1). “Is There Something More Radical than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It: In a candid series of conversations, Vance revealed an ominous philosophy behind his first year in office”, Mar 15, 2024, Ian Ward, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
2). “J.D. Vance Is a Dangerous Authoritarian: The only coherent aspect of his worldview is a lust for power”, May 4, 2022, Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, at < https://nymag.com/
3). “JD Vance on Abortion: Donald Trump's trad-husband VP pick wants women back in the kitchen”, Jul 16, 2024, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
4). “JD Vance as VP Is 'Beginning of the End' of Women's Rights: Mary Trump”, Jul 17, 2024, Shannon Power, Newsweek, at < https://www.newsweek.com/jd-
5). “A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates: Rights groups are vociferously condemning Trump’s VP pick of JD Vance, who has long opposed the procedure”, Jul 16, 2024, Carter Sherman, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
6). “The GOP Platform Is a Hoax—Don't Fall for It | Opinion”, Jul 16, 2024, Serena Mayeri (Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School), Newsweek, at < https://www.newsweek.com/gop-
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction: In a couple of ways J.D. Vance is actually worse than Trump. He is far more intelligent and he plans for the future, and he is 40 years younger. He has crafted a convoluted explanation for the current plight of the working people of the U.S. that, like all the work of the most talented right-wing analysts, contains some elements of truth but is in the end a pack of lies embedded in twisted logic.
Item 1)., ““Is There Something More Radical ….”, is the most comprehensive of the two {including Item 2)., “J.D. Vance Is a Dangerous Authoritarian: ….”} and Item 1 points out that:
“ …. Vance has emerged as the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump — including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles — in an even more radical direction. Unlike Trump’s more conventional Republican followers, Vance’s New Right cohort see Trump as merely the first step in a broader populist-nationalist revolution that is already reshaping the American right — and, if they get their way, that will soon reshape America as a whole. ….
“He was candid about his desire to fundamentally transform the Republican Party, and he sketched the outlines of an agenda that would, in effect, amount to a radical restructuring of the American economy, U.S. foreign policy and even its constitutional order. He spoke about this project not in terms of election cycles but decades.
“ 'It’s a long-term project,' Vance told me during one of our sit-downs in his Capitol Hill office. 'The country wasn’t screwed in a 10-year period, and it’s not going to get unscrewed in a 10-year period.'
“The coverage of Vance’s first year in office has largely overlooked his emerging role as the political face of the New Right, treating Vance as interchangeable with a handful of other young, populist-leaning Republicans like fellow Sens. Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton — all of whom, like Vance, have transformed themselves from college-educated elites into self-styled critics of America’s ruling class. But Vance’s far-reaching vision for the future of the GOP — and the political strategy and infrastructure that he has built in Washington around that vision — makes him largely unique among congressional Republicans. (Emphasis added) …..
“ 'He is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement,' said Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative think tank in Washington.
“ 'I’m sure he’ll run for the presidency one day,' said Steve Bannon, another Vance ally. …..
“ …. Vance — who, at 39 years old, is the second-youngest member of the chamber — has positioned himself as the vanguard of an ideological insurgency within the Republican conference. …..
“ …. as Trump further consolidates his control over the party and Republicans jockey to replace Mitch McConnell as leader later this year, Vance’s faction is poised to broaden the scope of its influence. “Senators are anticipating a new leader, and the ideological and philosophical shift is moving” toward Vance’s faction, Roberts said. 'If the next president is Trump, you’re going to see a much closer working relationship [between that faction in the Senate and the White House].'
“Yet for Vance, winning the ideological battle in the Senate is only one step toward victory in his broader political war. ….
“Vance’s dual identities in Washington — the MAGA mudslinger and the New Right leader — are reflected in his two key political allies, both of whom dwell far beyond the Beltway.
“The first can be found a thousand miles to the south of Capitol Hill, amid the sunny confines of Mar-a-Lago. Vance remains in regular contact with Trump, but his closest ally in that world is the former president’s eldest son, Don Jr. ….
“Vance’s other critical political connection — and his primary political patron — can be found 3,000 miles to the west of Washington in Los Angeles. …. (he is) Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance worked for before running for Senate, has become the chief financier of the New Right ecosystem. And Thiel’s idiosyncratic brand of techno-libertarianism — which combines an abiding skepticism of liberal democracy with a belief in national restoration through utopian modes of technological innovation — has become a touchstone of intellectual discussions on the New Right.”
Peter Thiel is an ultra-reactionary Israel-First computer information technology business figure. One article that discusses how Peter Thiel fits into the American Right states that:
“Peter Thiel is a fascist. There’s really no better word for what he is. But, for some reason, people have trouble grasping this or just coming out and saying it.
“In his biography of Thiel, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Max Chafkin writes, “The Thiel ideology is complicated and, in parts, self-contradictory, and will take many of the pages that follow to explore, but it combines an obsession with technological progress with nationalist politics—a politics that at times has seemingly flirted with white supremacy.” Let’s see, we’ve go some futurism, nationalism, maybe a little bit of racism here and there…hmm, what does that all add up to? What a mystery this guy is! (Emphasis in original)
“In a recent piece for the Washington Post about Thiel’s support for populist candidates, Greg Sargent writes:
“At first glance, it’s hard to discern why Thiel is heavily investing in them. Thiel is sometimes described as a radical libertarian, while Masters and Vance represent a form of conservative populism that is supposedly hostile to libertarianism and envisions the robust use of state power to fight liberal cultural enemies wherever necessary.” (Emphasis in original) {See, “The Enigma of Peter Thiel, There Is No Enigma — He's a Fascist”, Jul 23, 2022, John Ganz, Unpopular Front, at < https://www.unpopularfront.
Item 1)., finishes up with a question posed to Vance about who inspired him:
“During my final sit-down with Vance, I asked him if there were any historical figures he looked to for inspiration. He thought for a moment, and then said that he had been thinking a lot about Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French resistance during World War II who returned to power in 1958 as the founder and reactionary leader of France’s Fifth Republic.
“ ….. Vance said he was drawn to de Gaulle’s post-war legacy. He told me that he admired de Gaulle’s efforts to rebuild France’s industrial might and preserve its distinctive national interest within the emerging Atlanticist alliance, as well as his efforts to sow the seeds of a 'vibrant' cultural conservatism ….
“ …. as I walked away from our final conversation, I realized that Vance had just told me what kind of leader he aspires to be. Charles de Gaulle was prepared to transform his country’s entire constitutional system to preserve what he believed to be the essence of his beloved nation. So is J.D. Vance.”
Item 2). looks at several issues and ends up with this statement about Vance, “ .... authoritarians are often cynics who simply want power and will do or say whatever they need in order to get it.”
Item 3)., “JD Vance on Abortion: ….”, Item 4)., “JD Vance as VP ….”, and Item 5)., “A Trump-Vance administration ….”, all discuss the severe danger a Trump / Vance regime poses for American Women. Vance has opposed abortion rights and repeatedly stated that he thinks no woman should ever get a legal abortion. He has also stated that women should stay in abusive marriages for the sake of their children, and lied about the fact that the rate of abusive marriages has gone down significantly. Of course, now he has “softened his stance” in the attempt to win the upcoming election. Vance worked to try to defeat the Abortion Rights amendment in Ohio and wrote in a post on “X” that:
“Giving up on the unborn is not an option. It's politically dumb and morally repugnant. Instead, we need to understand why we lost this battle so we can win the war.
“I was very involved in the "no" campaign for issue 1, so let me share a few insights. ….
“A lot of people are celebrating right now, and I don't care about that. I do care about the fact that because we lost, many innocent children will never have a chance to live their dreams.
“There is something sociopathic about a political movement that tells young women (and men) that it is liberating to murder their own children.” (See, J.D. Vance post on “X”, Nov 8, 2023, at < https://x.com/JDVance1/status/
Finally there is a good discussion by a law professor in Item 6)., “The GOP Platform Is a Hoax ….” that examines the GOP Platform pointing out that:
“First, the "scaled-back" platform is no less extreme than the party's previous positions. ….
“To be clear, this is a full-throated endorsement of states' prerogative to ban abortion with no or limited exceptions, forcing pregnant patients to reach the brink of death before receiving care and to sacrifice their health and fertility to preserve even an embryo or fetus that cannot survive.”
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Is There Something More Radical than MAGA? J.D. Vance Is Dreaming It.
In a candid series of conversations, Vance revealed an ominous philosophy behind his first year in office.
POLITICO illustration by Emily Scherer/Photos by AP, Getty Images
Ian Ward is a reporter at POLITICO.
KINGSTON, New Hampshire — J.D. Vance arrived at Saddle Up Saloon — a Western-themed bar 30 miles outside Manchester — dressed for the part: blue jeans, pale-blue button down and a bright red MAGA hat. As he grabbed the mic and took his place in front of a “Trump 2024” backdrop, he slid seamlessly into a stream of classically Trumpian attacks: on Joe Biden; on the liberal elites who want to send American jobs to China and American troops to Ukraine; on the radical Democrats who allow inflation to wreck the economy and immigrants to flood the country; on the liberal media who lie about it all.
“If you listen to the media, they will tell you the inflation crisis of Joe Biden is over,” Vance jawed to the crowd of three dozen Trump supporters, who sipped beer around tables made of wooden barrels on the Friday before the presidential primary in New Hampshire. “But I’ll tell you how bad the inflation crisis is: Hunter Biden told everybody that he couldn’t even afford crack cocaine.”
It was Vance’s first-ever appearance for Trump on the trail. The audience roared with approval.
A few minutes later, during the question-and-answer portion of the event, a woman in the crowd shouted, “We’ve got to find out the truth about Jan. 6!”
Vance nodded solemnly. “That’s maybe the most important thing that [Trump] needs to do when he’s elected president,” he replied.
This was the version of J.D. Vance that most of country has come to know since he was elected to the United States Senate in 2022: crass, confrontational and unconditionally committed to defending Donald Trump. One year into his first term representing Ohio, Vance has completed a dramatic evolution from outspoken Never Trumper to unwavering Trump loyalist and dogged defender of the ex-president’s most authoritarian assertions — from the lie that the 2020 election was stolen to the legally dubious claim the president is immune from criminal prosecution. In exchange for his public displays of loyalty, Vance has been warmly embraced at Mar-a-Lago, earning a spot on Trump’s shortlist of potential vice presidential running mates for 2024.
But Vance’s new identity as the MAGA militant has existed alongside — and, at times, served to obscure — another influential role that Vance has taken on in Washington. In certain conservative circles, Vance has emerged as the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump — including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles — in an even more radical direction. Unlike Trump’s more conventional Republican followers, Vance’s New Right cohort see Trump as merely the first step in a broader populist-nationalist revolution that is already reshaping the American right — and, if they get their way, that will soon reshape America as a whole.
Over the course of the past few months, Vance sat down with me for a string of interviews in which he offered a window into this mission, including a rare assessment of his first year in the Senate and of the state of the American right more broadly. Despite his gleefully trollish tendencies online and on the campaign trail, Vance presents in person as something like an intellectual, or at least like a completely unselfconscious nerd. During our conversations, he was soft-spoken and cerebral, more the brooding memoirist of his Hillbilly Elegy days than the Trumpian firebrand who appears on television. He didn’t call anyone a “scumbag,” which has become his favorite on-air epithet. He rarely mentioned Trump unprompted.
Like most politicians, his professed principles occasionally clashed with the actual substance of his politics. But on the whole, he presented a sweeping and strikingly systematic account of the outlook that has shaped his tenure in office, premised upon a vision of the current moment in American history that is darker and more cataclysmic than anything he has described in public. He was candid about his desire to fundamentally transform the Republican Party, and he sketched the outlines of an agenda that would, in effect, amount to a radical restructuring of the American economy, U.S. foreign policy and even its constitutional order. He spoke about this project not in terms of election cycles but decades.
“It’s a long-term project,” Vance told me during one of our sit-downs in his Capitol Hill office. “The country wasn’t screwed in a 10-year period, and it’s not going to get unscrewed in a 10-year period.”
The coverage of Vance’s first year in office has largely overlooked his emerging role as the political face of the New Right, treating Vance as interchangeable with a handful of other young, populist-leaning Republicans like fellow Sens. Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton — all of whom, like Vance, have transformed themselves from college-educated elites into self-styled critics of America’s ruling class. But Vance’s far-reaching vision for the future of the GOP — and the political strategy and infrastructure that he has built in Washington around that vision — makes him largely unique among congressional Republicans.
To Trump’s opponents, that makes Vance a singularly threatening embodiment of the “dangerous authoritarianism” that has taken hold of the American right. To Trump’s conservative allies, it makes him an increasingly appealing avatar of a post-Trump GOP — and a much-whispered-about heir to Trump’s political movement.
“I feel like I’ve got a really good sense of senators, and he’s by far the smartest and the deepest of any I’ve ever met,” said Tucker Carlson, who backed Vance’s 2022 Senate bid and remains a close political ally.
“He is absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement,” said Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the leading conservative think tank in Washington.
“I’m sure he’ll run for the presidency one day,” said Steve Bannon, another Vance ally.
Regardless of whether Vance becomes Trump’s eventual running mate for 2024, he is still likely to wield significant influence in a possible second Trump administration, either as a top ally in the Senate or a Cabinet-level official. And beyond that, who knows? In a not-so-distant future, the question of “Whither J.D. Vance?” could very easily become “Whither America?”
Or as Vance said to me: “Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House. There is a big question about what comes after him.”
‘It’s not that they’re malevolent, it’s that they’re stupid’
Like a lot of first-term Senate offices, Vance’s Capitol Hill outfit runs on a mixture of adrenaline and youthful enthusiasm. But in Vance’s case, that heady cocktail is made even more potent by the addition of two other powerful stimulants: testosterone and nicotine.
Of Vance’s senior staff, the vast majority are men under 40, almost all are 6 feet tall (with the notable exception of his chief of staff, Jacob Reses, who walks around like Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians) and a significant percentage of them ingest some form of nicotine on a regular basis. “My Senate office probably has the highest ratio of smokers of anybody in the U.S. Senate,” Vance, who does not himself smoke, told Business Insider in January.
An appetite for nicotine isn’t the only thing that unites Vance’s staff. The résumés of Vance’s senior staffers read like a phone book for the New Right ecosystem in Washington: the Claremont Institute, American Compass, the Conservative Partnership Institute, Hillsdale College. “His staff is hardwired in all over town,” Bannon told me.
The youthful belligerence of Vance’s office is not a coincidence. Since entering the Senate, Vance — who, at 39 years old, is the second-youngest member of the chamber — has positioned himself as the vanguard of an ideological insurgency within the Republican conference. And like any vanguard, he needs his shock troops.
At its most basic, this intraconservative revolt is unfolding as a generational schism over Trump, with younger Trump-aligned conservatives like Vance squaring off against older, Trump-skeptical leaders like Mitch McConnell. But Vance and his allies also view the conflict as a deeper philosophical clash between competing definitions of conservatism.
As Vance sees it, the conservatism of McConnell and his allies in Republican leadership represents little more than a watered-down version of liberalism, grounded in free market fundamentalism and foreign policy interventionism. As a result, Vance believes, these conservatives are fundamentally part of what he and other members of the New Right call “the regime” — the interconnected class of liberal elites who populate the upper echelons of American government, business, media, entertainment and academia. Vance and his allies, meanwhile, have positioned themselves as non-liberal reactionaries who stand apart from “the regime.”
Though they call themselves the “New Right,” they in fact view themselves as the defenders of “an older definition of conservatism,” as Russ Vought, the former director of the Office of Management during the Trump administration and a close ally of Vance, told me. This older definition, Vought said, harkens back to the conservative populism of the interwar period, when the far right of the Republican Party supported high tariffs and strict limits on immigration and opposed American involvement in overseas conflicts — including, infamously, the U.S. entrance into World War II.
“People here in D.C. think that this is just Trumpism and that this is the way that Trump has changed the party,” said Vought, whose name has been floated as a potential candidate for chief of staff in a second Trump administration. But, he said, it goes much deeper than that.
Vance’s mission has been to bring this ideological battle to the Senate floor, and he has done so with some surprising results. In Congress, Vance has predictably allied himself with mostly younger, populist-leaning conservatives like Hawley, Rubio, Cotton and Mike Lee in the Senate and Jim Banks, Chip Roy and Matt Gaetz in the House. Yet his more unexpected collaborations have been with the Senate’s progressive Democrats. In March, after a Norfolk Southern train carrying over 100,000 gallons of hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, Vance joined forces with his fellow Ohio senator, Sherrod Brown, to introduce the Rail Safety Act, a proposal to raise safety standards in the rail industry. A few months later, following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Vance teamed up with fellow Banking Committee member Sen. Elizabeth Warren on a plan to require the federal regulations to claw back executive compensation at large failed banks. Both bills ultimately received mark ups and passed out of committee.
These cross-aisle collaborations aren’t especially radical stuff, but they have set Vance apart from the more straightforwardly obstructionist elements of the MAGA coalition, where working with Democrats on anything as humble as naming a bridge is considered tantamount to treason.
To a degree, Vance has embraced his reputation as “the Senate’s MAGA dealmaker,” as Semafor put it last year, but he is also quick to point out that his work with Democrats doesn’t reflect any sort of ideological affinity for bipartisanship. (Vance often jokes that “bipartisanship” in Washington means that the “stupid party and the evil party have gotten together to do something that is both stupid and evil.” He cites the Iraq War as a prime example.) Rather, he says, his tendency to cross the aisle reflects his skepticism of corporate interests, which more often aligns him with progressive Democrats than it does with conventionally pro-business Republicans.
“If you look at the people that I’ve worked with most successfully, it’s people who, even though they’re from the left, recognize that something’s pretty fundamentally broken about American society,” Vance told me. “Elizabeth Warren — obviously, I disagree with her more than I agree with her — but she’s at least thinking deeply about what’s going on in the country and why things seem to be going off the rails.”
At least on some economic issues, he finds himself at loggerheads with Republican leadership. For instance, Vance is quietly critical of Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the 2017 tax bill, parts of which he views as regrettable vestiges of McConnell-style conservatism. When I asked him about it, Vance praised parts of the bill — including the elimination of the SALT deduction, which he called “massively redistributive toward the lower- and middle-income brackets” — while criticizing other elements.
“Do I think that there was some more standard GOP tax fare, some of which I liked and some of which I didn’t? Yeah, absolutely,” he told me. “Do I think cutting the top marginal rate is like a high priority for me? No, I don’t.”
And at least for now, the old guard Republicans in the Senate remain strong enough to marginalize Vance and the other conservative insurgents. Vance admitted that he would have voted for Trump’s tax bill if he had been in the Senate, and his two most populist legislative initiatives — the Rail Safety Act and an amended version of the banking regulation bill — have both stalled in the Senate, due in large part to persistent opposition from Republican leadership.
But as Trump further consolidates his control over the party and Republicans jockey to replace Mitch McConnell as leader later this year, Vance’s faction is poised to broaden the scope of its influence. “Senators are anticipating a new leader, and the ideological and philosophical shift is moving” toward Vance’s faction, Roberts said. “If the next president is Trump, you’re going to see a much closer working relationship [between that faction in the Senate and the White House].”
Yet for Vance, winning the ideological battle in the Senate is only one step toward victory in his broader political war.
“If [my project] goes well, it will be very hard in 10 years to be a Republican who’s not supportive of American manufacturing,” he told me. “To me, that’s success.”
In the meantime, I asked him, had he learned any broader lessons about working within “the regime”?
“The thing that I would like to persuade people most is that [too] many people think the problem with the country and the world right now is, like, Klaus Schwab in a private room figuring all this shit out,” he said, name-checking the proudly plutocratic patron of the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The problem with the elites is not that they’re malevolent, it’s that they’re stupid. I think that recognition that incompetence and stupidity explain a lot more than malevolence is …” He trailed off, thinking.
“Well, I think we’d actually get a lot more done if we didn’t assume our enemies were all-powerful.”
‘We needed to fuck something else up’
Vance’s dual identities in Washington — the MAGA mudslinger and the New Right leader — are reflected in his two key political allies, both of whom dwell far beyond the Beltway.
The first can be found a thousand miles to the south of Capitol Hill, amid the sunny confines of Mar-a-Lago. Vance remains in regular contact with Trump, but his closest ally in that world is the former president’s eldest son, Don Jr. According to an aide who is close to both men, Vance’s relationship with Don Jr. dates back to 2016, when Don Jr. read Vance’s memoir and “fucking went bananas over it.” In the lead-up to the 2022 campaign, Vance and Don Jr. developed a close friendship and political alliance, and Don Jr. lobbied his father hard to get him to endorse Vance, in part by persuading him that Vance’s previous criticisms — including his speculation that Trump could become “America’s Hitler” — no longer reflected his attitude toward Trump.
“They are regular texting buddies, and they are genuine friends,” said the aide. (In a written statement, Don Jr. confirmed his relationship with Vance, calling him “a close personal friend.”)
In Trump world, the decision to shortlist Vance for vice president is widely seen as a reflection of his closeness to Don Jr., as well as a reward for his public displays of fidelity to Trump — such as his decision last summer to place holds on all of the Biden administration’s appointments to the Department of Justice to protest the federal indictments of Trump. Vance has said he would “think seriously” about accepting the V.P. job if Trump offered it to him, but at least for now, he sees his future in the Senate.
“I think J.D.’s view is that he can probably be most helpful in helping shepherd Trump’s agenda inside the Senate,” said the aide. “He believes that the thing that probably hurt Trump the most in his first administration was the fact that there were so many Republicans in the Senate who disagreed with him on fundamental issues.”
Vance’s other critical political connection — and his primary political patron — can be found 3,000 miles to the west of Washington in Los Angeles. In recent years, Peter Thiel, whose venture capital firm Vance worked for before running for Senate, has become the chief financier of the New Right ecosystem. And Thiel’s idiosyncratic brand of techno-libertarianism — which combines an abiding skepticism of liberal democracy with a belief in national restoration through utopian modes of technological innovation — has become a touchstone of intellectual discussions on the New Right.
But Thiel’s involvement in Republican politics has become more sporadic. In the 2022 election cycle, he spent over $20 million to support the campaigns of Vance and his other political protégé, failed Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, only to reverse course late last year by publicly committing not to spend any money on the 2024 cycle. Nevertheless, he remains a close friend and intellectual mentor to Vance.
“My relationship with Peter is what it has been for the close to 15 years that I’ve known him — which is, if there’s something interesting going on, and I want to bounce ideas off of a very fascinating and knowledgeable person, I’ll give him a call,” Vance told me.
He gave me an example.
“I’m very worried about Israel — very worried about it as a country — [because] I think what’s happened the last couple months has revealed deep fissures in Israel’s support around the world.
“A more short-term worry that I have with Israel is that something analogous to what happened after 9/11 will happen, right? You get all this bullshitting about how the deep state misled Bush about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or maybe Bush misled himself, or maybe Cheney misled him. There are all these theories you read about why we invaded Iraq.
“But when you think back on it, the most important reason we invaded Iraq was social psychology. Afghanistan was too easy, Sept. 11 was too bad, and we needed to fuck something else up. There was just, like, this need to fuck something else up, and Afghanistan didn’t satisfy that need.”
He paused.
“And I worry about that with Israel. I think the Hamas thing — obviously, there are a lot of civilians who have died — but Israel expected to lose more troops going into this, and I think they’ve had a more successful military operation than they expected to. And if I have a big fear for Israel, right now, it’s [about] the same exact dynamic — that they’re going to need to try to fuck something else up, because the psychology impact of Oct. 7 was so, so powerful.”
He paused again.
“Who did I call to bounce that idea off of? Peter Thiel.”
‘He’s at the nerve center of this movement’
After a year in Washington, Vance is convinced that if conservatives like himself are going to complete the takeover of the Republican Party they began under Trump, they need to do what the Koch family and other big-name libertarian donors have done for the past half-century: Build a sprawling system of think tanks, donor networks, educational institutions, professional programs and media outlets to support their ideological allies on Capitol Hill. And to do that, they need deep-pocketed allies like Thiel.
In Washington, Vance has already begun to lay the foundations of this alternative conservative establishment. In 2022, while still running for Senate, Vance helped set up the Rockbridge Network, a coalition of wealthy conservative donors who are sympathetic to Trump and the broader nationalist-populist agenda. Also in 2022, he served as a founding board member for American Moment, an organization that trains young, populist-minded conservatives to work in junior-level staff positions on Capitol Hill — and, if all goes according to plan, in the next Trump administration. In Washington, he has been a major supporter of Kevin Roberts’s efforts to transform the Heritage Foundation from a bastion of Reagan-era conservatism into the de facto institutional home of Trumpism, and he is a frequent guest at events hosted by the Claremont Institute, a chief academic hub of the Trumpist right.
“He’s at the nerve center of this movement,” said Bannon, who frequently hosts Vance on his talk show, War Room, which remains influential in New Right circles.
Vance’s contributions to the burgeoning conservative counter-establishment have been intellectual as well as institutional. Vance is a recurring guest at the National Conservatism Conference, a buzzy annual gathering that brings Trump-aligned Republicans together with leading New Right writers and academics. He has also gone out of his way to inject New Right intellectual ideas into the conservative mainstream in Washington. In May 2023, for instance, Vance spoke on a panel in Washington with the Catholic philosopher Patrick Deneen, whose most recent book called on conservatives to carry out a “regime change” in the U.S. to replace liberal democracy with an avowedly conservative “post-liberal order.” (At the event, Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — identified himself as a member of the “postliberal right” and said that he views his role in Congress as “explicitly anti-regime.”)
“He’s the one public intellectual that we have who’s in office, and it’s incredibly powerful,” said Bannon. “This movement has needed someone like J.D.”
Vance’s most important intellectual contribution has been his effort to stitch together conservatives’ critique of elite liberal culture with the populist right’s economic critique of the hyperglobalized 21st-century economy — a position that Vance often summarizes with the slogan, “The culture war is class warfare.” From a liberal frame of reference, Vance’s mantra sounds a lot like a sophisticated-sounding justification for, say, sexist shitposts about “childless cat ladies” on Twitter — so I asked him to provide an example.
He pointed to “the trans issue.” In the eyes of their critics, Vance said, conservatives appear to be unduly preoccupied with banning a relatively rare medical procedure that parents and doctors should be free to authorize for transgender children under the age of 18. “But if you think about how much money has gone into selling AbbVie’s off-label hormonal therapy product, what I see is a combination of children getting preyed on and pharmaceutical companies getting rich,” he said. “There is a connection between those two things.”
This connection nominally undergirds Vance’s various interventions in the culture war, which include a measure to criminalize gender-affirming care for trans kids, a bill to ban federal mask mandates, a proposal to crack down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities, and public support for a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother. In each instance, Vance believes, “the regime” has turned progressive cultural values into a tool to entrench its own economic and political power — meaning that when Republicans defend conservatives’ cultural values, they are simultaneously defending working-class economic interests against the predations of corporate exploitation and government coercion. As society continues to polarize politically along economic and educational lines, he believes, these two objectives will overlap more and more.
Yet even if the culture war is class war — and there are good reasons to believe that it is not — Vance’s slogan doesn’t provide a particularly persuasive explanation of his own approach to a host of culture issues like declaring English the national language and preempting bans on gas stoves, which have, at best, an extremely tenuous connection to class politics. Nor does it account for Vance’s more transparently illiberal interventions in the culture war, like his request this past December that the Department of Justice investigate Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan for writing a column arguing that Democratic states could refuse to recognize the authority of a second Trump administration.
But the primary reason to be skeptical of Vance’s culture war credo is that his interventions in America’s actual class war have been decidedly uneven. Vance has styled himself as a “pro-worker” conservative, and he points to his work on rail safety and bank regulation — as well as his efforts to tighten immigration restrictions and boost domestic manufacturing — as evidence of his support for America’s working class. In October, Vance made a big splash in the national media when he became one of the few Republicans to join striking autoworkers from the United Auto Workers on the picket line in Ohio, where he expressed support for their contract negotiations and bashed the Biden administration’s electric vehicle policies, which he says will hasten the offshoring of American auto manufacturing jobs.
In Washington, though, Vance has consistently opposed the PRO Act, the “holy grail of pro-union labor reform” that organized labor and its allies on the Hill have been fighting for over two years to get passed. When I asked Vance why he opposes the bill, he pointed to two considerations, one practical and one political. The practical consideration, he told me, is that the PRO Act would effectively codify the U.S.’ current system of collective bargaining — in which contracts are negotiated between workers and their individual employers — whereas he’d like to see the U.S. move toward the sectoral model used in Europe, where contracts are negotiated to cover entire industries. (Pro-labor advocates on the left have argued that the PRO Act could serve as a bridge to more sweeping reforms to America’s collective bargaining system.)
But the political case against the PRO Act is just as critical, said Vance.
“We can’t just be good, we have to be smart,” he told me, “and I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican.”
Vance’s skepticism of the PRO Act is part of a more fundamental skepticism that he harbors toward organized labor.In a speech at a Claremont Institute event in December, Vance said that conservatives “need to be honest about the fact” that there are “good unions” that Republicans should support and “bad unions” that they should oppose. As an example of the former, he cited the Fraternal Order of Police; as an example of the latter, he cited the Starbucks baristas union.
“If your politics lead you to defend the baristas union as they defend Hamas, then you should have a different politics,” he said. “It’s really that simple.”
Together with his opposition to the PRO Act, Vance’s criticisms of the labor movement have put him in the awkward spot of trying to position himself as “pro-worker conservative” while simultaneously seeking to contain the political power of organized labor, the only entities in American society that reflect — however imperfectly — the actual will of workers.
A generous reading of Vance’s position would be that he’s trying to navigate the fraught political dynamics of a labor movement whose leaders and rank-and-file members are occasionally at odds on basic questions of ideology and partisan loyalty. A more cynical reading would conclude that a conservative like Vance — who only sides with workers when they side with him — isn’t really “pro-worker” at all. He’s just a regular conservative.
‘You have to rethink the entire project’
During one of our conversations in his Capitol Hill office in early January, I asked Vance what he considered his most significant accomplishment during his first year in office.
“Maybe the thing that I’m most proud of is that we are on the cusp of radically changing U.S. policy towards Ukraine,” he said. “It’s taken a lot of work.”
Vance entered the Senate last year as one of only a handful of Republicans who openly opposed U.S. financial support for Ukraine — “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in an interview in early 2022 — but since then, over two dozen Senate Republicans have come to share his skepticism. The power of this emerging bloc of anti-aid conservatives was on full display in early February when Vance and his fellow conservatives — with Trump’s blessing — killed a bipartisan deal that paired aid for Ukraine with new measures to crack down on immigration at the southern border.
Although the Senate eventually passed a $60 billion stand-alone aid package — disregarding Vance’s last-ditch effort to persuade Republicans that the bill contains a covert mechanism for Democrats to impeach Trump if he reenters the White House next year — the bill has stalled in the Republican-led House. And with further aid stuck in legislative limbo, Vance has called on Ukraine to cede some territory to Russia as part of a deal to end the war.
“I think he deserves quite a bit [of credit],” for shifting conservative opinion on Ukraine, Tucker Carlson told me a few weeks before he traveled to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin. “There’s only one measure of political power — voters — and what he’s doing is demonstrating the capacity of that issue to move voters.”
Vance’s critics sometimes chalk up his stance on Ukraine to rank isolationism or latent Russophilia. But even if Vance does harbor some secret affinity for Putin, those accusations overlook the real radicalness of his position.
As Vance explained to me during one of our conversations, he is deeply skeptical of the so-called “rules-based international order” — the system of laws, norms and multilateral institutions established in the years following the Second World War. During the post-war era and into the Cold War, Vance told me, “a lot of the mythology around free trade and globalization” — the idea that the free movement of labor, goods and capital would lead to a more peaceful and prosperous world for everyone — “was astroturfed to justify the political project” of bringing communist China into the West’s orbit, even as proponents of the new system understood it would come at a cost for the West.
“In the ’60s and ’70s, what Kissinger and these guys would say was, ‘Yeah, of course, [with] globalization, a lot of our people lose jobs, it’s going to weaken our social solidarity in all these important ways, but if we make China more like us, it will be worth it in the long run,’” Vance said.
In the intervening half-century, Vance believes, the rules-based order has delivered on half of that promise — shipping jobs overseas and undermining social stability in the U.S. — without delivering on its ultimate promise of transforming China into a liberal democracy. Along the way, it has enriched economic elites who benefit from the globalization and financialization of the international economy, while harming working-class people who were rooted in the older industrial economies that globalization destroyed.
“If that fundamental goal has not materialized” — and it’s clear that Vance thinks it hasn’t — “then I think you have to rethink the entire project,” he told me.
Whether you agree with Vance’s diagnosis or not, it serves as the ideological basis for his ongoing opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine. In fact, Vance’s opposition goes well beyond Trump’s griping about NATO or Republican China hawks’ preoccupation with defending Taiwan — even though he has parroted those talking points. When Vance looks at the United States’ decision to fund a war for the explicit purpose of defending “the principles at the heart of the international rules-based order,” he does not see a noble attempt to defend one nation from the violent incursions of another. He sees a cynical ploy by economic elites to preserve a global order that serves their interests while screwing over the type of people he represents in post-industrial Ohio.
What Vance wants to see happen — and believes he can play a role in precipitating — is a fundamental shift away from the rules-based international order and toward a system where individual nations are responsible for their own security and economic well-being. Vance admitted that getting to this point would require a “really drastic change” in the way the U.S. economy functions, beginning with erasing America’s trade deficits, severely curtailing immigration and possibly even abandoning the dollar as the global reserve currency. But it would also require an entirely new way of measuring economic strength.
“If your GDP measurement says that America’s economy is 10 times more powerful than Russia’s, but Russia has a 20-to-one [cost] advantage in some of the most important goods necessary to national security and self-defense, then maybe the measurement is just fake,” Vance told me. (And no, he is quick to argue, the reason the U.S. weapons manufacturing can’t keep pace with Russia isn’t because conservatives in Congress won’t approve more funding.)
As I listened to Vance explain his position, it struck me that his basic argument — that economic elites are spending billions of dollars to preserve a global order that does more to protect their stock portfolios than it does to improve the well-being of their fellow citizens — might find broad appeal across the political spectrum. In public, though, Vance has stubbornly refused to present that argument in anything but the narrowest partisan frame.
At the Saddle Up Saloon in New Hampshire, for example, Vance bemoaned the fact that if you take your child to an American pharmacy to buy medicine for an ear infection, you have to go to the fourth or fifth available prescription to find a drug that’s manufactured in the United States. “Even though we invented those pharmaceuticals in the United States of America, we let other countries make the drugs that we put in our children’s bodies. And that,” he told the audience, “is Joe Biden’s fault.”
A few weeks later, during a sit-down at an old-timey restaurant on Capitol Hill (“The best biscuits in D.C.,” he assured me), I asked Vance if he actually believed what he had said in New Hampshire — if, despite his own understanding of the forces that have led to globalization and the decline of America’s industrial base, he sincerely believed that blame ought to be laid squarely at the feet of the Biden administration that has been in office for only three years.
“Do I think that he is representative of a set of ideas that has caused the problem to happen? And more importantly, do I think he has not significantly changed that during his time in office? Absolutely,” Vance replied.
But that’s not exactly what he had told the voters in New Hampshire, I pointed out.
“I think it’s Joe Biden’s fault for not taking affirmative steps to change these things and for sort of doubling down on a generation of failed policy. … Is it only Joe Biden’s fault? No. Is he a significant fixture of a bipartisan problem? Absolutely.”
But as an elected official, did he feel any obligation to give the public a complicated and nuanced sense of issues, rather than reducing them to their crudest partisan dimensions?
“I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” Vance said. “What does macroeconomics mean to a person who goes to work and pays taxes and is trying to run a small business?”
He looked pensive for a moment.
“I think if you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.”
Having spent several months trying to understand how the man across from me makes sense of the world, it occurred to me that something very similar could be said about J.D. Vance.
‘A your-fucking-society-is-collapsing problem’
While reporting this story, I noticed that conservatives are prone to some pretty outrageous historical analogizing when you ask them about J.D. Vance’s future in the Republican Party. Some compared him to legendary politician-intellectuals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a conservative Democrat who shaped the policy of multiple presidents from both parties. Others pointed to long-time Senate powerbrokers like Robert Taft, another Ohioan who, like Vance, became a vocal critic of American intervention abroad.
In a more biblical mood, Bannon even suggested that Vance could become the St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus — the zealous convert who spreads the gospel of Trumpism further than Trump himself ever could. “You know, Jesus played the small rooms until St. Paul came around,” he told me. “It took the zeal of St. Paul to turn Jesus into a headliner.”
During my final sit-down with Vance, I asked him if there were any historical figures he looked to for inspiration. He thought for a moment, and then said that he had been thinking a lot about Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French resistance during World War II who returned to power in 1958 as the founder and reactionary leader of France’s Fifth Republic.
While most Americans remember de Gaulle for standing against the Nazis, Vance said he was drawn to de Gaulle’s post-war legacy. He told me that he admired de Gaulle’s efforts to rebuild France’s industrial might and preserve its distinctive national interest within the emerging Atlanticist alliance, as well as his efforts to sow the seeds of a “vibrant” cultural conservatism that could transform France’s experience during the Second World War into a source of national pride rather than national shame.
“It wasn’t, like, moral majority, petulant finger-wagging,” Vance told me of de Gaulle’s conservatism. “It was more like an invigorated self-confidence.”
I mentioned that de Gaulle — who returned to power following a right-wing coup stemming from the Algerian War of Independence, and then proceeded to rewrite the French constitution to dramatically expand the executive power of the president — also saw his job as reversing France’s imperial decline.
“I don’t think he was 100 percent successful,” Vance said. “He solved a lot of problems and made a lot of problems less bad, but he didn’t fundamentally address the decline of France.”
It was, he acknowledged, an imperfect analogy, but it got at something critical about Vance’s political outlook. Like de Gaulle, Vance thinks of his task as managing an empire in decline. He has said that the United States has entered “a late Republican period,” analogizing America’s current political trajectory to the decline of the Roman Republic in the 1st century B.C. But that comparison doesn’t entirely capture the direness of Vance’s understanding of the current moment in American history.
In Washington, Vance told me, “very serious people” regularly approach him concerning America’s aging population and its impact on the federal government’s ability to pay for Social Security.
“My response to that is that’s a financial consequence of a much deeper problem,” Vance said. In the not-so-distant future, he said, America is poised to become “a society that is upside down demographically, where more and more retirees are supported by fewer and fewer young people, where we don’t have children laughing in the streets because [we’ve] gone the way of South Korea and there aren’t enough kids to even like populate our schools.”
A grave look entered his eyes.
“That is not a ‘We can’t afford Social Security’ problem. That’s a ‘Your fucking society is collapsing’ problem.”
Whatever else Vance might believe, this is the ominous core of his worldview: After decades of decline, America is teetering on the brink of complete civilizational collapse. Vance pushed back against my suggestion that his vision reflected a fundamental pessimism about America — “I think decline often proceeds periods of renewal,” he told me — but he did suggest that America’s political class has proved either unwilling or unable to grapple with the “fundamental stagnation at the heart of American society.”
“There’s just this desperate effort to just argue that everything’s gone well — and, man, I just don’t buy it at all,” Vance told me. “Life expectancy is going down, and we’re talking about slashing retiree benefits for our elderly, and you can’t get amoxicillin for your kid’s ear infection. It all just seems incredibly fake.”
There’s a lot to quibble with about Vance’s response to the situation he described. For one thing, Vance seems blithely indifferent about other, perhaps more pressing antecedents of civilization collapse like climate change, and he has accused Democrats of “bring[ing] a large number of new voters [into the country] to replace the voters that are already here,” rather than embracing immigration as a possible solution to America’s rapidly aging population.
But Vance’s seemingly genuine belief in the catastrophic trajectory of American decline provides the critical context for understanding his broader political project. During one of our conversations, for instance, I asked him what, exactly, he had meant in New Hampshire when he said that Trump needed to uncover the “truth” about Jan. 6.
“Look,” he said, sounding a little peeved that he was being forced to talk about this again. “To get all the throat clearing out of the way, do I think that Jan. 6 was good? No. Do I think that people who, like, violently beat up cops should go to prison? Absolutely.”
He shifted into a more earnest register.
“But there was this really weird attempt to spin a narrative around Jan. 6 that I just don’t buy. Like, do I think it was actually an effort to overthrow the government? No. But, like, the guy who was going around planting pipe bombs — we were totally uninterested in that guy. … How was our media and our security services able to spin a narrative that MAGA grandmas are participating in an insurrection, but meanwhile, we’re not interested in the guy who’s planting pipe bombs?”
Vance isn’t correct that the security state doesn’t want to find the Jan. 6 bomber — the FBI is currently offering a half-a-million dollar reward for information related to the incident — and he is stretching his poetic license when he describes the Jan. 6 rioters as “MAGA grandmas.” But these distortions of Jan. 6 mirror Vance’s broader view of the country. As he sees it, the United States is on the verge of going up in smoke, yet its leaders seem indifferent to this fact at best — or, at worst, cynically invested in covering it up.
This same apocalyptic vision also underlies his enduring support for Trump. Vance does not believe that four more years of Trump will be enough time to realize his vision of America, but he believes that electing Trump represents the only hope that Americans have for getting off the path to literal civilization collapse. And he is prepared to go to extreme — and possibly unconstitutional — lengths to ensure that outcome.
![Supporters hold placards as ]then U.S. Senate candidate Vance, who was endorsed by Trump for the upcoming primary elections (not pictured) speaks on stage during an event hosted by Trump.](https://www.politico.com/dims4/default/11b3eeb/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4863x3265+0+0/resize/1414x950!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F95%2F6a%2F51f67168476ba1b5715b34e436db%2Fmag-ward-jdvance-ender.jpg "Supporters hold placards as ]then U.S. Senate candidate Vance, who was endorsed by Trump for the upcoming primary elections (not pictured) speaks on stage during an event hosted by Trump.")
When asked by George Stephanopoulos in early February what he would have done if he had been vice president on Jan. 6, Vance said in no uncertain terms that he would have done what Trump had asked and demanded that contested states submit alternative slates of electors to the House of Representatives. This wasn’t just cynical posturing for the veepstakes. It was an earnest — and deeply unsettling — expression of his view that America might not survive another four years of rule by “the regime.”
On several other occasions — most recently during his interview with Stephanopoulos — Vance has suggested that a second-term President Trump should summarily fire a significant number of midlevel federal bureaucrats, and if the Supreme Court steps intervenes to stop him, he should openly defy its order.
I asked him if this was an accurate description of his views.
“Yup,” he said.
I asked him to explain.
“For me, this is not a limited-government thing — this is a democracy thing. Like, you need the bureaucracy to be responsive to the elected branches of government,” he said. “The counterargument is, you know, ‘Aren’t you promoting a constitutional crisis?’ And my response is no — I’m recognizing a constitutional crisis. If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on.”
There is a lot that the country still doesn’t know about J.D. Vance, but as I walked away from our final conversation, I realized that Vance had just told me what kind of leader he aspires to be. Charles de Gaulle was prepared to transform his country’s entire constitutional system to preserve what he believed to be the essence of his beloved nation. So is J.D. Vance.
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J.D. Vance Is a Dangerous Authoritarian
The only coherent aspect of his worldview is a lust for power.
The GOP Establishment is shocked and appalled that J.D. Vance won the race to the bottom that was the Ohio Republican Senate primary. A Senate Republican leadership source had previously said “that of all the Ohio Senate candidates, Vance caused the biggest headaches, but the good news was he wouldn’t win,” reports Axios, which observes that “the Republican establishment privately regards Vance with the same disgust many felt toward Donald Trump.”
However — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — the party is still supporting him as the nominee. There is no evidence it has even considered an alternative. Vance rival Matt Dolan (the least pro-Trump candidate in the race), retiring Establishmentarian Rob Portman — they have lined up behind Vance without hesitation. In case you still harbored the faintest hope that the party has some moral red line, its unquestioning affirmation of Vance ought to dispel it.
Let me state my thesis directly. Politicians who wish to defend democracy ought to draw a line at supporting allies who pose a threat to democracy. J.D. Vance is an authoritarian. Granted, this charge is difficult to prove without first handing him power, but the authoritarian nature of his beliefs is established as clearly as it can be without a pile of corpses.
What he believes remains fuzzy in the public consciousness because of the unique nature of Vance’s career. He is a member of the intellectual elite who occupies an interesting niche as spokesman for the rural white working class and policy entrepreneur for a new form of conservatism. This identity has attracted a parade of journalists and critics attempting to draw out his worldview.
And yet, despite the constant and generally friendly efforts of his interlocutors to clarify his thinking, Vance’s ideas about economic and social policy are confined to broad slogans. He can speak in scenes and generalities, but he is no closer to defining a program than he was when he burst onto the scene with Hillbilly Elegy.
What is increasingly clear about Vance is his thinking about power. Vance has aligned himself with the “post-liberal” right and its longing for an iron fist to smash their enemies. Vance has asserted the 2020 election was stolen and lionized those charged with storming the Capitol on January 6 as political prisoners.
A generally sympathetic profile by James Pogue quotes Vance longing for the destruction of the republic:
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, 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.”
Vance’s vision for how this will occur is at least somewhat specific. Donald Trump would win reelection, fill the government with loyalists, violate federal law, be rebuked by the Supreme Court, and then ignore the Court:
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” he said. “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.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say —” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order — “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Bear in mind that, at this very moment, the Republican Party is united in outrage against the threat to norms posed by a leak of a draft ruling. They are likening this act of small defiance against the Court’s authority to the insurrection, even though it would not actually prevent the ruling from taking effect. Yet here they have a candidate for office openly longing to ignore the Court’s authority — he is imagining a scenario where Trump has abused his power clearly enough that at least one Republican-appointed justice calls the act illegal — and none of them have raised even a peep of complaint.
Vance’s efforts to explain his thinking lean heavily on the terms “corruption” and “scumbags,” which he employs liberally to describe his political adversaries in a broad variety of contexts. “We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags” was Vance’s account for why he was delighted to be endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Corruption” is Vance’s explanation for why he decided to support Trump, after initially opposing him, and then embrace his (false) claims that the election was stolen:
“What changed my mind about Donald Trump more than anything is that I saw the corruption in our institutions.”
“A lot of what this campaign is about — and a lot of my own thinking about politics is about — is that our institutions are corrupt,” he said to the crowd of about 50. “We have to replace the people who run them. Some of those institutions we have to destroy.”
By any neutral definition of corruption, Trump engaged in corruption on a historic and unprecedented scale, literally using his office for self-enrichment. For that matter, Vance’s unique reliance on a single billionaire to finance his campaign, to whose interests he is completely beholden, is a shockingly unethical arrangement. Vance invokes corruption in the same way Trump does. There is no set of actions that defines it, and no reforms that can correct it. It is an intrinsic definitional trait held by his opponents, who are an enemy class that must be vanquished by any means, legal or not.
Ironically, just as he benefits from his history of pseudo-intellectualism, Vance benefits from the presumption that he can’t actually believe what he says, because the reversal has been so naked. A less clever, but probably more accurate, interpretation is that authoritarians are often cynics who simply want power and will do or say whatever they need in order to get it.
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JD Vance on Abortion
Donald Trump has chosen U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, anti-abortion loser galore, as his running mate. It’s an interesting choice, one that indicates that maybe Trump isn’t as worried about abortion as he should be.
Because while we’ve heard for months that Trump wanted a vice presidential candidate who appeared moderate on abortion rights, that is most definitely not Vance—who calls abortion “the first political issue” he ever cared about.
But Vance isn’t just your run-of-the-mill anti-abortion Republican: he’s a full-on trad husband, obsessed with forcing women in the home and calling anyone who disagrees “childless cat ladies.” A hundred dollars says he has Harrison Butker on speed dial.
Remember, this is a guy who opined for 1950s marriages and encouraged women to stay in abusive marriages. Seriously:
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”
In short, Vance’s anti-abortion beliefs are driven by a broader desire for traditional gender norms and a world where women didn’t have choices about anything, not just their bodies. Like so many men obsessed with the ‘trad’ movement, however, Vance shrouds his old-school misogyny as concern for women’s happiness—or even a way to buck against capitalism:
“If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
We’ve seen similar messaging from conservative influencers eager to convince women to stay at home, insisting that real freedom and feminism comes from opting out of the public sphere.
If you don’t want to opt-out, Vance’s policies will force you out: The new VP candidate not only supports a federal abortion ban, but opposes rape and incest exceptions. When he was asked about abortion access for sexual violence in a 2021 interview, Vance replied that “two wrong don’t make a right.”
“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.”
I’d love for Vance to tell a 13 year-old girl who has been impregnated by her father that it’s simply “inconvenient.”
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Vance has also compared abortion to slavery in an absolutely wild interview where he complained that people see children as “inconveniences to be discarded instead of blessings to cherish.” (Something tells me he’d feel differently if those blessings were being cherished in his body against his will.)
All that said, Vance knows that his extremism won’t land well with most voters—that’s why he’s been burying it in Republican-approved rhetoric. Instead of calling a national ban a ‘ban’, for example, Vance says he supports a “minimum national standard.” If you’re a regular reader, you know what that term means.
And over the last few weeks, Vance has been feigning moderation in interviews in a shameless attempt to show Trump he can toe the line. Most recently he lied to “Meet the Press” about supporting abortion medication.
Anti-abortion groups used the same softened language when responding to Trump’s nomination: President of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Marjorie Dannenfeser lauded Vance’s “compassionate approach” to abortion.
The truth is that Trump doesn’t care if Vance is actually ‘reasonable’ on abortion (whatever that means), he just needs him to appear that way. Vance’s anti-choice bonafides are actually quite helpful to the disgraced former president with his conservative base. As Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju said today in response to the news, “Make no mistake, Trump picked him because of—not in spite of—his anti-abortion bonafides.
A note from Jessica:
I’ll be reporting on the media response to Vance’s nomination in the daily report today, but I had to flag this absolutely wild lie from The New York Times as soon as possible. The Times reported yesterday that Vance opposes a national ban, quoting from this 2022 interview as evidence: “Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable.”
But let’s look at the full quote and what Vance actually said:
Let’s be serious; this is journalistic malpractice. The Times has deceptively edited a quote to make it appear as if Vance opposes a national ban, even though the full quote is a literal call for federal legislation. I don’t even know what to say anymore.
This is why I publish the newsletter. We need independent feminist media more than ever—not just to hold Republicans accountable, but mainstream outlets. Please help Abortion, Every Day keep doing this vital work by becoming a paying subscriber:
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Mary Trump's warning to women about JD Vance
Former President Donald Trump's estranged niece Mary Trump has warned that Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance will help usher in "the end of women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy" if the GOP wins back the White House.
The former president announced Vance, a U.S. senator for Ohio, as his running mate on Monday. In a Truth Social post made less than 48 hours after he survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump wrote that Vance was "best suited to assume the position" of vice president.
On Tuesday, Mary Trump called Vance a "misogynist" in her newsletter The Good in US, while also sharing some of her thoughts on X, formerly Twitter. She warned that Vance "hates women as much as" her uncle does, citing the senator's previous calls to "end abortion" without exception.
Mary Trump predicted that a Republican presidential election win would transform the U.S. into a country like that depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, a fictional account of a dystopian future where women have been stripped of nearly all rights by religious conservatives.
"Donald was never going to pick a woman to be his running mate," she wrote. "He has far too much contempt for us. In Vance, he's found someone who hates women as much as he does; someone who wants to control them as much as he does. If the Trump/Vance ticket wins this election, it will be the beginning of the end of women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy."
"American women will know misery if by some great tragedy Donald and Vance get into the White House because those two will make The Handmaid's Tale our reality," she continued. "We know where Donald and Vance stand. And we need to make sure neither of them gets anywhere near the Oval Office."
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump/Vance campaign via email on Tuesday night.
Donald Trump, who has frequently boasted about eliminating federal abortion rights by appointing conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who later overturned Roe v. Wade, has been attempting to moderate his abortion views amid his bid to win back the White House.
The softened abortion stance has included a change to the Republican Party's platform, which no longer calls for a national ban on the women's health procedure. Trump has repeatedly claimed that abortion is only about "states' rights," while arguing that Democrats are "extreme" on the issue.
Vance has also seemingly backtracked recently on what was once a hard-line stance in favor of banning abortion at the federal level. The senator provoked fury from some conservatives earlier this month after saying that he was in favor of allowing access to the "abortion pill" mifepristone.
The reelection campaign of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, which has been backed by Mary Trump, has placed a heavy focus on Trump's abortion policies, with messaging that often points out that the former president's judicial nominees helped overturn Roe.
The abortion section of the Biden-Harris campaign website also claims that "Donald Trump has plans to ban abortion nationwide," while promising that "Joe Biden will never let that happen."
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A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates
Rights groups are vociferously condemning Trump’s VP pick of JD Vance, who has long opposed the procedure
Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.
“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.
“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.
Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.
In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “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.”
But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.
“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”
In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.
Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.
“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”
But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”
Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.
“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.
“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)
“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.
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Vance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.
Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”
Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.
JD Vance says women should stay in violent marriages “for the sake of their kids” pic.twitter.com/zqM15Aqhvm
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.
Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.
“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.”
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The GOP Platform Is a Hoax—Don't Fall for It | Opinion
If you believe the headlines, the Republican party's 2024 platform "softens" its stance on abortion and same-sex marriage at the behest of former President Donald Trump. Trump supposedly moderated his position to win support from suburban women, independents, and the vast majority of Americans who oppose the extreme abortion bans enacted in many states over the past two years. Don't be fooled by this transparent attempt to hoodwink voters.
First, the "scaled-back" platform is no less extreme than the party's previous positions. True, it does not call specifically for a federal ban or say outright that laws permitting any termination of pregnancy are unconstitutional, as anti-abortion advocates wished. Instead, the platform declares that the Constitution "guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process," and claims credit for giving "power to the States and to a vote of the People" to "pass Laws protecting those Rights."
To be clear, this is a full-throated endorsement of states' prerogative to ban abortion with no or limited exceptions, forcing pregnant patients to reach the brink of death before receiving care and to sacrifice their health and fertility to preserve even an embryo or fetus that cannot survive. And if the Constitution protects the unborn as "persons" with rights equal to those of living adults, then abortion cannot be allowed under any circumstances. At the very least, "a vote of the People" can authorize a national ban. Cleverly, the platform promises to "oppose Late Term Abortion," which simultaneously evokes Trump's ludicrous lie that Democrats support abortions up until the moment of birth and leaves the definition of "late term" open to include terminations after the first trimester or even earlier.
Moreover, the platform binds no one. Tempering its language is a cost-free way to distract and deceive voters. While anti-abortion advocates express disappointment in public, they can rest assured that Trump will deliver for them. Trump's lack of personal convictions allows him to shape-shift according to what he thinks his audience wants to hear. But actions speak louder than words. Trump delivered spectacularly on his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. And the GOP's record renders laughable the platform's promise to "support mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments)."
In fact, Republican-led states actively discourage access to contraception and comprehensive sex education. The conservative legal movement fought for and won religious exemptions for corporations that deny contraceptive coverage to their employees. Many anti-abortion advocates oppose common forms of birth control such as the pill and IUDs, as well as IVF. The same red states that ban abortion reject free federal funds to expand Medicaid and subsidize childcare.
The GOP platform's failure to condemn same-sex marriage is similarly misleading. As Justice Clarence Thomas freely admits, the same constitutional theory that overruled Roe makes precedents protecting marriage equality—as well as rights to contraception and same-sex intimacy—equally vulnerable. Last month, in a low-profile ruling about a citizen's right to know why her non-citizen spouse could not obtain a visa, the supermajority quietly but ominously signaled its intent to revisit the scope of the right to marry.
To understand the Republican party's real agenda, read Project 2025, the 900+ page blueprint for a second Trump administration authored by his acolytes for the Heritage Foundation. It lays out detailed plans to abolish the independent federal civil service and the Department of Education; vest broad new powers in the president; sharply curtail immigration and expand deportations; eviscerate civil rights and liberties; exempt religious individuals and corporations from obeying the law; supercharge corporate power; use the 1873 Comstock Act to ban abortion nationwide; and decimate the government's ability to fight climate change, gun violence, and discrimination or to protect the environment, consumers, workers, families, and the integrity of our elections.
If these plans sound like far-fetched fantasy, they shouldn't. Recent decisions by the Court's right-wing super-majority lay crucial groundwork: granting broad presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, allowing corrupt public officials and insurrectionists to escape scot-free, unleashing attacks on federal regulation, tearing down the wall between church and state, undermining voting rights, blessing gerrymandering, and rescinding basic individual freedoms. Trump's attempts to distance himself from this terrifying agenda, like his GOP platform ruse, must not be allowed to succeed.
Serena Mayeri is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
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