Donald Trump and J.D. Vance at the RNC.Nate Gowdy/Mother Jones
In the days when the nation’s confused liberals and bereft neocons wanted to understand the rise of Donald Trump with empathy—but without challenging too many assumptions about power structures—a respectable, moneyed, beardless man with a perfect story appeared.
In the pages of the Atlantic, at various Washington, DC, think tank gatherings, and in monologues with earnest journalists on television, J.D. Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler,” a “moral disaster,” and a “total fraud.” But he drew a sharp distinction between the victorious candidate and his supporters: the evil of Trump did not make his voters bad people. Vance knew those voters. In fact, he could have been one of them—until, thank god, he broke away.
In this way, Vance’s best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy, offered a roadmap to Trumpism without Trump for (and I am adopting the language that’s always been part of his pitch) “liberal elites.” With his hardscrabble background, military service, an advanced degree from Yale, and a career in the tech’s venture capital sector, Vance could code-switch from the voice of a heartfelt op-ed about his childhood to the language of new oligarchs in California pitching start-ups for the heartland, back when they still had the Obama-era glow of conscious capitalism. Vance appeared to have authentically lived all the steps on the ladder of the American dream and he begged liberals to listen.
“The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real,” Vance wrote in the Atlantic in 2016. The president saw the poverty Vance did. But his solutions did not suffice, or follow the cultural framework offered in Hillbilly Elegy. “Cultural heroin,” Vance called Trump. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails.”
It is easy to think now after watching Vance take the reins as Trump’s vice presidential pick that something has changed. “America’s Hitler’s” running mate is quite the shift.
But the hypocrisy frame overlooks what should be a much scarier possibility for liberal elites: That Vance’s conversion is genuine. The idea that a Yale Law graduate who wrote a book that many liberals liked as much as Hillbilly Elegy could love Trump appears too scary for many to countenance. It makes MAGA into an ideology whose purchase could soon expand and be executed far more competently. To see Vance as a 2004 version of John Kerry flip-flopping in the wind is more likely than not a self-comforting delusion.
In this way, Vance’s past hatred of Trump becomes an asset. Trump wants to show people that liberals were bent out of shape, and he is not that bad. And when you get past the unnecessary yelling about Trump, his agenda is what America needs. To prove it? His running mate in 2024 is one of the people who was used to yell Trump was too dangerous the loudest.
As the vice presidential nominee, Vance is now tasked with doing the same thing he did in 2016 in his rise to prominence: explaining to the unhappy elites that Trump has been misunderstood. And his flip on Trump is the perfect vehicle because it allows the GOP’s vice presidential nominee to explain his betrayal as a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus kind of revelation. (As a fellow Catholic, I cannot help but feel a kinship here.) It allows him to say that he, the apostate of the establishment, has seen the way liberals speak behind closed doors, and he has broken from their lies. I was blind, but now I see.
For a fuller understanding of this strategy, look at how Vance spoke to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the ur-intellectual conservative. Vance never apologizes for his previous dislike of Trump. Instead, like so many readers of the New York Times, he was brainwashed by the liberal regime. He sees now, finally, that Trump is a vulgar, but important messenger. “I was confronted with the reality that part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump,” he said, “was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.”
“I was confronted with the reality that part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump, was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them.”
Vance sees this as a war being waged within the right as much as a broader cultural battle against leftists attempting to tear down Western thought. Yes, Vance notes, Trump wasn’t his taste—but he opened up room for debate. As the Trump administration unfolded, Vance realized, “The more complete truth is that the country never really litigated the mistakes of the bipartisan consensus until Donald Trump came along, and on the right, nobody had litigated the failures of George W. Bush until Donald Trump came along.”
Vance’s strength won’t be tallying votes or swinging a state. Instead, as Ezra Klein noted on a recent podcast, he speaks to an intellectual battle about what it means for the (mostly theoretical shift) of the right towards a party that has a Teamster president speak at their convention. “Like a lot of other elite conservatives and elite liberals, I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump,” Vance told Douthat, “I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration.”
Is Vance’s change real? It is bullshit? Yes and yes. Vance really does vote a bit differently on foreign policy, and especially differently on US funding for Ukraine’s war with Russia, of which he has been a vocal and persistent critic. He really did push for a bipartisan piece of legislation with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to reform rail safety. (Okay, just one bipartisan piece of legislation.) This may look pathetic compared to the bonafides of your average Democrat, for whom visiting a UAW picket line once is not notable unless you’re president. But it is also different from most other Republican lawmakers.
What is important in these gestures is not that Vance appeals to actual working-class voters. It is that he appeals to elites who want to believe they are helping the working class by voting for Trump. Vance knows this. In the Times explanation of how he became the VP pick, we are told “[he] said he wanted to make an intellectual argument for Mr. Trump that would resonate with the donor class and other elites, according to a person briefed on the exchanges.”
That strategy has worked. Apparently, Vance was Elon Musk’s pick. The same day as the official announcement, Musk launched a massive money machine committed to spending $45 million a month for Trump’s campaign. Who cares if Musk is fundamentally anti-union and Vance is theoretically going to bring unionism to the Republican party? Vance has convinced several very rich Silicon Valley people to donate to Trump and the media to debate whether he is changing the GOP into a working-class party.
Vance uses his life to attempt what Trump and his acolytes envision for his campaign and second term: For conservatives disgusted by the Trump rhetoric, and for moderates who felt freaked out by the George Floyd protests, to realize that the 45th president’s intellectual project is worthwhile.
Vance is clearly invested in it. He is not someone who just went to Trump for power. He has demonstrated often he has done the reading: unnecessarily invoking the de-Ba’athification of the administrative state, or opining on the reign of Charles De Gaulle. When Vance name-drops Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt in interviews, you know the man has read the canon of the New Right. He seems to believe that he has found in his own candidacy the possibility of realignment to turn the GOP’s intellectual tradition into his own story—the one from Never-Trumper to a campaign ad asking “Are you a racist?”
You’ll hear Vance touted as turning the party towards the working class. That’s not it. He is, instead, the perfect vehicle to help Republicans pitch Trumpism to a lot of rich people who want to believe that it takes real intellectual heft to change one’s mind about Trump, and by voting for him at last, they will be helping poor white people in ways they never dreamed possible. Everyone will be forgiven. And everything will be redeemed. You could even say, made great again.
