Jeff Dean/AP Photo
J.D. Vance at a Trump campaign rally in Vandalia, Ohio, March 16, 2024
I’ve been in a number of conversations with smart observers of politics who make the following argument: If Biden and the Democrats can just beat Trump this fall, MAGA will gradually splinter and fade.
Typically, several reasons are given. First, Trump is a unique specimen—a political unicorn. With his long experience as an entertainer, his intuitive sense of how to rally a base, and his feral facility for making the outrageous endearing to his cult, he has held together a fractious coalition in a way that nobody else could.
Look beneath the superficial unity that Trump has wrought, the argument goes, and the Republican coalition is a mass of fissures. Economic nationalists abhor free-traders. Fiscal conservatives disagree with supply-siders. Isolationists have little use for police-the-world internationalists. Take Trump personally out of the equation, and his working-class zealots might begin to notice that Republican policies do not serve their interests.
And there’s more. The House is a complete mess, with Speaker (for the moment) Mike Johnson barely papering over bitter divisions and serving as a de facto agent of the Democrats. Evangelicals support Trump but would prefer someone who is not such a flagrant hypocrite. Despite the fact that so many mainstream Republican elected officials are calling it quits in disgust, the corporate wing of the GOP is still potent and would revive once Trump is gone.
All of this is true. But the modern Republican Party has been a bundle of contradictions at least since Ronald Reagan. And as long as Republican rule has produced tax cuts and deregulation, the socially urbane corporate types who hire gays, believe in abortions, and want global alliances have been happy to hold their noses and vote in coalition with fundamentalist rubes whom they privately ridicule.
When it comes to personalities who might keep the MAGA/corporate coalition intact, there is only one I really worry about. That’s J.D. Vance.
WITH THE PUBLICATION IN 2016 of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance marketed himself as a self-made man who had risen above his troubled origins. For Vance, poverty was all about self-defeating values. In my review of his book in the Prospect, I described Vance as Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. As I wrote:
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.
By then, hillbilly Vance had already become a protégé of Peter Thiel, the ultra-right tech billionaire. Thiel poured $15 million into Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Republican Senate primary in Ohio.
Vance reminded me of Harold Ickes’s withering description of the 1940 Republican nominee for president, Wendell Willkie. An Indianan who also served as a lawyer for wealthy corporations but tried in the campaign to stress his rural roots, Ickes called him the barefoot boy from Wall Street.
But when I subsequently appeared with Vance at a public event at Oberlin, I realized that I had underestimated him. In contrast to the bombast of Trump, Vance is a man of intellect and charm. He can be effective at a rally, but also impressive in a discussion.
At first, Vance was anti-Trump. During the 2016 campaign, Vance called himself a Never Trumper, said that he loathed Trump, and asked on Twitter, “What percentage of the American population has @RealDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?”
By the time of the Ohio Senate race in 2022, Thiel had brokered a fence-mending meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump and Vance ended up embracing each other. Vance went on to win the primary election against two better-known opponents, and handily defeated Democrat Tim Ryan in the general.
IF ANYONE CAN PULL OFF APPEALING to both MAGA and the corporate base as Trump’s heir apparent, Vance can. Vance is attempting this by being hyper-loyal to Trump and setting forth an “America first” worldview that’s even more far-right (and more coherent) than Trump’s, while remaining primarily pro-corporate.
Despite the extremism of his views, compared to Trump he seems reassuringly sane. In the Senate, he partnered with his Ohio counterpart Sherrod Brown on legislation to bolster rail safety after the East Palestine disaster, though The Lever reported that he weakened that bill at the request of corporate lobbyists. He offered support to striking autoworkers at the Big Three plants, though he has taken up the Trumpian line that what really harms those workers is the transition to electric vehicles. And these occasional sops to the working class have generally not been repeated in Vance’s voting record. His lifetime AFL-CIO score is zero percent.
Vance can emulate Trump’s sheer crassness when he addresses a rally. As he told a group of MAGA supporters in New Hampshire in March, “If you listen to the media, they will tell you the inflation crisis of Joe Biden is over. But I’ll tell you how bad the inflation crisis is: Hunter Biden told everybody that he couldn’t even afford crack cocaine.” But unlike Trump, Vance can also come accross as soft-spoken, cerebral, and intellectually serious.
It is hard to imagine a version of American nationalism more far-fetched than Trump’s, but Vance is proposing one. Vance was the Senate leader of a group opposing aid to Ukraine. As he wrote in a New York Times op-ed on April 12, no matter how many weapons the U.S. supplies, Ukraine is in a war that it can’t win.
That view is outside the bipartisan consensus, but it’s far from crazy. The longer the war drags on, the more that neo-isolationism will have some appeal. But what’s truly radical is the larger ideology of which Vance’s Ukraine posture is a part.
As Vance declared in a major policy address in February, “The experts, the bipartisan consensus, of course, got us into Vietnam, a war that lasted nearly 15 years, that saw the destruction of nearly 60,000 American lives. And for what?” He analogized the tragedy for Vietnam to the enduring post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that “Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction” and the war, in his view, empowered Iran within the region. “Now those experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely,” Vance concluded. “And it is called the conflict in Ukraine.”
Vance is calling for nothing less than an end to American internationalism, in which each nation is responsible for its own military and economic security. As two seemingly endless wars in Ukraine and Gaza keep dragging on, an ideology of neo-isolation could well gain appeal, even among Democrats.
In my view, Vance is running to be both Trump’s vice-presidential candidate and then his successor. But he is not exactly sucking up to Trump. Rather, he is creating his own variant of Trumpian ideology, minus the incoherence. He is not proposing to destroy American democracy; he can leave that to Trump.
Vance, in contrast to some of the people whose names have been floated for VP, would also reassure on-the-fence voters that if Trump dropped dead in office, a serious person who shares Trump’s basic worldview would succeed him. Vance would probably do more for Trump’s ticket than Kamala Harris would for Biden’s.
Vance turns 40 in August. He would be the youngest major-party nominee for vice president since Ike put Richard Nixon, then 39, on the GOP ticket in 1952 as a sop to the far right of that era.
The one thing that may save America from a Trump-Vance ticket is Trump’s own narcissism. He may well be averse to a running mate whose intellect and clarity would upstage him. If I had to bet, I’d bet that Trump’s own vanity will save us from Vance, at least this year. But at 40, Vance will be a contender for the presidency at least until the election of 2056.
Assuming we are spared a second Trump term, Democrats are kidding themselves if they think that MAGA and its alliance with corporate America will splinter in the aftermath. That’s all the more reason for Democrats to work even harder to make clear to working Americans that MAGA and Trumpism are fakes.
Vance is only a more refined fake. That’s what makes him so dangerous.
