Can Vance make Trump’s party his own? He should look to Italy’s Giorgia Meloni.

The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prevents presidents from being elected to more than two terms. With President Trump winning re-election in 2024, he will not be eligible to run again.

This reality has both Democrats and Republicans asking themselves whether “Trumpism” will survive once he exits the political stage. The second question often debated is who will inherit Trump’s base, and can his successor sustain Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.

The person most likely to inherit Trump’s base is Vice President JD Vance. In many ways, Vance is more aligned with the MAGA movement than Trump himself — most notably on foreign policy, U.S. relations with Israel and the role of religion in our nation’s public affairs.

After the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in September of 2025, it was Vance who took the leading role in eulogizing Kirk, both defining and defending his Christian populist narrative before the country.

During his tenure in office, Vance has worked hard to develop and maintain close working relationships with a network of MAGA associated advocacy organizations, think tanks, influencers, podcasters, and donors. He is also one of the few high-profile Republican elected officials who has refused to publicly condemn or disavow his friendship with Tucker Carlson, a MAGA favorite who continues to make incendiary remarks about Israel and American Jews.

Although Vance shares Trump’s policy prescriptions on illegal immigration, trade, tariffs, and other domestic issues, he seems far more skeptical of long-standing U.S. global security relationships. He often criticizes NATO and has expressed little public support for defending Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion.

He has also recently begun to distance himself from Trump on Israel and the war in Iran, and he has been a consistent critic within the administration of U.S. involvement in Ukraine. In fact, Vance has shown little interest, unlike Trump, in using U.S. military power and diplomacy to negotiate peace deals in Gaza, Ukraine, and in the Persian Gulf.

A conservative Catholic convert, Vance is also more likely than Trump to assertively expand religious liberty protections and be more receptive to pro-Life advocates within the Republican Party, which Trump has kept at a distance since his first term in office. The central question is whether Vance can inherit the MAGA movement by modifying its policy interests and direction — or whether Trumpism is impossible to maintain and grow without Trump’s own super-sized personality.

To answer that question, Vance should examine how another gifted populist politician in a Western democracy was able not only to inherit a political movement from a larger-than-life politician, but to transform that movement by making it her own.

At 31 years old, Giorgia Meloni became the youngest minister in the Italian government of the late Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire businessman who created and led the conservative Forza Italia Party.

Berlusconi’s personality and politics dominated Italian life between 1994 and 2011, when he served three stints as prime minister. His massive ego and unconventional methods of governing made him a hero to the Italian right and a villain to the left, dividing the country more than any other modern Italian politician. He was Trump before Trump.

After the fall of Berlusconi, Meloni knew that she could not duplicate his cult of personality. She quickly recognized that the conservative movement needed both to change and to be rebranded for her to succeed.

After leaving her mentor Berlusconi and the conservative People of Freedom Party in 2012, Meloni co-founded the populist Brothers of Italy Party. Ten years later, Meloni was elected prime minister.

She quickly adopted a common-sense governing style to forever separate herself from the Berlusconi’s ego-fueled and larger-than-life personality. She did this while embracing a populist policy agenda which included an end to open immigration, less intervention in foreign conflicts, free-speech legal protections, and rejection of a more intrusive EU bureaucracy. She also began to publicly defend traditional marriage, the role of the Catholic Church in public affairs, and Italy’s national sovereignty.

Berlusconi and other right-wing parties had often ignored these cultural issues, preferring to focus on their free-market economic agenda. Meloni’s innovation was to skillfully transform the Italian right from Berlusconi’s transactional politics to a populist movement defined by policy rather than personality.

The biggest problem confronting Meloni was that she could never dominate the news cycle or manipulate the political conversation through the force of her personality the way Berlusconi did. Meloni solved this problem by marrying her straightforward, no-nonsense governing style to a populist policy agenda that embraced many of Berlusconi’s economic and anti-immigration positions, while adding a broader religious and cultural narrative to her politics, to appeal directly to Italian national pride. The strategy has worked brilliantly, uniting the right and making Meloni one of the most popular and influential prime ministers in modern Italian history.

Vance is similarly situated to Meloni in many ways. And to replicate her success, he will need to do something like what she has done. Trump’s larger-than-life personality, unconventional politics and transactional style of governing closely mimics Berlusconi’s long tenure. And Trump, like Berlusconi, will be a hard act to follow.

However, Vance and Meloni have a great deal in common. They both share a direct and straightforward governing style. They also embrace a similar populist policy agenda that focuses on stopping illegal immigration, a healthy mistrust of “free trade” and global institutions, a reluctance to get involved in foreign wars, a skepticism of EU security and economic policies, and a foundational belief that preserving Western civilization and national sovereignty are important goals for both countries.

Will Vance enjoy the same post-Trump success as Meloni has after inheriting and reshaping the Italian right in the post-Berlusconi era? Trump and the MAGA movement seem willing to give Vance that opportunity. Recent polls suggest that he is the leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2028, well ahead of current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who shares Trump’s more aggressive foreign policy agenda.

Vance’s success or failure will be determined by his own political skills and the electorate’s mood at the end of Trump’s term. But the electoral blueprint for successfully following a larger-than-life leader has already been laid out for him by Meloni.

Frank DiFulvio is a professional writer and independent journalist who lives and works in Italy and in Northern Virginia.