I doubt Trump will:
become president
go to prison
live much longer
So what’s in store for the Republican Party in our hyper-polarized political world? Will it be possible to pry it back from the clutches of a Trumpless MAGA Movement? And who will lead it? Don Jr? Vance? Something even worse? Anyone remember Mike Pence and the pre-MAGA conservative values? we'll come back to him in a couple of minutes.
I was fascinated with CNN’s in-depth political discussions with 10 year olds, especially in what red state 10 year olds (in Texas) had to say since Trump addresses his followers as though they are 10 years old. A team of CNN reporters found it “jarring to hear American kids talk about politics and see the country’s often angry political debate filtered through young people. When a child is asked for one word to describe former President Donald Trump and comes up with “pure evil,” it suggests a level of division that might surprise the average American. Researchers found that Democrat-supporting kids drove polarization in a new study for CNN, and the children were more likely to say they wouldn’t be friends with someone who supports Trump. Kids in red states, on the other hand, were more likely to repeat misinformation... [W]hen kids were asked how much they liked Harris or Trump on a five-point scale, the Democrat-leaning and blue-state kids were more likely to say they really liked Harris and really disliked Trump. Republican-leaning and red-state kids liked Trump but were neutral or even positive about Harris.”
Long before these kids take over the GOP, there will be that post-Trump party mentioned above. Let’s start by noting— courtesy of Eric Cortelessa— that “public opinion of Vance has fallen since his debut as Trump’s VP. Vance’s penchant for provocation has often obscured the set of ideas he’s seeking to advance. The Ohio Senator has positioned himself at the vanguard of an emerging ideology often described as the ‘New Right’ or ‘National Conservatism.’ The movement is socially conservative and economically populist. Vance argues that decades of unfettered trade, increased immigration, and market consolidation have led to a loss of jobs and opportunity, the disintegration of families, and widening regional inequality, vesting too much cultural power in the hands of liberal elites and too much economic power in corporate boardrooms. The political project aims to resolve a long-standing issue for Republicans, whose need to win over heartland voters on cultural issues is in tension with an economic agenda that has benefited the wealthy over the working class.”
To Vance’s allies, his elevation to Trump’s No. 2 was an indication their side has the upper hand in the looming battle over what the GOP should be after Trump exits the scene. “It was a very clear message and recognition that the Republican Party has been transformed,” says Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Vance edged out for the job. And it appeared to position Vance, at 40, as the heir apparent to the Make America Great Again movement, or at the very least one of the figures poised to define the party’s post-Trump future.
But for Vance’s ideas to carry the day, he has to survive the role. He has been a forceful tribune for much of Trump’s agenda, including restrictive immigration measures, across-the-board tariffs, and limiting foreign entanglements. But Trump is also running as a classic business-friendly Republican who wants to cut taxes and regulations. He recently told some of the nation’s wealthiest donors that he would lower their tax burdens to make them even richer. Since locking up the GOP nomination, Trump has cozied up to billionaires such as Elon Musk and the libertarian financier Jeff Yass, who have made no secret of their desire to quash renewed antitrust efforts, disempower unions, and restore laissez-faire Reaganomics.
No running mate agrees with the top of the ticket on everything. Kamala Harris opposed Joe Biden’s record on busing. Biden, before becoming Vice President, supported the Iraq War, whereas Barack Obama did not. But Trump sees politics through the prism of power and loyalty, not ideology. His last Vice President, Mike Pence, was a faithful understudy until he followed his conscience and the Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021— at which point Trump appeared willing to sacrifice Pence to a braying mob chanting for Pence’s hanging. Vance has endeared himself to Trump through professions of unalloyed fealty; he has said he would have followed Trump’s scheme to decertify the 2020 election.
The partnership already shows some signs of strain. Trump has more than once distanced himself from Vance. He told an interviewer that VP picks have “virtually no impact” on elections. In the debate with Harris, he disavowed Vance’s claim that Trump would veto a national abortion ban. While Trump has professed satisfaction with his pick, some in his orbit believe he made a mistake. “Vance didn’t propel him forward. It kind of pulled him back,” says a close Trump ally. “There’s a lot of blowback on the J.D. pick.”
The former President remains attracted to Vance’s bootstrap biography: the kid from a broken home who made it to Yale Law School via the Marines; who parlayed his fame as an author into founding a venture-capital firm; and who evolved from a withering Trump critic into one of the former President’s most vehement boosters. “J.D. Vance is doing a wonderful job,” Trump said in a statement to TIME. “I could not be more pleased.”
During the final stretch of the campaign, Vance’s ideas and political instincts alike will be tested as he attempts to play the dual role of Trump’s pit bull and lapdog. At the vice-presidential debate Oct. 1 with Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vance will aim to prosecute the case against the Democrats without alienating either swing voters or his boss. To ideological fellow travelers, the larger task is to win the battle of ideas and reorient the GOP. Winning the election is just the first step. “There’s going to be a long debate,” Vance tells me. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”
A few months into Trump’s first term, in November 2017, Vance gave an address at Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the most liberal campuses in America. In an auditorium filled with the eager faces of literature professors and art-history majors, Vance spoke of the disintegrating social fabric in blue collar America: fewer people joining churches, jobs shifting overseas, community structures collapsing. Many felt they no longer had a place in the American story. In that void, he argued, the Trump constituency emerged. Vance had recently published Hillbilly Elegy, which earned him a reputation as a MAGA whisperer— a public intellectual who could demystify the phenomenon for cosmopolitan audiences. “He became this kind of agent who would come and tell you from behind the lines what the enemy is thinking,” says Phil Longman, policy director of the antimonopoly think tank Open Markets, who attended the speech.
…For Vance, Trump came to represent an opportunity. It wasn’t just their areas of policy alignment; Trump was waging war against the political establishment, creating the space for new ideological movements to emerge.
Another factor in Vance’s evolution was his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Vance, who had never been baptized, came to the church through an uncle by marriage and the influence of intellectual heroes like René Girard. It was appealing not only for its social traditionalism but also for its vision of political economy. One of the forebears of Catholic social thought, Pope Leo XIII, published an encyclical in 1891 that outlined the deleterious effects of unregulated markets on family and community. Allies say Vance’s Catholic faith helped to transform a conviction reflected in Hillbilly Elegy that blamed the people he grew up with for their own misfortune, rather than recognizing the systemic forces grinding them down. “I think that over the years,” says Sohrab Ahmari, a friend and leading voice of the New Right, “he’s reached the truer conclusion of his own book.”
Around this time, Vance met Tucker Carlson at a conference. The then Fox host was struck by how Vance voiced hostility to a class that still saw him as a cultural conduit. “He was talking about what he had learned from growing up in southern Ohio, going to Yale Law School, being welcomed into this new world, being thrilled by it, and then discovering,” Carlson says, “that a lot of these people were just careerist frauds.”
Vance’s antipathy for them hardened during the pandemic. He had come to believe the government should incentivize the formation of families and promote child-rearing. In his view, COVID-19 mitigation measures, like keeping kids out of school, revealed how policymakers were doing the opposite. “I was kind of astonished at how little real reflection there was about all of the COVID policies,” he says. “There’s a certain segment of America’s leadership class that I think really has become explicitly antifamily and explicitly antichild.”
After the pandemic, Vance became a regular on Carlson’s show, then the most-watched program on cable news. Often the segments focused on the culture war or on Big Tech, which both Vance and Carlson accuse of censoring conservative speech. “The problem with Google is not just its market power,” Vance tells me. “It’s the way that it uses its market power to influence politics.” The former President saw Vance on Carlson’s show and was impressed. In February 2021, when Trump was in exile after the Jan. 6 attack and Vance was eyeing a run for an open Ohio Senate seat, the pair met for the first time at Mar-a-Lago at the suggestion of Carlson, Trump’s eldest son Don Jr., and the financier Omeed Malik, who all urged the ex-President to give one of his former critics a chance. For Vance, much was on the line; receiving Trump’s backing was the easiest path to rise in the modern GOP.
When Vance walked into Trump’s private office, there were printouts on the desk of Vance’s past salvos, according to a source familiar with the meeting. “You said some nasty shit about me,” Trump said. Vance apologized, saying he had bought into media misrepresentations. Over time, he told Trump, he came to realize that the policies Trump championed would help the people he wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy. Trump was pleased. They left the meeting agreeing to stay in touch. Vance told Trump he wanted to earn his support.
For much of the Ohio Senate primary, Vance trailed in the polls despite the largesse of Thiel, the explicitly pro-monopoly libertarian who poured $15 million into a super PAC supporting him. But in April 2022, less than a month before GOP primary voters cast ballots, Trump delivered an endorsement that lifted Vance to victory.
By the time J.D. Vance got to Capitol Hill, he no longer had the boyish face from his book’s jacket. He grew a beard and slimmed down. He came to Washington ready to fight the governing class.
In some ways, Vance’s Senate tenure was an audition for his current role. He has backed Trump’s election lies and expansive vision of presidential power, as well as draconian immigration laws, protectionist trade policies, and limited American involvement overseas, including ending U.S. support for Ukraine. The month Vance took office, he became one of the first GOP officials to endorse Trump for President, at a moment when his dominant victory in the 2024 primary was far from assured. He quickly became one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders in Congress.
At the same time, he proposed legislation that can fairly be described as progressive. He introduced bills with Democrats to beef up regulations on railways and CEO pay, and to eliminate tax breaks for large corporate mergers. He called for raising the minimum wage and worked on a bill to prevent insurance companies from charging new mothers co-pays. He proposed legislation to crack down on the Visa-MasterCard duopoly and praised Biden’s trust-busting Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.
This agenda reflects a changing Republican Party. In the Bush years, Thomas Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which argued Americans voted for presidential candidates with whom they culturally identify instead of those who would better serve their economic interests. Wealthy Manhattanites routinely voted for Democrats (who wanted to raise their taxes), while rural Kansans routinely voted for Republicans (who wanted to erode the social safety net). By tacking to the right on culture but to the left on economics, the New Right argues Republicans can chip away at the Democrats’ coalition.
…In the past, Vance has supported abortion bans with no exceptions for rape and incest; now he has adopted Trump’s stance that abortion should be a states’-rights issue. Vance has said people with children should pay lower taxes, saying in 2021 that the government should “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad.” The point Vance was trying to make with his comments, he says now, was that policymakers should promote nuclear families that can stave off the trauma and dysfunction he endured as a child. “I think everybody’s viewpoints are influenced by how they grew up and their perspective and their life experiences,” he says. “I’m no different.”
Critics like Sarah Longwell, the GOP strategist who runs Republican Voters Against Trump, say Vance’s hard-line social views are deeply unpopular with most voters in her focus groups. She is also skeptical that Vance’s MAGA pivot is fully genuine. “I think he has something in mind right now that he views as an ideological lodestar,” she says. “I wouldn’t say that I think he’s got a core that’s driven by something other than the pursuit of power. He figures out who the richest or most powerful alpha in a room is, and then he sucks up to them and adopts their project. It’s what he did with Thiel. It’s what he did with Tucker. It’s what he did with Trump.”
Yesterday, Twitter quickly blocked links to the 270 page Vance dossier— an opposition research report— that came from the Trump campaign, in all likelihood courtesy of Iranian hackers. Ken Klippenstein published it and Musk suspended him from Twitter! There wasn’t anything new in it, lots of pages like this... stuff many of us who pay attention already knew:
The flip side of the GOP Bitcoin could be Mike Pence, who, reported Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett “Mike Pence stuck his head up this week to take a whack at Trumpism, urging Republicans to reject ‘protectionist tariffs’ and ‘isolationism’ while ‘unashamedly’ recommitting to anti-abortion positions. It’s a sign of what he’s up to behind the scenes as well… laying the groundwork for a party that could move on after the election from Donald Trump’s populism and protectionism. Sometimes that means being a rare voice of public dissent, at other times it means quietly trying to recruit allies to his cause who might be more willing to join him on specific policy or political fights… [T]he big question for Pence is: Is there still a place for him in today’s GOP? The answer isn’t even clear to his fans: Pence doesn’t fit into ‘the Republican party of today,’ said Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. ‘The Republican Party of tomorrow may be a different matter.’”
Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, a Republican who has not endorsed Trump: “There’s room for his voice and the voices of others, for this reason: Our party is, at this point, mostly a political coalition in search of a clear policy agenda. At some point we’re going to have to gravitate around a clear policy agenda… And Mike Pence is very well equipped to do that.”
“Pence’s best opportunity to redirect his party, wrote Talcott and Everett, “is if Trump loses. There’s pent-up angst over the party’s policy direction on foreign and economic policy, and lots of social conservatives who are closer to Pence on issues like abortion than they are to Trump. So if Republicans are picking up the pieces in mid-November, it seems likely Pence will be one of the voices involved. It’s harder to see where Pence and his group will go if Trump wins— and Pence’s non-endorsement of Trump doesn’t help in that scenario. It’s also hard to see Pence holding elected office again, though there are plenty of opportunities for him to influence policy through his group and in the press. While these challenges are real, at minimum he’s engendered goodwill around Washington from his time on Capitol Hill and the Trump presidency. ‘Mike Pence is a good man and I definitely think he has a place in the party,’ Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said. ‘I’m not going to second-guess anybody’s endorsement.’”
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