17/07/2024

J.D. Vance, Trump's running mate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump

For those, like me, who found it unexpected that someone like J.D. Vance, who has said about Donald Trump in the past what Muhammad did not say about pork, has been named Trump's running mate, the following article by Olivia Reingold of The Free Press, who followed Vance on the campaign trail in 2022, shed some light.

«Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate is remarkable in more ways than one. There is Vance’s journey from the broken home in a poor, rural Ohio he wrote about in Hillbilly Elegy, to the Marines, to Ohio State, then to Yale Law School and to the Senate, and now a presidential ticket. Also remarkable is his transformation from a prominent “Never Trumper”—who once called his now–running mate “America’s Hitler” and an “opioid for the masses”—to an enthusiastic Trumpist in the vanguard of the New Right. 

For some, Vance’s journey is simple enough to explain: it’s the story of a smart and ambitious “sellout” and an “angry jerk,” as one of his (ex-) friends from law school put it on X yesterday. To this crowd, Vance is only the most extreme example of a familiar story of Republicans kowtowing to the man who took over their party. 

But Vance is a much more complicated—and interesting—figure than that. 

Agree with him or not, he has undergone a sincere ideological conversion since 2016. That much was obvious to me when I followed him on the campaign trail in 2022. And it’s obvious from any speech or interview he gives. He is not someone who just parrots his party’s talking points. (He has also undergone an actual conversion: I recommend Rod Dreher’s interview with him on the day he was baptized and received into the Catholic Church in 2019.) 

In the Senate, he hasn’t just voted with the GOP herd but teamed up with Democrats on a range of bills that stake out new ideological territory for Republicans. He makes some of Trump’s donors uncomfortable. 

By picking Vance, Trump has made clear his project is about more than personality. The Republican presidential ticket now has a distinct ideological flavor. It has teeth. National Review’s Philip Klein called the pick “another nail in the coffin of Reagan Republicanism.” (This is not a compliment at that magazine.) Vance is a prominent critic of U.S. involvement in Ukraine (for more on his foreign policy views, I recommend this piece by my colleague Isaac Grafstein). 

He’s also economically unorthodox—and more relaxed about government involvement in the economy than many of his colleagues. He has backed a higher minimum wage and praised Lina Khan, Joe Biden’s FTC chair and a proponent of more robust antitrust policies. 

Did these ideological considerations clinch it for Vance? I suspect a bigger factor was that in Vance, Trump saw someone who was welcomed into the elite—as Trump never has been—but who turned his back on it.»

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