Vance Once Called Trump “Cultural Heroin,” Noxious” And “Reprehensible”— Then What Happened?

JD Vance-- Incompatible With The Basic Principles Of American Democracy

I bet RFK, Jr. imagined Trump was going to offer him the VP slot on the GOP ticket when he responded to Trump’s summons yesterday with a face to face in Milwaukee. No doubt Trump offered him something in return for an endorsement— Secretary of Health and Human Services?— but it certainly wasn’t to be on the ticket. Trump had already settled on Ohio’s MAGA one year senator, JD Vance, a NeverTrumper-turned-consumate-asskisser, who billionaire Peter Thiel bought a Senate seat for. 

Since then, Vance has obediently pushed the Big Lie and is always out front embracing every extreme MAGA policy, from the racist, xenophobic “replacement theory” to the entirety of the Project 2025 nightmare. <> According to Nicholas Nehamas<>, Trump told the media on Monday that Vance is “a clone of Trump on the issues” and said he did not “see any difference” between them.

Dan Pfeifer wrote that Trump picked Vance to implement the MAGA agenda and make Project 2025 a reality. “This is a really odd choice for so many reasons, but it tells me one thing— Project 2025 is a very real threat if Trump wins. And Vance will implement it with ruthless efficiency… [He] offers no political advantage. He doesn’t expand the map; Ohio, his home state, is firmly in Trump’s camp. He also lacks appeal to key demographics that Trump needs to win over. His appeal seems limited to staunch MAGA supporters who are unwaveringly loyal to Trump. Moreover, Vance fails to provide ideological balance or address vulnerabilities within the ticket. His alignment with far-right extremism mirrors Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election and suggests a willingness to support future insurrectionist actions. Vance is just another white male MAGA candidate. While he is younger than Trump, age doesn't seem to be a significant concern for voters regarding Trump— especially when compared to Joe Biden. So, why the hell did Trump pick Vance?”

Vance Is MAGA Dick Cheney

Donald Trump does not give two shits about governing. He’d likely struggle to explain how a bill becomes a law or distinguish between an executive order and a presidential memorandum. His knowledge of the responsibilities of the cabinet agencies under his administration would likely be lacking as well.

However, Trump picked Vance for the same reasons George W. Bush picked Cheney— someone who has the smarts and know-how to implement the MAGA agenda. Trump may not even know this is why he picked Vance, but it’s why so many people behind Project 2025 supported Vance’s appointment. While Trump is watching his fifth hour of Fox News that day and Truthing about absurd marginalia, Vance is going to pull the lever of power to put in place the most radical policies in modern American history. As evidenced by the transition from Never Trump to slavishly pro-Trump, Vance has no moral center or ideological consistency. All he cares about is his power. Vance is driven by ambition, and he knows that MAGA is the future of the Republican Party. So die-hard MAGA is his persona.

Unlike Mike Pence— a famously dumb person— Vance is smart enough to be very dangerous. I would encourage you to read Ross Douthat's interview with Vance. Douthat’s political crush on Vance comes through because he refuses to challenge Vance with tough follow-up questions or confront him about the glaring contradictions in his responses. However, the article provides insight into Vance's thought process and his skill in presenting extreme views in a palatable manner.

There has been much skepticism about whether Trump would or could actually implement the scarier elements of Project 2025. Vance’s selection should put those doubts to rest. If Trump wins, Vance will be the frontrunner for the GOP nomination and will be judged on his ability to make American MAGA. 

Arizona congressional candidate Conor O’Callaghan agrees. He told us that “Vance is not dumb; he went to Yale Law, the top law school in America. His analysis about Trump in October 2016 was spot on and he was a self-described ‘Never Trumper.’ So what changed? Unfortunately, there’s a real ‘if you can’t beat him, join him!’ movement going on with Trump and JD Vance is the just the latest in a long list of sellouts.”

Nate Silver noted that Vance’s [electoral track record] is mediocre: he won the primary with only 32 percent of the vote, and he beat Tim Ryan by ‘just’ 6 points, not bad but less than Trump’s 8-point margin of victory in Ohio in 2020… [W]ith only eighteen months in the Senate and no elected experience before then, voters could also question whether Vance is ready to step into the biggest job in the world— although he does have experience in other fields like business and in the United States Marine Corps. That’s not to say Vance is the worst pick Trump might have made— at least not when he was reportedly also considering people like Victor Ramaswamay who had no elected experience at all.” Speaking of whom… the pressure is on for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to appoint Ramaswamay to the Senate seat Vance will leave behind if he and Trump win in November.

Eric Wilson, the progressive running for the congressional swing district in western and central Wisconsin, was impressed when Trump arrived in his state yesterday and announced his running mate. “JD Vance, once a Never Trump guy,” he scoffed, “clearly lacks a spine. His about-face demonstrates he is willing to jump when told to jump and is a Derrick Van Orden-style lapdog. Here in Wisconsin, we reject Trump, Vance and the GOP extremism the RNC has brought to town.”

If Wilson hasn’t been impressed with Vance, Trump's two not very bright sons have been. In fact, according to a report from NBC News, Trump was leaning towards Burgum, an unthreatening billionaire, as recently as a few days ago. A GOP operative told NBC that when Trump ran that by Junior and Eric, they “went batshit crazy. ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing.’” They both insisted on Vance.

While Vance’s selection illustrates the ascendancy of younger right-wing leaders like Charlie Kirk, who also pushed for Vance to be chosen, it carries risks for Trump. Vance, who turns 40 next month, would be the third-youngest U.S. vice president if elected. He has a history of hard-line positions on issues such as abortion. And he has a reputation for hot rhetoric at a time when national leaders, including Trump, are urging cooler heads in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump last week in Pennsylvania.

…If Biden steps aside, as many Democrats have called on him to do, some close to Trump see a scenario in which Vice President Kamala Harris is the nominee and picks Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or a Midwesterner as her running mate. Vance, with his appeal to blue-collar, industrial-belt voters, could fortify the GOP ticket against such a move. 

The final days of the search involved a last-minute rush of knife-fighting among Trump world insiders and outsiders pushing for a particular contender— and in some cases pushing to block Vance’s selection. Conway in particular was vehemently opposed to Vance and made her opinion known to Trump, three sources familiar with the discussions said. 

Conway acknowledged in text and telephone exchanges that Vance was not her preference.

“I thought Rubio or [Virginia Gov. Glenn] Youngkin could get him more unique voters or help expand the map, and that he’ll need young ‘America First’ fighters like Vance in the U.S. Senate,” Conway said. 

But even as he gave a thorough look to other options, Trump kept returning to Vance, who had long been at the top of his list. 

“He went back to where he was at the beginning,” Conway said.

The efforts to diminish Vance were reminiscent of the push to keep Trump from endorsing him in the Senate primary two years earlier. But those rehashing Vance’s old comments weren’t telling Trump or his advisers anything they didn’t already know or hadn’t already factored into their calculations.

“I have been having flashbacks to the JD primary endorsement process,” a person close to Vance said. 

In the end, Vance’s allies and advocates viewed Burgum as the main competition — and the one who proved to be the toughest to dispatch. Last week,  the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post ran editorials pumping up Burgum’s candidacy, and former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove talked up Burgum during an appearance on Fox News. It was a trifecta from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which Trump hadn’t quite forgiven for being an early booster of DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign. 

Rove, a villain to many in Trump’s MAGA movement, may have been the final straw. Trump Jr. promptly shared with his father a Breitbart News article highlighting Rove’s Burgum praise. 

It did not, according to a source familiar with the exchange, go over well.

Zack Beauchamp, who met Vance at a Zionist even in Israel just before he was elected to the Senate. Beauchamp found him more intelligent than your garden variety DC politician but… “his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy. Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump’s scheme for the Vice President to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence. This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should ‘fire every single mid-level bureaucrat’ in the US government and ‘replace them with our people.’ If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.”

He wrote that “Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response.” That’s certainly not out of step with Trump’s MAGA base, very similar to the millions of people who voted in the Nazi Party in 1933 Germany. Vance “sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.

Ultimately, whether Vance truly believes what he’s saying is secondary to the public persona he’s chosen to adopt. Politicians are not defined by their inner lives, but the decisions that they make in public— the ones that actually affect law and policy. Those choices are deeply shaped by the constituencies they depend on and the allies they court.

And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war.

Vance has cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington, describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.

Vance is also an open admirer of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a right-wing politician who has systematically torn his country’s democracy apart. Vance praised Orbán’s approach to higher education in particular, saying he “made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.” The policies in question involve using national dollars to impose state controls over universities, turning them into vehicles for disseminating the government line.

…He would enable all of Trump’s worst instincts, and put a brake on none— deploying his considerable intellectual and intrapersonal gifts toward bending the government to Trump’s will.

In Trump’s first term, he faced considerable opposition from inside his own administration. People like Defense Secretary James Mattis and Vice President Mike Pence served as brakes on Trump’s most radical impulses, challenging or even refusing to implement his (illegal) directives.

Vance’s ascendance represents the death of this “adults in the room” model. Backed by people drawn from the lists of loyal staffers being prepared by places like Heritage, Vance would not only support Trump’s radical impulses but seems likely to spearhead efforts to implement them.

He would be a direct conduit from the shadowy world of far-right influencers, where Curtis Yarvin is a respected voice and Viktor Orbán a role model, straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean described himself as hailing from “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” If the GOP under Trump has indeed evolved into an authoritarian party, then Vance hails from its authoritarian wing.