JD Vance, Trump's running mate, the righteous hypocrate, from Never Trump to Ever Trump and beyond (3)

Sequel to (1), (2)

«Mike Pence should have been a warning to J. D. Vance about the inevitable abasement in store once you join a ticket with Donald Trump. Before he became Trump’s running mate a decade ago, conservative Christian values were the center of Pence’s political identity, but in October 2016, he reluctantly stood by Trump after the release of the tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women “by the pussy.” It was a sign of things to come. Pence became vice president, and for the next four years, he defended his boss through moral abominations and deficit explosions that cut against his fiscal conservatism, flinching only when Trump asked him to help steal an election. His reward? Trump did nothing while a mob threatened to hang Pence.

All of this was common knowledge when Vance agreed to run with Trump in 2024. No one lands on a presidential ticket if they’re not outrageously ambitious—nearly every veep for at least a century has fancied themselves a future president—but Vance is particularly brazen. Becoming Trump’s running mate required a yearslong effort to ingratiate himself with a guy whom Vance had, in the pages of this magazine, referred to as “cultural heroin” and elsewhere called “America’s Hitler.” Maybe Vance’s ambition blinded him to Pence’s lesson, but the war in Iran is teaching it to him the hard way.»

J. D. Vance learns what Mike Pence already knows

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«JD Vance just delivered one of those painfully awkward moments that ends up defining a political appearance.

While speaking at a rally in Hungary where he was promoting Viktor Orbán Vance tried to create a headline-grabbing moment by calling Donald Trump live on stage to show support. Instead, it completely backfired. Trump didn’t answer.

Trying to play it off, Vance joked with the crowd that it might get embarrassing if the call didn’t go through. Moments later, that’s exactly what happened the call went straight to a voicemail that wasn’t even set up. The room was left with an uncomfortable silence and a failed stunt.

He eventually tried again and did get Trump on the line, but even that didn’t help much. Trump sounded distracted and irritated, briefly mumbling before offering a generic endorsement of Orbán. It felt more like an obligation than enthusiasm.»

Hudson Flores, Quora

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«Vice-President J.D. Vance loves big ideas, or at least the idea of big ideas. Unlike President Donald Trump, he reads books and even writes his own, and he talks, authentically, like a diploma-carrying member of the elite they both ostentatiously disdain. He aligns himself with the “post-liberal right”, a term so highfalutin one struggles to imagine Mr Trump using it. Mr Vance serves as the chief emissary between the Trump White House and the intellectual “New Right”, the agglomeration of pointy-heads, Silicon Valley potentates and podcasters with big ideas of their own for saving Western civilisation, as Mr Vance, apocalyptically, likes to describe his mission.

It is heady stuff. It must also, on some days, prove vexatious, for it has led Mr Vance to cast himself as the chief ideologist of a movement, MAGA, whose essence is that it has no ideology. MAGA is committed instead to the instincts, impulses and glory of one man. As a result, Mr Vance’s theories of governance keep taking a beating from Mr Trump’s practice.

For example, contrary to the big ideas of Mr Vance, Mr Trump has recently been threatening to destroy a civilisation. Mr Vance, a veteran of the Iraq war, has been an advocate of isolationism. As he put it during the last presidential campaign, “America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world.” A war with Iran seemed to him a particularly bad idea. It was not in America’s interest and would mean “a huge distraction of resources”; war between Israel and Iran was “the most likely and the most dangerous scenario” for starting a third world war.»

J.D. Vance’s theory of Trumpism is no match for the practice