Who is J.D. Vance?

Historically, a weak vice-presidential running mate is more likely to hurt a candidate than a strong one is to help. Mike Pence, former President Donald Trump’s erstwhile ally, was an exceptional case.

Genteel, orthodox, and thoroughly Christian, the governor of Indiana placated the old guard’s misgivings about Trump’s uncouth personality, shoring up the frontman’s many faults and weaknesses. Leading many a hesitant voter to the polls, he proved it possible to stand by the president’s conservative agenda while shying away from his more provocative leadership style and rhetoric.

But that was 2016. That was back when Republicans’ mismatched relationship with Trump was far more transactional and cynical. That was back before the party dropped the formerly ubiquitous disclaimer: “I agree with Trump’s policies, BUT…” For better or worse, that caveat has since disappeared, now a relic of the past and a party that once kept Trump at arm’s length. The former president has solidified his control over the movement: MAGA is here to stay, and Trump’s 2024 vice presidential candidate, first and foremost, reflects that shift.

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio does not broaden Trump’s appeal—he deepens it. The 2024 Republican nominee is doubling down. He does not need (or want) another Pence.

If Trump had wanted to appeal to voters in Virginia, a battleground state that Trump lost in 2016 and 2020, he would have tapped their popular Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, one of the few Republicans to win an election since Trump left office. If he wanted to bolster his standing amongst black voters (a mere 8% of whom voted for him in 2020), he might have considered Byron Donalds or Dr. Ben Carson. Latinos? Marco Rubio. Females and lukewarm traditionalists? Nikki Haley.

Instead, he went with Vance. Why?

The junior senator from Ohio is, as others have pointed out, a show of confidence. A running mate like Vance means that Trump expects to win in November by a landslide. Rather than disappoint his base—who, at this point, would vote for him no matter who he picked—with another conciliatory Pence-like figure, Trump offered them a self-assured thank-you for their emphatic support: a thoroughly and ideologically MAGA heir apparent.

During Trump’s first term, many conservatives mistakenly assumed that “MAGA,” whatever exactly that meant, would live, move, and have its being in Trump alone. Post-Trump, the pash was sure to fade. After all, MAGA had no apologists. It had no cohesive worldview or vision, no Buckleys, Goldwaters, or Kirks to articulate its precepts. MAGA was purely reactionary, and its days were numbered.

Or so we thought.

J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old Yale Law School graduate and New York Times bestselling author, shattered that already-dying illusion. He proved that MAGA has a future beyond Trump himself, not to mention a newfound sense of intellectual coherence. MAGA, the Pied Piper’s enigma, is no more; MAGA, the political philosophy, has arrived.

However, how Vance himself arrived at that philosophy is far less black and white than the politics he personifies.

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For those now seeking to understand their potential future vice president, the task is made easier by, ironically, a staple of the Left’s 2016-2017 discourse: Vance’s hugely successful memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“You will not read a more important book about America this year,” The Economist claimed three months before Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Vance’s personal account of growing up in a poor, abusive, middle-class, white, drug-addled family in Middletown, Ohio, was embraced by the liberal intelligentsia as a prism through which to interpret the baffling rise of Trump. At the time, Vance was deeply critical of the president, whom he called a “reprehensible,” “total fraud,” “moral disaster,” and “cultural heroin.” “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical [expletive] like Nixon,” he once wrote, “or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

However, he also professed to understand and speak for the people who voted for that “Hitler,” transforming him—somewhat unwillingly—into the Left’s go-to prophet—“the voice of the Rust Belt”—for deciphering Trump’s appeal. As Netflix, who adapted Vance’s book into a controversial 2020 film, relayed, “The memoir’s description of the white working classes was seen as a unique insight into the supporters who fueled [Trump’s] winning campaign.”

Having grown up in Middle America, Vance always sympathized with the plight of everyday Americans. “I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scotch-Irish descent who have no college degree,” the Yale graduate wrote in his book. “To these folks, poverty is the family tradition… Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”

Paradoxically, however, Vance championed his message primarily to coastal elites, clinching commentary gigs for CNN and The New York Times. For a Midwestern native like Vance, it was an impressive feat, no doubt, but one which may have temporarily alienated him from the demographic he claimed to speak for. “Hillbilly Elegy” and Vance’s columns and TED Talks were curated for consumption by educated liberals who wanted to gawk at the author’s strange “neighbors, friends and family” like a foreign species. They were not designed for the rednecks themselves.

It is, perhaps, shocking, then, that four years later, Vance found himself center stage at the Republican National Convention, ripping into those same coastal elites who had once applauded his book, having just accepted the nomination to serve as vice president under the man he had previously denounced as Hitler.

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Seven years ago, when Megyn Kelly asked the future senator if he might one day run for office, Vance laughed uncomfortably. “You never say never,” he replied. “It’s just not something I think about doing right now.” Five years later, Vance became one of the only Trump-endorsed candidates to win his race in the 2022 midterm election. That same night, Republican Governors Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp, both of whom were viewed, at the time, as rivals to Trump, were reelected by wide margins. Otherwise, the highly anticipated “Red Wave” failed to materialize; suffering humiliating losses in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, MAGA’s future appeared open to question. In a prediction that did not age well, National Review writer Ari Blaff claimed, “President Trump’s handpicked and endorsed candidates largely underperformed or outright lost their midterm contests on Tuesday, deflating the former president’s status as a party kingmaker and likely 2024 GOP presidential nominee.”

MAGA may have entered its darkest moment, but Senator J.D. Vance’s moment to shine had just arrived.

“He is one of the few political leaders in America that recognizes the frustration that exists in large parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, eastern Kentucky, and so forth,” Vance said of Trump in 2018. By 2020, he had apologized for his past condemnation of the 45th president. Shortly thereafter, Trump rewarded the convert with a highly coveted endorsement.

Sworn in as the junior senator from the Buckeye States on January 3, 2023, Vance quickly set out to reinvigorate MAGA. He did not merely embrace the MAGA doctrine; he helped define it. Even Vance’s fiercest critics noted that he brought a certain philosophical and intellectual robustness to the movement.

“Trump has impulses, whereas Vance has an ideology,” maintained perennial MAGA fault-finder David French.  “He’s done more work than just about any politician in America to create something coherent out of MAGA’s concerns and MAGA’s grievances. He doesn’t just want to possess power, he wants to wield it in quite specific ways. To the extent that MAGA has ideological legs after Trump leaves the scene, it will in large part be because of Vance.”

But Vance, one can imagine, could not care less about what French thinks. Such establishment figures are, after all, anathema to MAGA. Over the past four years, Vance has effectively transformed his commentary to coastal elites about Trump voters on its head. Now, he is, quite literally, speaking to Trump voters about the elites who once courted his friendship. Only now, he is far less sympathetic to his subject.

“I grew up in Middletown, Ohio,” the 2024 vice presidential candidate stated during his convention speech, “a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their communities, and their country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.” Such is the gripe at the heart of Vance’s variegated persona. But, whereas he used to urge such D.C.-forsaken communities to take responsibility for their stunted upward mobility, questioning the effectiveness of government intervention, he has now simplified his message. “I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse,” he outlined in “Hillbilly Elegy.” Now, he’s back to cursing the government. In the book, he accused those who depended on (and, often, “gamed”) the welfare system of being lazy (“you can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness,” he deplored); in his RNC speech, he blamed the government for taking their jobs. Perhaps, both can be true at once. Nevertheless, the former message has all but vanished from his rhetoric.

“As always, America’s ruling class wrote the checks. Communities like mine paid the price,” he quipped about the opioid epidemic many of his fellow Middletown residents have succumbed to. “For decades, that divide between the few with their power and comfort in Washington and the rest of us only widened,” he continued. “The people who govern this country have failed and failed again.”

Earlier this year, he posted a similar message on X. “Our entire elite is like this,” he said about Claudine Gay after the former Harvard president resigned. “People who got their jobs because they checked boxes, not because they achieved something amazing or accomplished something meaningful. That is now the purpose of our elite universities, to give credentials that signal fake merit rather than rely on real excellence…. You are ruled by thousands of people who are just as mediocre.” He urged his followers to “mock,” “ignore,” “laugh at,” “scorn,” and “question” those who claimed to be experts—and we can imagine he will do the same as vice president.

Senator Vance’s stances on the national debt, term limits, and Convention of States underscore a deep-seated disdain for America’s elites, whom he holds responsible for the failures of the middle class. And yet, rather than merely reacting to such conditions, he is laying the groundwork for a lasting intellectual opposition to the religion of faith in the state. Even as he calls for the nation to question the prevailing political orthodoxies of the past six decades—orthodoxies which, he says, have utterly failed Rust Belt Americans like himself—he props up a MAGA-influenced alternative in their place.

“Twentieth-century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship,”' Alan Brinkley mocked in his “The Problem of American Conservatism.” The same was true of MAGA. But, just as Russell Kirk “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement” with his formidable tome, “The Conservative Mind,” J.D. Vance is set to correct the same insufficiency. Not with historical scholarship per se, but with articulated sensibilities, a forward-facing vision, and the calming assurance that the post-Trump movement will be just as thoroughly (perhaps even more) MAGA in its leanings than when Trump himself held the reins.

Whether or not he will succeed, we cannot yet determine. (Vance, we must remember, is still a relative newcomer to the political arena, having served less than two years in his first official government job. Moreover, he is somewhat malleable, which, no doubt, explains Trump’s fondness for him). But, if he stays the course, one can easily foresee the permanence of a new intellectual Right—one rooted in neither conservative nor liberal think tanks, professors, and philosopher kings, but the American people.