One week ago, Republicans were partying. The raucous scenes at Milwaukee’s Republican National Convention reflected two victories. One was Donald Trump’s now total and complete takeover of the GOP. The other was his upcoming victory in the 2024 presidential election. Sure, voters were still months away from heading to the polls. But with 81-year-old President Joe Biden topping the Democratic ticket, how could he lose?
Trump and his supporters found out how on Sunday. Biden stepped aside and quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Harris, a 59-year-old former prosecutor, can, unlike Biden, put up a fight. What looked like a cakewalk suddenly became a real campaign. And that campaign now had a huge vulnerability: J.D. Vance, who Trump had selected as his running mate just a week earlier. Arguably the most extreme candidate Trump could have chosen, Vance is also a neophyte: 39 years old, he has served less than two years in the Senate and otherwise has no experience in government. In the new race in which Republicans found themselves, Vance not only worsened everything, he exacerbated Trump’s biggest weaknesses: his own radicalism, particularly on abortion, and his status as the oldest presidential nominee in American history.
Surveying the mood within the Trump campaign after Biden’s decision to step aside, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta found more than a little running-mate buyer’s remorse. The decision to anoint Vance, “campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” Whoops!
Vance is only a luxury pick if you are 100 percent certain that you will win, which also means that, when he was selected, Trump was also sure that Biden would stay in the race. (As Biden engaged in a weekslong ego trip and hunkered down with loyalists and close family members amid calls for him to bow out, Trump did, to be fair, have a pretty good read on his mindset—because, well, Biden was acting just like him.) But J.D. Vance was a reckless and stupid pick even in a blowout election. He is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics. As Election Day fast approaches and Harris mounts a forceful challenge, Trump’s regrets will only grow.
Who is J.D. Vance for? Eight years ago, that was an easy question to answer. Vance had crafted an image designed to appeal to the reigning liberal and media elites, who couldn’t get enough of him. Then a 31-year-old venture capitalist, Vance became an overnight sensation after Hillbilly Elegy was published to widespread acclaim in June 2016.
Ostensibly a memoir cataloging Vance’s escape from postindustrial Ohio, Hillbilly Elegy was celebrated as the book to read to understand Donald Trump’s hold on the white working class. Vance provided a seductive and convenient explanation: Yes, rural whites have been systematically ignored by elites—but, in Vance’s telling, they are also indolent, drug-addicted, and welfare-dependent. Some may try to blame their plight on structural forces, but they are wrong: For Vance, America’s poor whites—very much including, it’s worth underlining, several members of his own immediate family—left themselves behind. Welfare and bailouts, in his estimation, will only make things worse by rewarding the poor slobs who raised him. Instead, the only true way out of the holler is to follow in his footsteps: Lift yourself up, one bootstrap at a time, enroll in Yale Law School, and become a venture capitalist.
Touted by its many boosters (a number of whom now repent) as an insightful work of sociology, it is in fact a rags-to-riches parable perfectly calibrated to pander to elite ideas about rural whites. In truth Hillbilly Elegy actively discourages readers from trying to understand the people it is ostensibly about. In Vance’s cold narrative, the white working-class voters now flocking to Donald Trump were largely responsible for their own innumerable misfortunes. If Vance, a hillbilly himself, thinks they aren’t worth saving, why should we?
Vance may be a mediocrity, but Hillbilly Elegy reveals his one true, God-given talent: exploiting his own impoverished background to tell elites precisely what they want to hear, allowing him to elide the fact that he didn’t actually understand or, for that matter, care about the people he was writing about. As the 2016 campaign unfolded, and anxiety about Trump’s hold on the GOP grew, Vance was celebrated not just as a kind of white-trash prophet—he was at the time a principal at Peter Thiel’s V.C. firm Mithril Capital—but someone who could lead the Republican Party out of the darkness. As the election neared, he sharpened his criticism of Trump: The hillbilly soothsayer called the GOP nominee a charlatan, a sexual assaulter, an American Hitler. When the GOP collapsed after Trump inevitably lost to Hillary Clinton, he would be well positioned to pick up the pieces.
There was just one problem: When Election Day came and Donald Trump won, it became abundantly obvious that Vance—the go-to explainer of his rural appeal—never actually understood the new president’s hold over his voters. Vance’s carefully plotted rise to prominence had appealed to the wrong elites. With Trump’s hold on the Republican Party secure and with the GOP enjoying control of all three branches of government, the elites Vance had impressed were of no use to him.
And so he began another metamorphosis. Over the next eight years, Vance grew more and more Trumpian: Culture-war obsessed, he cast aside much of the bootstraps talk in favor of a quasi-populist assault on “woke capital,” college professors, and the media that had made him a star. Horrified by his increasingly noxious, race- and gender-obsessed screeds and embrace of the far right, his liberal audience deserted him and were replaced by boosters who bolstered his new credentials like Tucker Carlson and anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin. Vance 2.0 was modeled on Trump, but only a bit. The new Vance was very online and plugged into the deep, and often very weird, recesses of the right-wing take-o-sphere. He came across as a Redditified Trump, suggesting that Biden was flooding the country with fentanyl to kill “a bunch of MAGA voters” and advocating for a “de-Baathification” of the U.S. government.
The new Vance was a hit with the group of radical, right-wing intellectuals who have spent the last eight years attempting to backfill the mostly empty vessel that is “Trumpism.” But it’s not clear that there is a mass audience for their “post-liberal” project, which will, among many other things, return women to their homes and essentially mandate childbirth. “Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be that they’re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics, are not anti-intellectual,” wrote James Pogue in a revealing Vanity Fair piece about the movement in 2023. “Vance is an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV.”
Still, Vance’s new identity stuck. In 2022, he won Trump’s endorsement and, soon after, Ohio’s junior Senate seat. Less than two years later, he is Trump’s running mate. Vance may soon be one (old, out of shape) heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world. Not yet 40 years old, he is finally where he has been trying to go for most of his adult life: a position of profound power and influence.
For all the talk of Vance’s transformation, he really hasn’t changed much. He’s still really only good at one thing: advancing by slavishly attaching himself to people richer and more powerful than himself, casting them aside when they become inconvenient. His rapid rise in the post-2016 GOP can largely be attributed to both his yearslong groveling at Donald Trump’s feet and the generous support of his benefactor and former employer, Peter Thiel. Without their support two years ago, Vance would have lost in Ohio’s Republican Senate primary and, by extension, never been selected as Trump’s vice president.
Even with that support, Vance has still struggled to build an actual base within the GOP. Running for a Senate seat in a solid red state, he needed huge infusions of cash from Thiel to limp across the finish line. Vance won by six points, running behind every other Republican running statewide that year, including Governor Mike DeWine, who was reelected by 26 percentage points. A late-October 2022 Marist poll of Ohio voters, meanwhile, found that he had negative favorability ratings overall and that independents and women, in particular, detested him. The voters who have looked the closest at Vance do not like him at all. It’s easy to see why:
Vance: I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I'm sure they will call that racist. pic.twitter.com/z3ra8Y5F2f
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 22, 2024
It’s not just that Vance doesn’t know how to speak to people generally—though that’s certainly true. It’s that he doesn’t know how to speak to the exact people he wrote an entire book about! He only knows how to pander, but he can only successfully pander up. Everyone else gets a lame joke about how soda—excuse me, Diet Mountain Dew, official beverage of the hill people—is racist now. Which points to another way Vance hasn’t changed: He despises the people he grew up around as much today as he did when he was happily calling them layabouts and drug addicts on CNN and NPR. The only difference is that he’s now asking for their votes.
And yet Vance has successfully rebranded himself as not only one of Trump’s heirs but perhaps the future of Trumpism itself. Given where he was eight years ago—when he was literally calling Trump “cultural heroin”—this is a testament to Vance’s well-established ability to maneuver himself into the zeitgeist and then out of it into the next one. He may very well end up as Trump’s heir. But there is very little—and arguably no—evidence that a sizable block of voters are buying what he’s selling. There is, moreover, plenty of evidence to suggest that voters are repelled by him.
If, per Alberta’s reporting, Vance was selected to be Trump’s running mate as “a luxury meant to run up margins with the base,” then Trump and the people surrounding him are even dumber than they seem. A more compelling “luxury” explanation suggests that, convinced that he was going to triumph over the enfeebled, senile Biden, Trump was unbothered by the normal considerations that go into selecting a vice president: balancing the ticket—as he did when he selected Mike Pence eight years ago to appeal to religious conservatives—or appealing to voters in a specific swing state. Instead, like the entire RNC, Vance’s selection was Trump spiking the football: By selecting a young, up-and-coming politician who had advanced by explicitly modeling himself on Trump, he was reminding everyone that the GOP is his party now and for the foreseeable future.
He may very well regret that decision. He may already be doing so. With Harris replacing Biden atop the ticket, it is hard to think of a worse running mate for Donald Trump than J.D. Vance.
One week after the Republican National Convention, Biden’s age is no longer a concern. But Trump’s is. A recently released Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 53 percent of voters thought that Trump was “too old” to be president. Without Biden to eclipse his own problems, Trump’s clear physical and mental decline over the last eight years will only grow more apparent—as will scrutiny of the radical, inexperienced 39-year-old who could replace him.
Voters have only gotten a short look at Vance the vice presidential candidate. But they really do not like him. His post-convention approval rating was a dismal minus six, the lowest ever recorded. (The average vice president since 2000, meanwhile, has come in at a more than respectable plus 19.) Many of these voters are repelled by Vance’s obvious fraudulence. But they also are repelled by what he stands for—which is itself very bad news for Trump.
Vance exacerbates Trump’s greatest political weakness. He is an anti-abortion zealot who has advocated for a national ban and compared the medical procedure to slavery. He has defended bans even for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, saying, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” He recently voted for a bill that would have banned in vitro fertilization. He is a virulent misogynist who wants to roll back feminism’s gains and has mocked childless women—naming Kamala Harris as one example—as “miserable cat ladies.”
Abortion was arguably Trump’s biggest weakness before Biden dropped out, given his pivotal role in reversing Roe v. Wade. Having Harris, who has made the issue a signature, as the Democratic nominee only augments it as vulnerability. Vance’s selection makes a mockery of Trump’s feeble denial that he would not sign a national abortion ban if reelected.
Vance’s extremism, of course, extends far beyond abortion and gender. His selection validates concerns about Trump’s own authoritarianism, as well as the radical Project 2025—from which Trump has weakly tried to disentangle himself. At every turn, Vance exacerbates Trump’s biggest weaknesses. It’s still not clear what, if anything, if he brings to the table.
It is possible that none of this will matter. Vice presidential nominees rarely do. But Vance’s selection has the potential to be an own goal of historical proportions. Yes, John McCain’s 2008 selection of the chaotic, inexperienced Sarah Palin was a disaster, but it was also a desperation move by a campaign that was losing and needed an injection of enthusiasm. Vance’s selection is something altogether different. When Trump picked him just over a week ago, the possibility of Biden dropping out of the race and Harris (or another younger Democrat) replacing him was not some far-fetched fantasy. It had been the biggest story in the country for weeks. But Trump didn’t hedge. Instead, he went ahead and chose the absolute worst running mate he could have—a fact that only reinforces questions about Trump’s own terrible judgment.
It’s worth asking again: For whom is this iteration of J.D. Vance designed? It is not so clear now. He is, in many ways, tailor-made to appeal to right-wing Silicon Valley venture capitalists. His benefactor and occasional puppet master, Peter Thiel, is certainly in his corner, as are the handful of weirdo bloggers and “intellectuals” whose work he trumpets and sometimes tries to turn into policy. Donald Trump may or may not be. Beyond that, though, he has shockingly little appeal. Most people see him for what he is: a fraud, a freak, a weirdo—who might become president anyway.
