Original title: "Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President."
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker
Two hours after a 20-year-old from Pennsylvania with unclear political affiliations and ulterior motives attempted to assassinate Donald Trump last Saturday, Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio posted a response on social media: "Today was not just an isolated incident. The core premise of Biden's campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt against President Trump."
By Washington logic, it made sense that Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate on Monday. Vance is the most conservative of the three nominees, the most outspokenly loyal and the most combatively partisan, traits that fit well with a candidate currently leading in the polls and looking ahead to the fight ahead. But Vance is also a figure who has swung quickly from mild reform conservatism to hard populism, which itself seems to be proliferating again, all along a line of anti-elitism. He is Trump’s attack dog, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: He is the fuse that Trump lights.
It’s only two years since Vance, 39, ran for public office for the first time. His rise has been as meteoric as that of any politician since Obama, and equally fueled by a rare ability to turn his life experiences into a compelling social narrative. Vance was raised by his grandparents in Appalachian Ohio, where his mother had a serious drinking problem. He served as a regular soldier in Iraq and later educated at Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where his mentor, Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” encouraged him to package his experiences into a memoir. The result, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published in 2016 and became a phenomenon; The New York Times listed it as one of the six books that explained Trump’s victory, a status helped by Vance’s own anti-Trumpism. (During the 2016 campaign, Vance messaged his former roommate: “I’m thinking Trump is either a dumb asshole like Nixon who won’t be that bad (and might even prove useful), or he’s the American Hitler.”)
Even at the time, some of the stereotypes in Hillbilly Elegy seemed plausible, but Vance’s rags-to-riches story and the timeliness of his analysis, which argues that economic turmoil has weakened the social ties that make life possible in places like southwest Ohio, gave it a cinematic lift. By 2020, with Vance working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and funded by Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy was being made into a film by Ron Howard.
The four-year journey from then (established, category-defying young conservative intellectual) to now (right-wing hotshot and Trump’s vice-presidential candidate) is equally impressive, and keyed by two changes within Vance and conservatism. What has changed for Vance is that, as he prepares to run for office, he has become more politically committed. In an extended interview with Ross Dauta of The New York Times last month, he attributed the shift to what he perceives as a shift in liberalism toward the end of the Trump years. “I was thinking a lot about the liberal thing in 2019 and 2020, and these guys have read Carl Schmitt—there is no law, there is only power,” Vance said. “The goal is to regain power. That seemed true in the Kavanaugh situation, and it seems true in the Black Lives Matter moment.” (Vance’s wife, Usha, an Indian-American lawyer whom he met at Yale, clerked for Brett Kavanaugh. “Kind of a nerd,” Vance told Dowta of the Supreme Court justice. “Never believed any of these stories.”) When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, his first campaign ad emphasized his antagonism to the liberal elite. “Are you racist?” he asked voters. “Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist because we want to build Trump’s wall. They blockade us, but that doesn’t change the facts.”
That April, when I traveled to Ohio to watch Vance run in a crowded U.S. Senate primary, his anti-Trumpism was omnipresent. “Let me get this straight,” he said, before launching into a speech about how he didn’t like Trump at first but eventually realized that the billionaire had “revealed the completely hidden corruption in our country.” Vance wasn’t a particularly gifted retail politician at the time (the upcoming election would test whether he had improved), and the crowd I watched tensed a little when he admitted that he hadn’t always been a Trump supporter. When audience members said that this history made them distrust him, Vance would nod in complete understanding. But he was also one of the most visible figures in the campaign, positioning himself as the voice of working-class conservatives. His self-negation paid off: Trump endorsed him, and Vance won the primary, then the general election. Vance, perhaps realizing what it takes to succeed in the current Republican Party, loudly denounced the sexual assault allegations against Trump and insisted that if he were vice president on January 6 instead of Mike Pence, he would empower Trump’s fantasy slate of “alternate electors” and let Congress “fight from there.”
Vance is a case study in Republican loyalty after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, with those who supported Trump in the aftermath often going all in — their careers and reputations already tied to the former president. But many Republicans remain die-hard Trump supporters. Vance's rise also relies on his populist stance. Like other Republican senators of his generation (Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida), Vance often emphasizes the need for the Republican Party to break away from the free-market absolutism of the past. "The Republican conservative movement must rethink the economic dogma of the 1980s and 1990s if it is to gain a lasting governing majority," he said at an event hosted by the American Compass think tank in 2023. He supports tariffs and urges Republicans to win more union votes. “My grandmother’s politics are a hybrid of left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal advancement, and both worldviews have merit,” Vance told the New Statesman’s Sohrab Amari in February, though that alliance has so far existed mostly on a rhetorical level; as Amari pointedly noted, “the mainstream labor movement has yet to find in Vance a partner for its legislative priorities.” Still, Vance’s selection as a running mate suggests a different philosophy of how Trump can engage with party elites than Pence’s ascension in 2016: less piety, more culture wars, a willingness to push economic nationalism a step further. In other words, it shows which direction conservative elites are moving, and how much the Trump era has changed them.
Of course, Pence’s tenure as vice president ended with Trump’s supporters turning against him, storming the Capitol and calling for him to be hung. Many Republicans who joined Trump’s cabinet regretted it. Vance is relatively new to all this, so it’s hard to say whether he will be an asset to the campaign, adding to its seriousness, or a liability by being too extreme, too weird. But in an election defined largely by age, Vance offers the Trump campaign something small but valuable: a chance to credibly suggest that Trumpism has a future after Trump.
