J. D. Vance Has Been Chosen; Has He Convinced Himself Yet?

A month ago I wrote a piece about Ohio senator — and now Trump vice-presidential nominee — J. D. Vance, and before we go any further, I really want to emphasize how many decades ago that feels like. Does anyone remember laughter? Does anyone remember “the before times,” my dear friends? When we could chuckle in our bucolic, Edenic innocence at the fall of Jamaal Bowman or the tackling of moronic climate protesters?

It matters more than as a mere observation of how wild this summer has been, because I evaluated Vance before (1) smoke began pouring out of the ears of the current president live onstage like a poorly programmed robot being asked to name a word that rhymes with “orange,” and then (2) his opponent, the former president, came within centimeters of having his head turned into mist in front of ten thousand cheering fans and in HDTV. After those two events — which, much to the utter despair of Democrats nervously eyeing swing-state polls, the nearest rafter, and that beguilingly thick coil of rope in the corner, must be considered in conjunction — everybody just assumes Trump is destined to win. (This of course is why when the next neck-snapping turn in our 2024 electoral drama hits, you will never see it coming.)

There’s a lot of water under the psychological bridge since then, which gives you a sense how dangerously pell-mell the current blitzkrieg rush of American politics has become just since January of this year. But back in June, I took Vance very seriously as a potential vice-presidential pick simply because he made it clear in his interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times that he was a serious man. This is no play for demographics.

Now, it is true that Vance lacks any serious executive or political experience — or extended experience with anything at all, outside of brief stints as a Marine journalist, Yale Law student, San Francisco venture capitalist, and best-selling memoirist. (He’s been a senator since 2022 as well.) Some think experience is overrated; I thought it was a decent enough book, at least. My concern was more about some of the arguments he was advancing in defense of Trump’s theory of a stolen 2020 election, with seeming sincerity. Brilliant intellects can often be put to ill use. (Hey: Read the piece. It’s good.)

Given all that has happened (and may happen yet), it seems impossible to say if Vance will have any real effect on the ticket electorally. But since you have to at least pretend to be confident in this business, I suppose I stand by my earlier thumbnail assessment: Vance brings little to the table demographically that Trump has not himself securely rounded up into his corner. This, as Michael Brendan Dougherty has savvily zeroed in on in his musings about a potential Vance pick, is a pick that broadcasts a deepening of his preexisting ideological affiliations rather than an attempt to “expand” his brand — the promise of actual change. And frankly, maybe that is for the best; too much ideological incoherence in pursuit of evanescent popularity (a temptation one imagines Trump to be especially vulnerable to) is always a danger. Vance as a vice president instead offers voters an undeniably intelligent man as Trump’s potential successor, one with a distinct populist agenda altogether different from Trump’s from-the-hip style.

Will it matter? J. D. Vance as vice president may be the one man that a reelected Donald Trump would be constitutionally incapable of firing, but you can kiss whatever “national conservative” policy vision Vance might have had goodbye if it ever comes to crossing Trump or his perceived best interests in public. If this is a matter of having the president’s ear and making good use of it, that’s one thing. Vance fails the Pence test by his own account — any VP pick ultimately was guaranteed to, a depressing comment on the moral demands Trump makes upon all potential collaborators — but I am otherwise sanguine enough about his politics, and in a way many others on the right are not. I am pretty sure Democrats will not be, however. You are about to hear four months of messaging around J. D. Vance from the left as: “Trumpism, But This Time They Really Mean It.” (Mark my words: That’s the play.)

And there is an extremely good chance that none of it will matter — none of it at all. Smarter people than I have long realized that vice-presidential picks don’t matter much in terms of moving votes, and in any event we are currently living through the late stages of an election in which most traditional rules other than “look at the polls” are long since out the window anyway. (One candidate halted and caught fire during a debate; the other avoided an assassin’s bullet on live television because he chanced to turn his head at the right time. We’re in crazytown.) The polls look as bad for Biden as they always have, and so long as they do, it’s denying your rational faculties to pretend we’re heading to any destination other than a second Trump term, this time with Ohio’s prodigal son as vice president. May he make proper use of his moment.