The clash couldn’t have been scripted any better.

The occasion was Vice President J.D. Vance’s first interview since taking office, a sit-down with Margaret Brennan of CBS News. The anchor pressed him on the White House pause of refugee resettlement operations, reminding Vance of his past support for admitting into the country those who were “properly vetted.” The vice president replied that the efficacy of the entire screening process was in doubt, pointing to an Afghan national recently arrested for plotting a terror attack in Oklahoma as an example.

The subsequent crescendo launched a thousand memes and highlight reels on the right that one giddy conservative pundit compared to the coverage Michael Jordan got on ESPN during his prime.

“It wasn’t clear if he was radicalized when he got here,” Brennan started to say of the terror suspect who came to the United States after the Afghanistan withdrawal and several rounds of vetting. “I don’t really care, Margaret,” interrupted Vance. This was the mic drop moment the White House wanted.

He was sworn in earlier last week, but during the CBS News interview, if Vance hadn’t already, the vice president cemented himself within MAGA hearts. A cult of personality is now emerging around President Trump’s ascendant Hillbilly Apprentice.

Conservative columnist Salena Zito likened the exchange with Brennan to Rhett Butler’s famous line from “Gone With the Wind,” explaining that it gave “‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ vibes.” The conservative corners of the internet agreed and shared the exchange far and wide. “At what point,” asked a gleeful Donald Trump Jr, “will these leftwing media hacks figure out that they’re no match for JD?” The interview attracted more than 1.3 million views on YouTube, where it was number one on trending the next day.

This was the kind of rollout that the Trump campaign imagined when the president picked him last summer, making him the heir-apparent of the MAGA movement overnight. Vance, then the junior senator from Ohio, had barely been in office for 18 months. He didn’t appeal to constituencies that Trump didn’t already have. Out of the gate, Democrats launched a campaign to label him “weird,” his favorability numbers went negative, and the press had a field day amplifying private comments rather than his public arguments. In private, some Republicans were left with buyer’s remorse.

At the time, Charlie Kirk did not make much of the congealing conventional wisdom. The political activist endorsed Vance first for Senate, then lobbied Trump to make him his running mate. “Many people didn’t understand why,” Kirk told RealClearPolitics, “but they’re seeing it very clearly now.”

A confidant of the first family, Kirk calls Vance “the most powerful weapon” conservatives have in defending Trump’s mandate: “He is smarter than them. He’s more likable than them. And he will not back down to their smug, coastal elitist tone.”

Another exchange between Vance and Brennan, this one on birthright citizenship, had Republicans applauding. He said that no other country has the practice. She countered that America is “a unique country” and one “founded by immigrants.”

Replied the vice president, “This is a very unique country, and it was founded by some immigrants and some settlers,” Vance responded. “But just because we were founded by immigrants doesn’t mean that, 240 years later, that we have to have the dumbest immigration policy in the world.”

Watching from home, Rep. Chip Roy cheered how Vance reframed the question and identified modern immigration as “a very different construct.” The two worked closely in Congress, and while Roy has at times found himself crossways with Trump, the Texas Republican was a public and early advocate of Vance as the number two on the ticket. Going forward, he expects Vance to be front and center.

“When you’ve got someone with that much horsepower,” Roy told RCP, “you want to use it. You want them to take it for a spin.”

Vance will likely reprise the role of attack dog, but conservative economist and longtime friend of the new vice president, Oren Cass, cautioned that “it is so much more sophisticated.” Vance didn’t climb the traditional ladder in politics, Cass told RCP. Instead, “he was a founding member of the intellectual movement to build the new right.” It is true the vice president, like his boss, loves the tariff and the union, loathes the corporate tax cut and the global corporation, and is very “anti-woke.”

He served as a vanguard of the New Right, a codification of a Trumpism defined by its rejection of libertarian economics and a rejection of neoconservative policy. This produced in Vance “a depth of understanding,” Cass said, as opposed to the “typical politician” in the Trump era who is “good at learning the talking points really well.”

But even the most talented politicians can languish as understudies when thrust into a job without a clearly delineated policy mandate. Former Vice President Mike Pence faithfully executed the role only to be excommunicated by his old boss. Former Vice President Kamala Harris was left on a policy island until she was summoned to replace her boss in a doomed bid to keep the White House under Democratic control. Cass sees a brighter future for Vance, specifically “at the center of the Venn diagram of all the different elements of the Trump coalition.”

He comes from a blue-collar background but worked in Silicon Valley. He is a millennial but harkens back to the economic nationalism of the 20th century. One thing all those disparate groups agree on: the need to re-industrialize.

This also makes Vance very different than the conservative old guard. When asked during his CBS News interview about criticism of Tulsi Gabbard from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and National Review, for instance, the vice president defended the nominee by saying the president, not publications that have “lost relevance,” ought to determine who serves as his director of national intelligence.

Everyday voters outside the conservative ecosystem are much less interested in those internecine ideological conflicts. They are more likely to identify with a vice president still awestruck by his new position. With shaky camera work, Speaker Mike Johnson captured the moment Vance walked into the Oval Office for the first time. And the man a heartbeat away from the presidency has developed a sort of parasocial presence with voters, giving followers less than choreographed insights into his day job.

When called on to cast the tie-breaking vote for Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth, Vance wrote on social media, “I thought I was done voting in the Senate.” After moving into the vice president’s official residence earlier last week, he wrote a thank you note. “While we don’t own this property, it is a beautiful home for our three little kids,” Vance said on X, adding that his family was “grateful and will take good care of it.” And when an Episcopal bishop pled with the new administration to soften its stance on immigration, Vance was caught on camera at the National Cathedral with an incredulous smirk. His fans likened it to the expression of Jim Halpert, a character from the comedy, “The Office.”

The right was tickled pink by all of it, but Kevin Roberts emphasized the ability of the vice president to break through politics and into the cultural zeitgeist. “His sense of humor, the fact that he’s intentionally a smart ass sometimes,” said Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a longtime friend of Vance, “meets the moment because he says with so few words, sometimes with no words just his facial expression, what we’re all thinking.”

The job is still new. Controversy will inevitably follow. But the early reviews are positive on the right, Roberts said, noting the many “obvious contrasts” in age, style, and demeanor between Vance and Trump, differences which he described as “complementary contrasts.” Added Roberts, “The real crux of this, the real reason for Vance’s success thus far, is he’s not trying to make it about himself.”

Alumni of the first Trump administration had to learn that lesson on the fly. Some flew too close to the sun, like former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who courted the press at every turn, obscuring the president and thus sealing his own fate.

“I’m not sure if anybody can ever outshine Trump,” said a former senior White House official looking back, “but that is the challenge.” Looking back at the first four years of Trump, the official cautioned that so long as the vice president is pushing Trump’s agenda and promoting Trump’s administration, there would be no trouble.

“As long as you do not ever cross that line into what you are doing,” the source added, “then you’re fine.”

This playbook is easier said than done, of course, and easier to follow when the president is not in his final term. Conversations about the next election are premature one week after Inauguration Day. But the subtext of being the MAGA heir-apparent is succession, and the former official noted that if Vance has his own White House ambitions, he doesn’t have the same four-to-six-year runway that other vice presidents normally enjoy: “He only has two years to get ready.”

Philip Wegmann is White House correspondent for RealClearPolitics.