“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”
“It’s astonishing to me — though perhaps it shouldn’t be — that Hillbilly Elegy managed to seduce as many liberals as it did given that Vance’s scorn for almost everyone in his poverty-stricken small Ohio town reverberates on every page. He doesn’t do a very good job of disguising it, but he does arguably try — he occasionally tells us he feels empathy, while rarely actually displaying any. Early on, he writes, “I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks.” This comes immediately after demonizing a co-worker he once had because he was consistently late or absent from work, and who seems to represent the larger ailment among “hillbillies” he claims to want to diagnose.
Though he seems to hate his community full of deadbeats, drug addicts, fat people, and “welfare queens,” we’re supposed to read his portrayal as enlightening and empathetic because he’s constantly feinting briefly toward gentleness. “There are no villains in this story,” he tells us early on; except Hillbilly Elegy is full of them. Throughout the book, he frequently makes assumptions about the motivations and life circumstances of the people around him and rails against them for what he sees as their lazy, unmotivated, or bizarre choices. Indeed, more sympathy does not seem to be his concern.
Even the book’s title is a manipulation. As many people have pointed out, Vance didn’t actually grow up as a fabled “hillbilly”; he merely spent some of his summers in Appalachia as a child. When he’s describing the small town of Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up, the first thing he focuses on is the town’s socioeconomic decline, unlike his more affectionate descriptions of the topography of rural Kentucky and detailed character profiles of his family there. He’s at pains to make sure we understand how much he hated it there, and how much his heart truly belonged with his renegade redneck family across the Kentucky border.
In Middletown, his focus on the town’s economics, its rising “residential segregation” into concentrated areas of working-class poor, and the row of decaying mansions on Main Street, all reveal his obsession with class and upward mobility. It’s a fixation that underpins the book. “Looking back, I don’t know if the ‘really poor’ areas and my block were any different, or whether these divisions were the constructs of a mind that didn’t want to believe it was really poor,” he admits.
In all of the many moments where he demonizes the poor people in his orbit, Vance fails to offer or even consider the broader context of what’s happening with his community that might drive people to lives of penury and misery. He rails against drug addicts and provides a close, painful look at his family’s own battle with addictions, particularly his mother — but he never mentions the opioid crisis or the role companies and policy played in ravaging rural communities.
“We created these problems, not the government, not a corporation,” he insists, despite having plenty of evidence to the contrary.”
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“Vance is, of course, a conservative, and the focus on individual failing rather than systemic failures is to be expected. But what’s striking about Hillbilly Elegy, especially in the context of his recent turn toward Trumpian populism, is its disdain for people.
Even as he’s trying to define himself as part of one in-group or another, be it the Scots-Irish or the “hillbillies,” he can’t stop shaming and distancing himself from the other people in it. His characterizations of his community and the people in it thrum with disgust and a deep sense of remove. As someone who grew up in a similar world, it would never even occur to me to feel for my own rural small Southern town the loathing Vance seems to feel for his, and the fact Vance never even second-guesses his own level of antipathy is one of the more chilling aspects of the book.”
“Donald Trump’s allies have laid out sweeping plans to reshape the executive branch of the federal government if he is returned to power, plans that involve firing perhaps tens of thousands of career civil servants and replacing them with handpicked MAGA allies.
But how far, exactly, would Trump go in trying to tear down what he calls the “deep state?” The answer hasn’t been clear.
In picking J.D. Vance as his vice president, he’s picked someone who will egg him on to go very far indeed.
“If I was giving him one piece of advice” for a second term, Vance said on a 2021 podcast:
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
That was no idle talk. To an extent unusual for a politician — and perhaps because he hasn’t been in politics very long — Vance is interested in big ideas. He’s been deeply influenced by thinkers on the movement known as the New Right, who want to seize and transform societal institutions they believe are dominated by the left.
A big part of that would involve a restored President Trump purging any resistance to him, or checks on his power, from the executive branch.”
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“As Trump was about to leave office in 2020, he finally got around to trying to do something about the supposed “deep state”: He issued an executive order known as Schedule F.
This order laid the groundwork for reclassifying as many as 50,000 career civil servant jobs as political appointees who could then be fired and replaced by Trump. He was out of office before it could be implemented, however, and Biden quickly revoked it.
There’s been much fear about Trump restoring this policy in his second term, replacing a great many nonpartisan career experts with political hacks or ideologues willing to go along with his extreme or corrupt plans.
Such a move could be implemented in any number of ways, from the more limited and less disruptive to more sweeping and very disruptive. Considering Trump has only intermittent interest in the details of policy and implementation, I’ve thought that how this plays out would depend on who staffs his administration, since he could be pulled in various directions. Advisers worried about chaos and political blowback could counsel restraint.
Vance would not do that. He would be a key voice in Trump’s administration urging him to go very big indeed.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Vance said that the courts would inevitably “stop” Trump from trying to fire so many employees. When they do, Vance went on, Trump should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
That is: Vance urged that Trump radically remake the executive branch even if the Supreme Court said doing so was illegal.”
“At the behest of Trump and his allies, the RNC approved a new GOP platform, one free of calls for federal abortion bans or any explicit opposition to same-sex marriage. The Republicans’ official agenda also forswears any cuts to Medicare and Social Security, including increases to the retirement age. All of these stances contradict longstanding conservative movement goals, and all three bring the Republican Party into closer alignment with public opinion.
Meanwhile, Trump used some of the RNC’s primetime speaking slots to signal sympathy for nonwhite voters, younger Americans, and union members. The biracial model and rapper Amber Rose gave a speech that invited young, historically liberal voters to rethink their skepticism of Trump and his party. “The truth is that the media has lied to us about Donald Trump. I know this because for a long time I believed those lies,” Rose declared, explaining that she eventually realized, “Donald Trump and his supporters don’t care if you’re Black, white, gay, or straight. It’s all love. And that’s when it hit me. These are my people.”
The RNC’s outreach to union voters was even more concerted. On the convention’s first night, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien enjoyed the most prominent speaking slot. The union leader did not actually endorse Trump and spent much of his address on diatribes against corporate greed that received tepid support in the convention hall.
To all but the most attentive viewers, however, O’Brien’s status as the keynote speaker overshadowed the absence of a formal endorsement: By all appearances, the head of one of America’s largest unions was vouching for Trump’s commitment to workers’ interests.
Taken together, the RNC’s four-day infomercial for Trump’s GOP was far more professionally orchestrated and broadly accessible than its 2020 and 2016 predecessors, which often seemed to be made by and for Fox News addicts.
Yet other aspects of the convention betrayed the strange, illiberal, and authoritarian character of Trump’s politics. As well-managed as the Trump campaign has been to this point, it cannot escape the inherent liabilities of the man it’s trying to sell.”
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“Vance is among the most openly authoritarian Republicans in Washington. He has said that he would have helped Trump overturn the 2020 election results, raised money for January 6 rioters, called on the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation against an anti-Trump Washington Post columnist, touted plans for consolidating the president’s authority over the federal bureaucracy, and argued that Trump should simply defy any court orders that obstruct such a power grab.
Traditionally, presidential candidates use their VP picks to assuage potential concerns that swing voters might have about them or balance out the ticket demographically. Vance’s selection, by contrast, exacerbates Trump’s biggest political liabilities: the perception that he is an authoritarian extremist whose election would threaten abortion rights.
Nevertheless, Trump picked him precisely because Vance’s current ideology closely mirrors his own. According to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta, the Trump campaign had initially planned to pick a milquetoast, unthreatening running mate, such as North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. But Trump was eventually persuaded that he needed a fellow true-believing populist to help him enact his most far-reaching ambitions.”
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“The Republican nominee’s acceptance speech was the longest ever given, meandering across 92 bizarre and tedious minutes. This excess was a direct reflection of the authoritarian nature of Trump’s candidacy. The nominee of a healthy democratic political party must balance their own narcissistic appetite for attention against the interests of the various constituencies they represent.
Having consolidated his personality cult’s control of the GOP, Trump faced no such constraint. His speech did not stretch to marathon length because of its abundance of substantive content. Rather, it consumed so much time because Trump allowed himself to supplement nearly every passage with pointless and tiresome ad-libbing, after detailing his own narrowly averted assassination in painstaking detail.
A less weird and authoritarian Republican nominee might have also drummed up panic about undocumented immigration. But they probably wouldn’t have paused in the middle of such demagogy to ask the crowd, “Has anyone seen The Silence of the Lambs?” and then say, incongruously, “The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump’s endless, self-indulgent rambling was alienating enough in and of itself. Even more unnerving was the spectacle of an increasingly bored crowd struggling to humor their dear leader with increasingly strained outbursts of enthusiasm.”
“Vance is perhaps the GOP’s leading practitioner of responding to questions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by pivoting to Mexico and fentanyl. “What are we talking about?” he asked at a voter forum in February 2022 as the invasion was imminent. “We’re talking about a border 5,000 miles away between Ukraine and Russia. That’s what our leaders are focused on. If we had leaders half as concerned about their own border as they were about the Ukraine-Russia border, we would not have a border crisis in this country.””
“”A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs,” Vance said in a Fox News interview at the Republican National Convention on Monday. “If you’re going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that’s what [Trump] did when he took out [Iranian Gen. Qassem] Soleimani.”
Vance praised Trump for trying to “enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states” to fight back against Iran. In a speech to the Quincy Institute in May, Vance tried to sell a U.S.-Israeli-Arab alliance as a way for the United States to “spend less time and less resources in the Middle East.”
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Instead, Trump ended up overseeing a massive U.S. military buildup in the region during his term and nearly went to war with Iran.
Vance even wants to add another counterinsurgency to America’s “forever war” roster. In July 2023, he told NBC News that he would “empower the president of the United States, whether that’s a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels” in Latin America.
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Trump and Vance also share the establishment view that the United States needs to get ready for a conflict with China over Taiwan. At the convention, Vance told Fox News that China is the “biggest threat” to America, and he has voiced support for building up the Taiwanese military with American weapons in the past.”
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“The stance that puts Trump and Vance most at odds with the foreign policy establishment is their opposition to U.S. military aid for Ukraine. In a February speech to the Senate, Vance complained that the “experts have a new thing that American taxpayers must fund and must fund indefinitely, and it is called the conflict in Ukraine.” He has also written about the munitions shortages that the war is causing, a rare moment of honesty by a politician about the limits of U.S. power.
Vance told Fox News at the convention that Trump will “go in there, negotiate with the Russians and the Ukrainians, [and] bring this thing to a rapid close.” He also said that the war simply wouldn’t have started if Trump were in office. Yet in practice, Trump’s policies toward Russia and Ukraine were just as hawkish as those of his successor. In fact, Trump was the first U.S. president to send weapons to Ukraine—a fact that he bragged about at the time.
And tellingly, at the presidential debate in June, Trump blamed President Joe Biden’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan for causing the Ukrainian conflict. “He was so bad with Afghanistan, it was such a horrible embarrassment,” Trump said. “When [Russian President Vladimir] Putin saw that, he said, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to go in.'”
It’s not really an argument against war—just a promise to be better at it than the last guy.
Many Democrats and Republicans want to have their cake and eat it too. They know that Americans are fed up with endless military conflict, but they want to make their opponents look weak. Liberal criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy were just as incoherent as conservative criticisms of Biden’s foreign policy.
But wanting to win harder is not a strategy. And America’s problems are not simply a lack of gumption. Vance may be more willing to acknowledge the limits of U.S. power than his competition. When it comes to actually applying those insights, he falls far short.”
“JD Vance wasn’t picked as Donald Trump’s running mate because he can deliver Ohio. It’s already in the tank for the GOP. And he wasn’t tapped because he’s the most qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency. The entirety of his government experience consists of less than two years in the Senate.
Vance’s ascension is owed to something else entirely. He is the embodiment — and one of the most articulate defenders — of a belief system that has gradually taken hold of the Republican Party, one that prizes cultural and ideological warfare and rewards the warriors who are most effective in taking the fight to non-believers.”
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“Vance has experience where it counts for the Trump era GOP, in the social media trenches and on cable TV hits. His Marine Corps service — Vance is the first post-9/11 veteran on a major-party ticket — insulates him on foreign policy, and offers a measure of credibility to isolationist views that once might have been dismissed as a product of a lack of seasoning.
He projects cool anger, and knows the enemy as well as anyone in the party because he’s lived and circulated among them, as a venture capitalist, a celebrated author and a Yale Law School graduate. He doesn’t deliver his home state so much as send a message to the restive regions that the GOP aspires to keep in its fold — the Rust Belt and Appalachia.
Trump spoke to these aspects of Vance’s background in announcing his pick Monday on social media, ticking off LinkedIn bullet points that individually served as dog whistles to the faithful.”