While I’ve never read JD Vance’s supposedly profound requiem for the pain and economic dislocation of rural White America, Hillbilly Elegy, I did briefly encounter Ron Howard’s Netflix version, before deciding that it was almost comically bad. It was basically unwatchable, and I shut it off without delay. Around then, I must have made a semiconscious decision to avoid ingesting Vance’s tired, manufactured, populist propaganda for as long as humanly possible.
But oh, how reality intrudes.
Of course, I did keep up with what Vance himself said and wrote over the years, as he devolved from Never Trumper to rabid acolyte, and I watched how his values morphed and mutated along with those of the Republican Party, in his naked bid to satiate his own endless ambition. In some ways, I found Vance to be something of a perfect illustration of what has happened within the larger conservative firmament, a walking metaphor for the party’s moral, spiritual, and political collapse.
In a purely human sense, it’s been difficult to watch this kind of rank hypocrisy, utter disingenuousness, and brazen duplicity on such stark display without gagging. Vance’s objective was always so nakedly transparent to me, his transactional principles so utterly fungible, his beliefs so easily dispensed with. It was like he wore a sign on his forehead, “Willing to say/do anything for power!” In the most literal sense, this is what it looks like when you sell your soul for power in today’s GOP.
It ain’t pretty.
The impoverished Midwesterner turned Marine turned Yale-educated lawyer turned tech bro’s pet politician is a real chameleon, the populist tribune playing his part as the prince of Trumpism to perfection. His rise has been uniquely grotesque because it’s plain to all and sundry that he knows exactly how bad Donald Trump is, since he has described him perfectly himself, articulately and accurately, before succumbing to his own base desire for political power in this broken GOP, and switching up completely. It’s kind of like watching Liz Cheney’s moral and political reckoning in reverse.
Back in 2016, Vance correctly described Trump as a threat to democracy, a “morally reprehensible human being,” an “idiot,” a “cynical asshole” and “America’s Hitler.” You knew he was serious when he described Trump as “cultural heroin,” an extraordinarily blistering insult from someone who grew up with an opiate-addicted mother in a Rust Belt ravaged by the drug. As it happens, the critique was also right on the money, betraying someone who understands what Trump represents on an intuitive level.
Among Trump and his inner circle, that’s all just water under the bridge now, particularly after several years of Vance kowtowing and rehabilitating himself before the throne, following his full-blown political conversion in 2022, when he launched himself into the Senate with a hard-earned Trump endorsement, bought and paid for with his dignity. For the rest of us, though, we can’t ever quite forget that JD Vance knows precisely who and what Trump is, since he’s told us in no uncertain terms, making his hypocrisy even more difficult and painful to swallow.
Insults from useful idiots
Now, he’s Donald Trump’s Uber-loyal running mate, a position that almost killed the last man who tried to do the job, Mike Pence, when supporters of the president very nearly lynched him at the U.S. Capitol. Of course, Vance wouldn’t make those same mistakes. He has said he never would have certified the 2020 election, had he been in Pence’s position. Instead, he would’ve obliterated American democracy for his boss.
This is how the Republican Party has grown.
Unsurprisingly, Vance is having an extremely rocky debut, as he’s catapulted from fringe right-wing podcasts into the bright lights of the national stage. It hasn’t helped that journalists and the internet continue to dig up ever more damning examples from his long history of extravagantly cruel (and politically noxious) insults. As these vicious tidbits circulate, it’s clear they were meant for distribution only within the neofascist informational ecosystem, rather than the national political conversation. Already, there’s been a round of serious second-guessing in MAGA World that Vance may not have been the wisest choice after all.
Indeed, the vice presidential nominee has found a way to denigrate just about everyone in the country: women, people lacking children, those with cats, among others. Vance has belittled Americans without offspring, particularly “childless cat ladies,” who apparently have no “physical stake in the future of the country,” besides their own worthless lives, of course. He lamely tried to clean that up by saying he had “nothing against cats.”
Hilarious.
He’s claimed people without children are “deranged” and “sociopathic,” the “most psychotic” commentators on Twitter. He said people without children should be taxed higher, and that people with children should be given more votes. In yet another damaging revelation, a lengthy email exchange between Vance and a transgender former friend from Yale Law School captures his evolution into a fascist bully perfectly. And all that’s before we even delve into his radical policies.
Extremism at home and abroad
Vance is a vocal proponent of one of the Republican Party’s most serious political vulnerabilities. He’s a hardcore and uncompromising anti-abortion activist who believes in a total federal abortion ban. He’s called for the federal government to interdict and arrest women for crossing state lines to get abortions, and has adopted the GOP’s most radical lines on the topic, like calling against popular exemptions for incest and rape. Even Trump has backed away from this kind of rhetoric on abortion, recognizing it as a political albatross around his neck.
Similarly, Vance believes women should remain in violent and abusive marriages, and thinks it’s high time to get rid of no-fault divorces. Obviously, Handmaiden Tale-style politics is exactly where Vance fits in, which is to say he’s essentially an opportunistic fascist trafficking in misogyny, and whatever else Trump requires of his underling.
He’s clearly found his niche: a vessel for Putin-style family-values authoritarianism. It’s no accident Vance is widely seen as the most anti-Ukrainian member of the senate; he actually said he doesn’t “give a shit what happens to Ukraine.” As he wrote in a New York Times op-ed, it’s “fantastical” to think Ukraine should keep all of its own land from being consumed by a vicious autocrat intent on devouring it. Instead, he argues Kyiv should simply accept this wanton aggression, as should the world order built by Washington, and ante up territory until Putin is sated.
Brilliant idea. Appeasement worked wonders with Hitler.
Of course, Vance’s bedding down with bloodthirsty foreign dictators is hardly the most worrisome aspect of his politics. To wit, Vance wrote a violent forward to what has become perhaps the most glaring political liability for the Trump campaign in 2024, Project 2025, an ominous 900-page authoritarian manifesto and blueprint dreamt up by the Heritage Foundation outlining the step-by-step construction of Trump’s personalist dictatorship. As Vance wrote in the forward to that monstrosity, “It’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”
Faustian bargains
In any case, it’s good to be lectured about who’s more concerned for the fate of the United States, those who own cats, or by the man who joined the ticket of the man he described as “America’s Hitler.”
But perhaps that’s exactly the point.
Ultimately, JD Vance is a perfect distillation of this modern Republican Party: reptilian, craven, vicious, and spineless all at the same time. He’s thoroughly authoritarian, queasily Orwellian, and quite obviously believes in absolutely nothing. He’s an empty vessel with a winning smile and a killer resume.
He’s also demographically helpful in that he’s WHITE from APPALACHIA, and he brings a heartwarming story of up-from-the-bootstraps self-reliance, even as he ingratiates himself into the right-wing fever dreams cooking amongst his political patrons: the wealthiest men on the planet in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, et al. Republicans can’t help but love him, even if his political skills are less than ideal.
Mostly, JD Vance is a symbol of what has happened to the Republican Party under Donald Trump’s ruinous leadership, when a party of ideas became a cult of personality in a remarkably brief window. As Trump teases his future dictatorship, telling crowds of excited Christians, “You won’t have to vote anymore,” his vice presidential nominee is surely among those who know exactly what he means. For the rest of us, we know that he knows.
JD Vance’s Faustian bargain is, perhaps, more obvious than it should be. Deals with the devil of this magnitude should be at least partially obscured, as in the rest of the Republican Party, for the sake of decency. When hypocrisy is this blindingly apparent, it leaves nothing to the imagination, and a sour taste in the mouth. There’s no pretending ignorance here.
One simply prays Vance continues to fall flat on his face day after day until November, dragging down Trump’s ticket, at which point, we will either find ourselves delivered from this national nightmare, or buried beneath it. At this point, I give American democracy about even odds of surviving.
If Trump loses, I wonder who he’ll blame? Hint: it won’t be himself. It’ll be the clunky senator from Ohio who hated cats, and ruined everything.
I find it hard to comprehend the Republican Party and it’s goals. It has morphed into a neofascist movement with a truly ignorant and cruel man as it’s leader. It’s terrifying that it has so many adamant followers. I just don’t get it.
They’re only hoping to get trump elected in order to adVance JD. Trump won’t last long, which is their entire motivation.
Trump says there won’t be a need for future elections, which is the wet dream of the alt-right. The plan is to dump trump shortly after his election and have Vance installed as the first monarch of the United States.
Just as their goal of young conservative judges and justices was realized, they require a young “family man” to inspire the masses in order to enact the planned “Christian” theocracy. An autocratic, theocratic, plutocratic, kleptocratic government is the desired result.