JD Vance could be a heartbeat away from the presidency. It’s a thought you may want to seriously consider, because at the top of the Republican ticket is a 78-year-old obese man showing signs of mental decline.
Vance is getting lots of headlines, mostly bad, and there was even talk early on that Donald Trump might drop him. We need to understand — quickly — who Vance is, what he stands for, and what he might do if he finds himself sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. You may feel like you just got off a carnival ride after reading all about him. Suffice it to say, he’s light years from the stolidness of Mike Pence.
Answering some of those questions about Vance is easier than others. His life story, as told by him, is fairly well known, thanks to his 2016 bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
Vance grew up in a blue-collar county in southwest Ohio. His parents divorced when he was a toddler. Because his mother struggled with addiction, Vance was raised by his maternal grandparents. After high school, he enlisted in the Marines and served for four years. He then got a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University and a law degree from Yale. After practicing law for a few years, he moved to Silicon Valley to become a venture capitalist before heading back to Ohio to run for the Senate. His campaign was funded by his mentor, the far-right tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Sounds like a great resume for an extreme-right politician. But a resume tells us only what he has done, not what he believes.
At 40 years old, Vance is the first millennial candidate for vice president. As such he brings vitality and energy to a tired Republican ticket. But he also brings a lot of baggage, in the form of a massive digital footprint. Almost everything he has said or written lives somewhere on the internet, available to be read, listened to, and parsed.
The most startling takeaway from a deep dive into Vance’s legion of interviews is that he is a wildly ambitious and opportunistic chameleon. He has transformed from a fairly moderate conservative, a self-described “never Trumper” who called the former president “cultural heroin,” “reprehensible,” and “America’s Hitler,” to a lapdog loyalist who has seemingly been absolved by Trump — perhaps because he has proven to be the anti-Mike Pence, willing to do anything to “win” an election.
Last week, on the “All-In” podcast, Vance said that in 2020, he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had,” thus throwing the presidential election results into complete chaos. He would have done this with no evidence of any election fraud, much less widespread fraud. Vance is an authoritarian in the making.
Just a reminder: Vance is willing to become vice president for a man who sent an angry mob to kill his last vice president.
Vance’s total and complete transformation into the MAGA heir-apparent happened as he sycophantically sought Trump’s endorsement of his 2022 Senate candidacy.
Vance converted to Catholicism from atheism five years ago. He now identifies as Christian nationalist. His reactionary views on gun control and same-sex marriage are not surprising. What is much less mainstream, even for MAGA, is when he veers into strident misogyny. Vance opposes abortion, including in cases of rape and incest. He believes a pregnancy resulting from rape should not be considered “inconvenient.” He has said that professional women “choose a path to misery” by picking careers over having children. He has called child care subsidies “class war against normal people” and opposes no-fault divorces, suggesting women should stay in abusive marriages.
With views as radical as these, even some Republicans have questioned Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate. But if it’s an attack dog Trump wanted, he got it.
It was Vance who gave legs to the now infamous lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating residents’ pets. He told Trump about it. One might think that after the political fallout from Trump regurgitating the story several times during the debate, and the real fallout in Springfield, where hospitals, schools, and even city hall have been threatened, he would let it go. He did not. On Sunday, Vance made the rounds of the political talk shows doubling down on his false narrative.
He told CNN’s Dana Bash that “the American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Bash replied, “You just said that this is a story that you created.”
Vance then tripled down. “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’s policies.”
A point of clarification: The Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally and came because the city needed workers, according to the mayor.
So Trump gets his toadying pit bull, and we might get a dangerous politico who makes decisions based on what it will mean for his future, not for ours. In the meantime, the Trump-Vance lies continue to distract and dominate news coverage.
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