Does Trump Know What a Radical He’s Picked for Vice President?

It’s no surprise that V.P. nominee J.D. Vance told about his life to the crowd at the Republican Convention. Growing up poor in southwestern Ohio, his mother an addict, raised mostly by his grandmother, he bootstrapped himself, joining the Marines, earning a summa cum laude degree at Ohio State, and on to Yale Law School. It’s an appealing story and he wrote about it in a best-seller, “Hillbilly Elegy”, which gave readers a firsthand look at the hardships of life for the left behind of middle-America.

There was no stopping there. Having served no elective office – no time served in the Ohio legislature, none in the U.S. House, for example – he went straight to the Senate where, only two years into his rookie
J.D. Vance and wife Usha.

term, after diligently courting Mr. Trump, he’s been anointed as his co-candidate.

NBC reports that Trump had settled on North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum, a no-drama conservative who would probably have dutifully stayed in his supporting role. But Trump’s sons interceded. “Don Jr. and Eric went bats--- crazy”, a longtime GOP operative told NBC News. “Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing.” Vance had covered that base, making himself a great friend of Donald Jr.

Jim Geraghty at The Washington Post said that in choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate, “Trump is doubling down on himself”. It’s MAGA times two. “With Vance, there’s no broadening of appeal; Trump is rejecting the idea that it’s needed”, so confident is the GOP about defeating Biden.

You’ve probably heard what he has said in the past about his benefactor, calling him “America’s Hitler”. He has also called him “cultural heroin”, “noxious”, “reprehensible”, “might be a cynical a— hole like Nixon”. In 2016, he said Trump “is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” Talking then to Kentucky Sports Radio host Matt Jones, he repeatedly called Trump a "total fraud."

Despite once declaring himself a “never-Trump guy”, Vance has managed to successfully walk all that back. The turnabout was so rapid that with Vance on stage alongside him at a Youngstown, Ohio, rally in 2022, Trump said about the candidate for the Senate, "J. D. is kissing my ass — he wants my support so bad".

Vance is an isolationist, a non-interventionist. His greatest impact at the outset of a second Trump presidency will probably be persuading Trump, if he is not of that view already, to abandon Ukraine. On Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast he said, while talking about the U.S. southern border,

"I think it's ridiculous that we're focused on this border in Ukraine. I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

He later backpedaled, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin “is the bad guy” and “we want the Ukrainians to be successful”, but his anti-aid stance was consistently expressed while in the Senate. Abandonment will confirm to the world that the U.S. can no longer be relied on.

Trump is determinately against China, but intends to fight them with tariff barriers. Vance has said we should help Taiwan make it difficult for China to conquer the island, but it’s a safe bet that he will be against the U.S. joining the fight.

Vance’s best friend from Yale, Jamil Jivani, now a member of the Canadian Parliament, a radio host, and political commentator, says Vance’s resentment with the elite liberal establishment happened when he was at Yale, exposed to “students from San Francisco, New York, mostly, all pontificating about how to help poor people in America”. He fell in with the political intellectuals of the New Right about which this publication wrote a year ago in "Who Are the New Right and What Do They Have in Store for Us?", quoting Vance saying:

"I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program…I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people."

That even goes beyond to what Trump intends to do – institute what is called "Schedule F", which would reclassify tens of thousands of civil service employees to “at will” status subject to dismissal if suspected to be disloyal.

"And when the courts stop you," he went on, "stand before the country, and say" — quoting Andrew Jackson's challenge to constitutional order — "the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it." Given the Court's bias, ignoring its edicts might find some agreement among Democrats.

Currying Trump's favor, Vance has said he would do what Mike Pence refused to do — overturn an election in order to retain power.

While at Yale, Vance introduced himself to Peter Thiel, after he had given a lecture that Vance called “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”. The talk had made him realize he “was obsessed with achievement … not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition.” It's fair to point out that despite that epiphany he went into venture capital for a few years on the West Coast.

A billionaire several times over, Thiel co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk and was then the first outside investor in Facebook. He thought the 2020 election should not have been certified and in 2009 said, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". Thiel’s use of his wealth, such as bringing about the bankruptcy of Gawker, is its own story, but Vance clearly impressed him. Years on, Thiel would put up $15 million to fund Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign.

Vance is a searcher, a political intellectual looking to develop his own philosophy. Jivani says:

“He is thoroughgoingly illiberal in his instincts. I don’t mean it as a slur. I mean it in a technical sense. He is skeptical of the political project of enlightenment liberalism.”

Vance is influenced by writers such as Patrick Deneen (“Why Liberalism Failed”) and Daniel Markovits (“The Meritocracy Trap”). He has said that Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society” best parallels his own belief system. He is disillusioned by the unregulated capitalism of the right and the social promiscuity of the left that has led to a soulless neoliberalism.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance has said, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar:

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Like many conservatives, he is drawn to Catholic social teaching, and iconoclasts like Rod Dreher, commentator and author of “The Benedict Option”, which says that to preserve their faith Christians should segregate themselves from the "post-Obergefell" society brought about by the Supreme Court’s sanctioning of same-sex marriage. Vance, an atheist, converted to Catholicism and Dreher, an expatriate who lives in Hungary, attended his baptism.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Vance released a statement saying, "Today is a great day. ... We now enter a new phase of the pro-life movement." Two-and-a-half years ago he said he was open to a national abortion ban: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said in January 2022 on a podcast when running for the Senate. That women travel out of states where abortion is banned to states where abortion is legal calls for federal action. He has said he is against abortion even in instances of rape and incest. Asked about that in an interview with Spectrum News he elaborated:

"I think two wrongs don't make a right. At the end of the day, we're talking about an unborn baby…Do we want to have a society that sees unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded? It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby."

In the early weeks of pregnancy, it is hardly a "baby", and it is also about the woman being forced to carry to term and to then raise the issue of rape or incest, which Vance brushes aside.

In a 2022 debate while running for the Senate, he moderated his stance:

“You can have some minimum national standards, which is my view, while also allowing the states to make up their minds."

Along with fellow Republicans, he said he supports in-vitro-fertilization, but then voted against the Democratic-led bill that would have safeguarded access to IVF.

He is unsympathetic to LGBTQ matters, and has expressed opposition to the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act. In the Senate he introduced legislation to make providing gender-affirming care to minors a class C felony. He calls educating about LGBTQ awareness "grooming" and the "sexualization of children".

Vance concern is elsewhere — a strong advocacy that America should restore the family as the center of our culture.

"I think the combination of porn, abortion have basically created a really lonely, isolated generation that isn’t getting married, they’re not having families, and they’re actually not even totally sure how to interact with each other."

Vance speaks of "the childless left" and admires Viktor Orban's Hungary for issuing loans to newly marrieds to encourage their starting a family, then forgiving the loan if they stay together and have children.

Quick summations of his views report Vance as even saying a woman should not leave even a violent marriage, but that ignored the context. He was parroting the view of others' casual view of marriage "making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear" to make the point that broken marriages, for whatever reason, "really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages."

His wife Usha is Indian, a Hindu, born in the U.S. of immigrant parents. They met at Yale. A lawyer herself, she clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he was D.C. Circuit Judge and later Chief Justice John Roberts. Married ten years, they have three kids, seven, four, and two.