real, and JD Vance is being pulled down right along with him.
