The Heir Apparent
7 min read
J. D. Vance’s rapid rise from obscurity to the vice-presidential nomination is an only-in-America tale—one that will shape what America is, for better or worse, for generations to come.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J. D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump announced on this Truth Social platform this afternoon.
Eight years ago, such a moment would have seemed impossible. In summer 2016, Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy hit shelves and bestseller lists, intertwining a potent personal narrative and an explanation of Donald Trump’s popularity in terms that non-Trump fans could understand. Vance was a scorching critic of the GOP nominee, but seemed able to articulate the cultural currents that had elevated him.
Since then, Vance has moved toward Trump, and his selection is emblematic of Trump’s remaking of the GOP. Today, Vance, who will turn 40 in August, is one of the former president’s most prominent boosters and now becomes the heir apparent to the Republican Party. For years, political observers have wondered what the GOP might look like after such a singular figure as Trump. Now there’s a good chance the future of the Republican Party will look like J. D. Vance: populist but illiberal, semi-isolationist, and able to connect with both the working class and elite circles.
Vance brings youth and intellect to the Republican ticket. He could also strengthen the ticket in the upper Midwest, which Joe Biden must win to be reelected (although Ohio is expected to be a safe Republican state). Unlike Trump, he is a military veteran and a real product of the working class. That doesn’t make Vance a no-brainer pick. Among other reported contenders, Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota would have been a non-threatening choice to reassure edgy voters, a little like Mike Pence in 2016. Marco Rubio would have brought foreign-policy knowledge and has been tested at a national level. Neither can rival Trump’s charisma. Vance’s ceiling is higher than either, but he is also still relatively green. His 2022 Senate campaign was underwhelming, and his success was largely thanks to Trump.
Vance’s transition from critic and exegete of Trumpism to its standard-bearer shows the ways that the Republican Party has changed in less than a decade. The question is whether Vance is an agent of that change or a subject of it. Probably he is both. As he told an interviewer last month, “It’s hard to reconstruct this stuff, it’s so gradual.”
In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance tells the story of his upbringing in Middletown, Ohio, in the suburbs of Cincinnati. (Vance is often mistakenly described as a native of rural Appalachian Ohio; his ancestors moved to Middletown from Kentucky.) Though his grandparents achieved a middle-class standard of living, his family life was chaotic. His mother slipped into addiction and cycled through partners. Upon graduating high school, Vance joined the Marines and served in Iraq. He returned home after his enlistment and attended the Ohio State University and then Yale Law School. From there, he moved to work in venture capital in the Bay Area, where he came into the orbit of Peter Thiel.
Meanwhile, Vance was working on his book. He portrayed a world of despair and decay, but he was no romantic about it. Though critical of government choices like free trade, Vance could be scathing about the world he’d left behind, criticizing its denizens for wallowing in addiction and self-pity, declining to take personal responsibility for their lives. In The New York Times, my now-colleague Jennifer Senior called Hillbilly Elegy “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion.”
The timing was good: The book emerged to an America where those in cultural capitals were baffled by the rise of Donald Trump, even as they doubted he would win the 2016 election. “Vance’s superpower in those days was his biographical credibility as he spoke about Trump America to non-Trump America,” my colleague David Frum wrote in 2022.
Vance detested Trump—even as he called for compassion towards his supporters, whom Vance saw as victims of a demagogue. “The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals,” Vance wrote in The Atlantic. “Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
Such a reckoning hasn’t happened yet. Instead, it is Vance who changed his tune. He moved back to Cincinnati and flirted with a Senate run in 2018 but ultimately passed. His politics were shifting, as was the tone he took. When Ohio’s LeBron James criticized Kyle Rittenhouse, the conservative cause celebre who killed two protesters in Wisconsin, in 2021, Vance tweeted, “Lebron is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Total coward.” (Rittenhouse was later acquitted of murder.) He called Alex Jones, the radio host fined $1 billion for defamation, a “reputable source” of information. Vance also began espousing a sort of soft election denialism—not claiming massive fraud, a la Rudy Giuliani, but arguing that changes to voting laws during the pandemic cheated Trump.
This all set Vance up nicely in 2022, when Senator Rob Portman’s retirement opened up a seat. Vance emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the nomination—largely on the strength of Trump’s endorsement. He then defeated the Democrat Tim Ryan in the general election.
Vance arrived to a Washington where the Republican Party had embraced not just Trump but also some of the ideas that Vance had been pushing for years. Vance has been an interesting lawmaker. For example, he has worked closely with fellow Ohioan Sherrod Brown, a Democratic senator who is up for reelection this year, on matters related to the 2023 derailment of a train carrying chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio—especially on a rail safety bill. Vance backed a UAW strike against automakers last year. He speaks with guarded respect for the Bernie Sanders left, while lambasting the center right and center left, who he regards as comfortable elites who benefit from the status quo. He has found common cause with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, another elitely-credentialed Republican who has adopted populist causes.
A recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat shows how hard Vance is to pin down and take in. It’s possible to discern the outlines of a post-Trump Trumpism that is serious and policy-minded, in contrast to the shallower culture-war approach taken by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He expresses ideas on taxation, employment, and other economic issues that would appeal to many Democratic voters. He speaks about tariffs in a more sophisticated manner than Trump ever has. And although he has been a leading critic of the Biden administration’s policy in Ukraine, his view is more nuanced than Trump’s simple isolationism, and you won’t find him fanboying Vladimir Putin. “It is not in our interest” for the Russians to conquer Ukraine, he told Douthat.
At other moments in the conversation, however, Vance completely abandons the thoughtfulness and complexity. Speaking of the 2020 election, for example, he expresses more concern about social media companies briefly blocking stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop than Trump’s elaborate effort to subvert the election. “What was reckless was the effort to try to take this very legitimate grievance over our most fundamental democratic act as a people, and completely suppress concerns about it.” This is funhouse mirror stuff, arguing that a private company’s actions are the real threat to democracy, while elected officials acting to subvert voter will is high-minded and proper.
This is emblematic of what really seems to have changed for Vance: He has fallen prey to exactly the sort of grievance politics that he decried in Hillbilly Elegy. “I think people really, really underrate the sense to which there is palpable and actionable frustration, and I’m always surprised that their assumption appears to be that Trump is the worst, rather than the best, expression of that frustration,” he tells Douthat. That’s not an argument—it’s a threat.
Approaches like this show what has endeared Vance to Trump, despite speculation that his clear ambition might put the former president off. But unlike Rubio or Burgum, Vance has demonstrated his eagerness and skill at saying even outrageous things on Trump’s behalf. He quickly issued one of the more inflammatory statements after Trump was shot this weekend, saying that the Biden campaign’s warnings about Trump’s authoritarianism “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” One might expect that a man once wondered on Facebook whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” would be more circumspect, but consistency isn’t what has gotten J. D. Vance this far, this fast.
