This past Saturday, two hours after a twenty-year-old Pennsylvania man with hazy political commitments and uncertain motives tried to kill Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, typed out a reaction on social media: “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Follow the logic of Washington: Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate on Monday makes sense. Vance is the most conservative of the three finalists for the nomination, the most outspokenly loyal, and the most pugnaciously partisan—qualities that fit a candidate who is increasingly leading in the polls and looking ahead at fights to come. But Vance is also someone who has rapidly tracked from a genial reform conservatism to a hard-edged populism, which itself seems to be metastasizing again, all following a track of anti-élitism. He is an attack dog for Trump, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit.
It has been just two years since Vance, who is thirty-nine, first ran for elective office. His rise has been as sharp as any politician to emerge since Barack Obama, and it has been similarly fuelled by a rare ability to convert the raw material of his life into a compelling social narrative. Vance was raised in Appalachian Ohio by his grandparents, since his mother struggled with addiction. He served as an enlisted marine in Iraq before attending Ohio State, and then Yale Law School, where his mentor Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” encouraged him to package his experience as a memoir. The result, “Hillbilly Elegy,” was published in 2016 and became a phenomenon; the New York Times named it one of six books that explained Trump’s victory, a status made possible by Vance’s own anti-Trumpism. (During the 2016 campaign, Vance messaged his former roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”)
Some of the characterizations in “Hillbilly Elegy,” even at the time, seemed two-dimensional, but Vance’s rags-to-riches story and the timeliness of his analysis, which argued that economic dislocation had degraded the social relationships upon which a good life had depended in places like southwestern Ohio, gave it a cinematic lift. In 2020, by which time Vance had worked as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, and earned the patronage of Peter Thiel, “Hillbilly Elegy” was released as a movie directed by Ron Howard.
The four-year trip from there (well-regarded, category-defying young conservative intellectual) to here (right-wing firebrand and Trump V.P. pick) has been equally extraordinary, and has hinged on two changes: one in Vance and one within conservatism. The change in Vance was that his politics hardened as he prepared to run for elective office. In an extended interview with the Times’ Ross Douthat last month, he attributed this turn to a shift he detected in liberalism toward the end of the Trump Presidency. “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—there’s no law, there’s just power,” Vance said. “And the goal here is to get back in power. Seemed true in the Kavanaugh thing, seemed true in the Black Lives Matter moment.” (Vance’s wife, Usha, an Indian American litigator whom he met at Yale, clerked for Brett Kavanaugh. “Kind of a dork,” Vance told Douthat, of the Supreme Court Justice. “Never believed these stories.”) When Vance ran for Senate, in 2022, his first campaign ad emphasized his antagonism to liberal élites. “Are you a racist?” he asked voters. “Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth.”
That April, when I travelled to Ohio to watch Vance compete in a crowded U.S. Senate primary, he was stalked everywhere by his anti-Trumpism. “Let me just address the elephant in the room,” he said, and then gave a spiel about how he had not liked Trump at first but eventually had come to realize that the billionaire “revealed a corruption in our country that at least to my eyes was completely hidden.” Vance was not an especially gifted retail politician at the time (the coming general-election campaign will test whether he’s improved), and the crowds I saw grew a little tense at his acknowledgment that he had not always been a Trump loyalist. When audience members said that this history made them distrust him, Vance would nod along and say he completely understood if that was the case. But he was also the most intriguing figure in the race, positioning himself as a voice for working-class conservatives. His self-abnegation proved successful: Trump endorsed him, and Vance won the primary and then the general election. Vance, perhaps sensing what it takes to get ahead in the current Republican Party, went on to loudly denounce the accusations of sexual assault against Trump and insisted that, were he Vice-President on January 6th instead of Mike Pence, he would have authorized Trump’s fantastical slates of “alternate electors” and let Congress fight “over it from there.”
Vance is, in some ways, a case study of Republican loyalty after January 6th, in which those who backed Trump after the insurrection at the Capitol have tended to go all in—their careers and reputations have become inextricably tied to the former President. But plenty of Republicans are diehard Trump loyalists. Vance’s rise has also depended on his populism. Like some other Republican senators of his generation (Tom Cotton, of Arkansas; Josh Hawley, of Missouri; and Marco Rubio, of Florida, among them), Vance often stressed the need for Republicans to break from the free-market absolutism of the past. “There is no path . . . to a durable governing majority for the conservative movement that doesn’t run through a rethinking of nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties economic dogma,” he said in 2023, at an event hosted by the think tank American Compass. He has backed tariffs and urged Republicans to try to win more union votes. “My grandma’s politics [was] a sort of hybrid between left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift, and there is virtue to both of these world-views,” Vance told the New Statesman’s Sohrab Ahmari in February, though this kind of alliance has so far existed mostly at the level of rhetoric; as Ahmari put it, archly, “The mainstream labour movement has yet to find in Vance a partner on its legislative priorities.” Even so, Vance’s inclusion on the ticket represents a different idea of how Trump can engage the Party’s élite than Pence’s elevation did in 2016: less piety, more cultural war, a willingness to push economic nationalism a step further. In other words, it shows which direction the conservative élites are moving, and how much the Trump years have transformed them, too.
Of course, the Pence Vice-Presidency ended with Trump’s movement turning on him, storming the Capitol while calling for him to be strung up. Many Republicans who have joined Trump’s Cabinet have come to regret it. Vance is still pretty new to all this, and it is a little hard to say whether he will be an asset to the ticket, deepening its seriousness, or a too extreme, too wonky liability. But, in an election defined most of all by age, Vance has given the Trump campaign something small but invaluable: the chance to credibly suggest that Trumpism has a future beyond him. ♦
