JD Vance is the embodiment of the populist, nationalist and blue-collar transformation of the old establishment Republican Party.
That’s why ex-President Donald Trump — who never forgets the enthusiasms of his base — picked the Ohio senator as his vice-presidential running mate and effectively named him as a political heir who is now the best positioned Republican to inherit the keys to the MAGA kingdom whenever Trump exits.
Trump rarely comes across as someone preoccupied with posterity — he lives in the present. But the selection of Vance is a nod to his legacy and anoints a leader of the “Make America Great Again” movement who could be active long after its author has left the scene.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Trump chose an heir apparent a few days after surviving an assassination attempt — a horrific event that underscored the constitutional duty of vice presidents to secure the chain of power and assume the presidency themselves if the worst happens.
The Ohio senator, who is only 39, injects a dash of youth into an election season dominated by two elderly men who have both been elected president. His selection caps a stunning political rise — he’s been in the Senate for less than two years. And if Trump wins the election in November, a millennial will be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Vance made his name by explaining the political forces behind the rise of Trumpism before most people were paying attention to them in his book “Hillbilly Elegy” about growing up poor in Appalachia. The memoir describes human blight, economic pain and drug addiction sown by deindustrialization and globalization in Kentucky and Ohio. Eight years ago, he was often sought out by liberal commentators looking to understand Trumpism’s populist appeal.
In many ways, his quintessential American story is the antidote to Trump’s biography. Unlike his new boss, he didn’t come from wealth — he’s a self-made man who rose from the lowliest of circumstances, heading to the Ohio State University, to service with the Marine Corps in Iraq and graduating with top honors from Yale Law School. Vance is exceedingly smart and eloquent and makes a case for Trumpism and his party’s revolutionary departure from its internationalist, corporate roots in a way that Trump, who operates on emotion and feral political instincts, embodies but rarely intellectualizes.
From Never Trumper to true believer
But Vance was not always on the Trump train. He was an early, self-declared “Never Trumper” who once called the ex-president “noxious.” Critics, therefore, accuse him of opportunism and of trashing his beliefs to become one of Trump’s most vocal sycophants in the pursuit of power. The Ohio Republican has turned on the establishment and elite academe that helped make his name with the vehemence that only a defector can muster. But he has explained that he was wrong about Trump and now believes that he was a great president.
Since Trump left the White House, Vance has emerged as one of his most vehement defenders and has enthusiastically embraced the idea that the ex-president is the victim of weaponized justice. He has also downplayed the assault on the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, and in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins earlier this year, cast doubt on the facts of the most flagrant attack on American democracy of the modern age.
“I’m extremely skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger. I think … in politics, people like to really exaggerate things, from time to time,” he said. “A lot of folks, in the Democratic Party act as if January the 6 was the scariest moment of their lives.” Vance went on: “January 6 was a bad day. It was a riot. But the idea that Donald Trump endangered anyone’s lives, when he told them to protest peacefully, it’s just absurd.”
But while Vance may juice MAGA turnout, he could alienate the critical suburban voters in swing states, especially women, who usually decide US elections, especially with his hardline position on abortion.
Trump critics are also seizing on the pick to question Trump’s commitment to his new unity message after he escaped the assassination attempt. Vance responded with the most searing reaction of any Republican. He claimed that President Joe Biden’s arguments that Trump was an “authoritarian fascist” led to the attempt to kill him, despite the motive of the gunman being unclear.
There is always intense debate about how much a vice-presidential nominee really matters in an electoral context and whether such picks really help put a ticket over the top. But the Vance move makes a lot of sense when Biden’s own team has said his best path to a second term runs through the Blue Wall states. Most assessments of the electoral map suggest Biden must at a minimum win those states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and add a single electoral vote in the Omaha, Nebraska, area to get to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.
Vance has a particular talent for talking to voters in the post-industrial Midwest. He won his Senate seat by more than 6 points in 2022 and he is an avatar for the political forces that turned the Buckeye State into a Republican bastion after years as a political bellwether.
Why European allies won’t relish the Vance pick
The new Republican vice-presidential pick is also the embodiment of Trump’s “America First” policies abroad and augurs another rocky period between the US and its European allies if the ex-president reclaims the Oval Office.
He is in the vanguard of a new generation of pro-Trump lawmakers who reject the traditional US foreign policy consensus. He traveled to the belly of the internationalist beast at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year to rebuke America’s European allies. And at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the US, he explained why he thinks America should no longer finance Ukraine’s fight for its freedom.
“I have … Republican colleagues, who are much more emotionally invested in what’s going on 6,000 miles away than they are in their own country,” Vance said at the conference. He backs Trump’s position that the war in Ukraine should end and the killing should stop. “It’s good for the country to have somebody saying, ‘How long does this go on? How much money are we supposed to funnel into this country?’” said Vance, who has also argued the US lacks the manufacturing capacity or sufficient military reserves to send more ammunition to Ukraine. “If you care about Ukraine, but most importantly, if you care about America, you should be wanting this thing to come to some diplomatic resolution.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rebuked Vance’s criticism of the war in an interview with CNN’s Collins in February.
“To understand it is to come to the front line to see what’s going on, to speak with the people, then to go to civilians to understand … what will (happen to) them without this support. And he will understand that millions … will be killed. It’s a fact,” Zelensky said.
“Of course, he doesn’t understand. God bless you don’t have the war on your territory,” he said.
But Vance is listening to Trump, not Zelensky or the foreign policy establishment. It’s not hard to imagine him deep in the West Wing as vice president implementing the hardline “America First” agenda at home and abroad, almost like a modern day — and far more populist — version of former Vice President Dick Cheney in the Bush administration.
Ultimately, Trump is clearly comfortable with Vance, a favorite of his firebrand son Donald Trump Jr. They are cut from the same ideological and temperamental cloth — unlike the ex-president and his first vice presidential pick, the pious Mike Pence, who eventually broke with Trump on January 6 after concluding he lacked the constitutional power to throw the 2020 election to his boss.
“I think he was a good president. And I think that he made the country more prosperous. And I think he made the world more peaceful,” Vance said of his future ticket mate in his interview with Collins, saying, “What gives me pause is another four years of Biden’s administration, where he’s opened the borders, and where you have, effectively a conflict, a major world conflict in nearly every continent in the world.”
There is little distance between Vance and Trump. The Ohio senator made sure of that and it’s made him one of the most significant rising powers in American politics.