Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks to reporters after the debate between President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump in Atlanta, June 27, 2024.
UPDATE: Donald Trump did indeed pick J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential running mate today. If elected, Vance would be the third-youngest vice president in U.S. history.
Ever since I read and reviewed his best-selling book, Hillbilly Elegy, and then encountered J.D. Vance personally at a conference, he has struck me as someone truly dangerous. Unlike Trump, who broadcasts lunatic views that rally the faithful but scare off traditional Republicans and swing voters, Vance has a gift for dressing up equally extreme ideas in the idiom of serious intellectual discourse. Unlike Trump, who revels in being a prick, Vance in person is a nice guy.
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance twisted his own life story of supposed compassion for his suffering hillbilly neighbors into a fable that blamed their plight on their self-defeating behavior. It was a classic right-wing narrative that ignores structural factors such as the collapse of manufacturing and coal in favor of placing individual blame. This is what I wrote in my Prospect review in 2016:
Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. (“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”) But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
In the end, it’s not about rapacious corporations and collapsing small-town economies. It’s about values. For all of his idyllic reminiscences of small-town Appalachia, good old boy Vance, now also a columnist with National Review, is Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin.
A year later, I found myself at a conference with Vance. He quoted back my line about Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. He was thoughtful, self-reflective, polite, and even likable.
In 2017, I wrote, “Keep an eye on this guy. If he doesn’t seek public office in, say, 2022, I will eat my shirt.” As it turned out, that was the year Vance got elected to the Senate from Ohio. I still have my shirt.
In many respects, Vance would be an ideal pairing with Trump, both nationally and in key Midwestern states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and in Western Pennsylvania: Youth complementing age and suggesting the future of Trump’s legacy. Intellectualized, personally likable, softening Trump’s bombast. A narrative of making something of himself after coming from dirt, in contrast with Trump’s silver-spoon upbringing. The only military veteran on either half of either party ticket.
Vance, at 39, would be the youngest vice-presidential nominee since 1952, when a moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower put Richard Nixon on the ticket to appease the Republican far right.
But Trump’s own vanity may prevent him from picking Vance. Trump doesn’t want youth reminding voters of his own age. He doesn’t like the idea of an attractive potental successor deflecting the spotlight.
Saturday’s assassination attempt has been played as a symbol of Trump’s fist-pumping invincibility. But it must also remind him of his own mortality.
Vance, in many ways, is too attractive. There is also the awkward fact that Vance, before cravenly converting to the MAGA tribe, repeatedly and eloquently trashed Trump, in videos that would make terrific TV spots for Trump’s Democratic opponent.
Yet in slavish emulation of Trump’s own appalling tendency to blame his opponents for his own political use of violence, Vance declared Saturday, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Of the others who have been mentioned, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio would help with the Hispanic vote. But Trump has a visceral dislike for the man whom he repeatedly disparaged in the 2016 primaries as “Little Marco.” Does he really want to position Rubio to be his successor?
There is also the problem that Trump and Rubio are nominally from the same state—Trump changed his residence from New York to Mar-a-Lago years ago—which would lead to an Electoral College problem. But this obstancle is secondary. With the Supreme Court in his pocket, Trump and his lawyers could devise a work-around.
As vice president, Rubio would presumably be on a short leash, which would give Trump sadistic pleasure. But a president doesn’t totally control a vice president, the one member of the government who can’t be fired, as Trump bitterly learned with Mike Pence.
That leaves North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, the blandest and safest of the possible choices. There would be little risk of his upstaging Trump. Burgum, very much a corporate Republican (his net worth is $100 million) and one who signed a state ban on abortions after six weeks, would signal an olive branch to both the anti-abortion right and the corporate right. He’d perhaps help marginally in upper Midwest states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. And he has an attractive wife, always a plus for Trump.
One outside possibility is Tim Scott of South Carolina, the one Republican senator who is African American. Trump dropped his name as a late entry. I don’t see it. There are just enough true racists in the MAGA base that Scott would give Trump pause.
Trump the showman loves surprises and he loves to demonstrate his own sheer arbitrary power. “It’s like a highly sophisticated version of The Apprentice, if you think about it,” Trump said Thursday on the Clay & Buck Show. Not quite what Madison intended.
As a generalization, running mates are overrated as decisive factors in elections. On the Democratic side, you have to go back to John Kennedy’s deal in 1960 with Lyndon Johnson, who helped the ticket carry Texas in a very close race. On the Republican side, Reagan’s selection of George H.W. Bush in 1980 helped unify his own party, which still had a large moderate faction concerned about the Goldwater debacle of 16 years earlier.
So Trump’s VP selection may not matter that much in this election, but it will matter a lot in positioning a successor. What is likely to be decisive in the choice is Trump’s relentless narcissism.
