JD Vance speaking at an event in Michigan during an event on June 16, three days before he accepted the nomination to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate at the GOP convention. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Ohio Senator JD Vance is a millionaire venture capitalist whose political career has been lavishly underwritten by right-wing billionaires such as Peter Thiel and has much of his wealth invested in the stock market, so when he proclaimed the Republican Party was done “catering to Wall Street” at the GOP convention Wednesday night in accepting the nomination to be the vice presidential running mate of hedge fund and private equity torchbearer Donald Trump, only the most credulous, uninformed dupes could possibly have taken him seriously. Among the political rubes that did were New York Times reporters Maureen Farrell and Rob Copeland, who coauthored a hilarious story that ran in the newspaper today that portrayed Vance as the scourge of Wall Street.
I have no idea who the Times duo spoke to other than the few sources named in the article, but their conclusion that the GOP has been taken over by radical anti-capitalists out to destroy the American Way of Life will surely come as a surprise to Trump backers such as Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Shaun Maguire and Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital, venture capitalist David Sacks, who spoke at the convention two nights before Vance, and Elon Musk, who recently pledged to donate $45 million a month to a Super PAC that’s working to elect the former president. Sacks and Musk are so petrified by the threat Vance represents to Corporate America that they personally lobbied Trump to make him his running mate.
Vance says he’s an enemy of Wall Street, which plays well in Ohio, especially for a Republican candidate, but it’s about as credible as when Bill Clinton looked into the camera back in 1998 and swore he didn’t have sex with Monica Lewinsky. Even if one takes Vance at his word when he calls for a crackdown on the corporate class and espouses pro-worker policies — which I don’t, but putting that aside for the moment — it’s preposterous to think he’s actually going to follow through as Trump’s vice president if the latter wins the November election. He certainly didn’t accomplish much in that regard after being elected to the senate two years ago and the idea that he’s a genuine enemy of Wall Street completely collapses after spending 15 minutes reviewing his Wikipedia profile and the summary of his campaign finances compiled by the indispensable nonpartisan watchdog group Open Secrets.
At Wikipedia you will learn that after graduating from law school, Vance worked for fervently pro-business Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas and soon moved to San Francisco, where he became a principal at Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital. While working there he rocketed to fame with his moronic 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, and was crowned the “voice of the Rust Belt” by the Washington Post. From there, Vance returned to his home state and founded the nonprofit Our Ohio Renewal, which “closed after less than two years with sparse achievements.” According to a Business Insider story cited by Wikipedia, in its first year the group “spent more on ‘management services’ provided by its executive director Jai Chabria,” Vance’s top political adviser, than it did on fighting opioid abuse, which was supposedly one its top priorities.
OK, but people can change. Perhaps Vance got serious about standing up to the corporate oligarchy and Wall Street after he was elected to the senate in 2022. He didn’t, which is seen at the Open Secrets website.
It shows the top industry that’s financed Vance’s political career thus far is — you already guessed, didn’t you? — Securities and Investment, which means Wall Street, big banks, hedge funds and investment firms, which have given him a combined $779,667. (I’m excluding the category “retired,” which isn’t a business industry.) When you look at his biggest PAC contributors, you find Finance, Insurance and Real Estate in the No. 1 position — again, I’m only looking at the corporate sector, so I’m not counting donations from GOP organizations, which raise piles of money from the corporate oligarchy, single issue groups, and the like — and “Miscellaneous Business” at No. 2.
If you’re looking for a bit more information on Vance’s historic role as an anti-corporate crusader I’ll point you to this recent story in Business Insider about where he invests his millions, which includes large stakes in Walmart, an Exchange-Traded Fund that tracks the oil energy, and index funds linked to the Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S & P 500. Lastly, take a gander at this Forbes article, “Here Are J.D. Vance’s Biggest Billionaire Donors,” where Thiel (net worth: $7.9 billion) is at the top of the charts with contributions of $15 million, and others in the Top Ten include Pilot Flying J truck stop empire heir Jimmy Haslam ($8 billion), who’s also a donor to radical socialist GOP Senators Rick Scott and Ron Johnson, and former Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler ($1 billion, which makes her a relative pauper), who’s married to billionaire Jeff Sprecher, the founder and CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange.
That’s all it takes to know that Wall Street CEOs and corporate executives aren’t trembling with fear of Vance, but trembling in anticipation of uncorking the champagne if Trump wins back the White House and brings him to Washington along for the ride.
This first appeared in Washington Babylon.
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