Some news reports have also referenced Vance’s apparent association with Catholic Integralism, although Vance himself has not addressed the issue publicly.
So, now might be a good time to ask: What is Catholic Integralism?
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Written by Diana Thebaud Nicholson // October 2, 2024 // Politics, U.S. // No comments
What to Know About J.D. Vance -NYT
Hillbilly Elegy (film)
55 Things to Know About JD Vance – Politico
Donald Trump’s pick for vice president made a 180-degree turn from fierce critic to bulldog surrogate for the former president.
Opioid of the Masses
To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh. By J. D. Vance (2016)
Ian Bremmer: How did JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” become his VP pick?
because Vance is really smart, very aligned with Trump. He’s very, let’s say, situationally ideological and wants to win
1-2 October
Ruth Marcus: JD Vance is a dangerous, disciplined shape-shifter
The Republican vice-presidential candidate is Trump with a brain and a strategy.
Vance’s Oscar-worthy debate performance ought to be alarming, not reassuring. He is Trump with a brain, a strategy and the discipline to execute it. Trump has only one move — to counterpunch. Vance’s repertoire is more expansive. He can be silken smooth and at least superficially appealing, while Trump has a single note, bombastic.
Maybe, given Vance’s historic unpopularity, his re-reinvention comes too late to matter. My fear is, instead, that it is unnervingly early — designed not so much as a game-changer in 2024 as an audition tape for 2028 and beyond.
Vance refuses to say Trump lost in 2020, sparking debate’s biggest clash
Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called Sen. JD Vance’s non-answer “damning” as the pair sparred over Jan. 6 and Trump’s refusal to concede defeat
Reactions after Walz and Vance focus on policy over personal attacks
Walz and Vance clashed over policy but stayed mostly cordial
The Mideast, immigration, abortion and the economy featured
Walz called Trump unstable
Vance said Harris had failed in office
Trump posted furiously throughout
Vance says he’s ‘focused on the future.’ That’s really MAGA 2.0.
Smoother than the Trump version, but just as shameless and untethered from the truth.
Walz and Vance kept agreeing with each other
A heated discussion over Jan. 6, 2021 was one of the few tense moments of the debate tonight.
The behind-the-scenes feud animating tonight’s debate
(Politico) When Tim Walz and JD Vance take the stage tonight for their first and likely only vice presidential debate, the meeting of Midwesterners will also showcase another Rust Belt proxy battle: the long-simmering feud between Vance and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Vice President Kamala Harris commended Buttigieg — like Vance, one of his party’s millennial stars — to Walz as an excellent sparring partner after his turn playing fellow Hoosier Mike Pence during 2020 debate prep after his own presidential bid ran aground in March of that year. Back then, Buttigieg embodied Pence’s mannerisms and folksy I truly do believe expressions; this time, he channeled Vance, in part, by donning a red tie.
Once again, it’s personal for Buttigieg — who has had a years-long war of words and ideas with both of the candidates he’s played in debate prep.
CBS decided to make fact-checking opt-in
CBS News will instead have a QR code on screen directing viewers to live fact-checking by journalists on their website.
(Politico) In lieu of moderator intervention, the network announced they will provide a QR code onscreen that will direct viewers to the CBS News website, where journalists online will be fact-checking the candidates’ remarks in real time. The QR code will only be available for those watching on CBS, not on other networks airing the simulcast.
Publicly: Everything’s fine. Privately: The Harris team is worried.
This may be the last major campaign event before November — and Dems are aware of the stakes.
…some Harris advisers acknowledge the uniquely high stakes for Tim Walz, given this may be the last major campaign event before November. No other debates are currently scheduled.
They’re still confident the governor can paint a stark contrast between Harris and former President Donald Trump on topics like foreign policy, labor and disaster funding and abortion access. But top Harris aides admit that Vance is a sharp and skilled debater.
A deluge of news earlier today is also adding to the pressure and forcing both candidates to reevaluate their plans, with a growing conflict in the Middle East, widening fallout from the catastrophic Hurricane Helene and a major port strike threatening to wreak economic havoc at home just weeks before the election.
We Watched Walz’s and Vance’s Previous Debates. Expect a Slugfest.
A review of the vice presidential contenders’ past debates suggests a fiery clash is likely.
Robert Reich: The single most important thing to listen for in tonight’s debate
Tonight, JD Vance will almost certainly try to out-Trump Trump, setting himself up to be Trump’s heir and likely Republican presidential candidate four years from now.
Listen carefully to Vance and you’ll probably also hear shades of Richard M. Nixon, because it was Nixon who first began peeling blue-collar workers away from the Democratic Party. Trump and Vance are the lineal descendants of Nixon — as well as Nixon aides Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan.
29 September
J. D. Vance’s Thin Skin Makes Him Vulnerable
Tuesday’s debate may hinge on whether Tim Walz can exploit his rival’s greatest weakness.
By David Frum
(The Atlantic) It has been said that the Trump-Vance ticket is the angriest in recent history. But Vance doesn’t rage and roar onstage the way Trump does. Instead, he seethes with petty peevishness. His disdain for women who deviate from his script for their life is barely disguised, or not disguised at all. It’s an unattractive look. Walz’s job is to provoke Vance into showing that ugly side to a huge national audience. How to do it?
…Vance himself believes that the “phony” charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.
Vance has changed his identity, beliefs, religion, personal history, even his name. He’s a Yale graduate and a venture capitalist who returned home to Ohio only to run for office, and had to be hauled over the finish line in this now-red state by a last-minute gift of $32 million in GOP campaign funds from his party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. Vance is a servant of America’s richest men; his elevation to the presidential ticket produced promises of tens of millions of dollars in super-PAC contributions to the Trump campaign. He was a fierce Trump critic in The Atlantic during the 2016 election, and in private messages as late as February 2020. In the book that made him famous, Vance urged the white working class to stop blaming foreigners and shadowy elites for their troubles. He then ran for office on a message of blaming foreigners and shadowy elites.
14 September
Vance’s media strategy takes a turn
He was Trump’s policy whisperer to key voting blocs. Now, he’s fueling rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating cats and dogs.
(Politico) Since Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic ticket and became former President Donald Trump’s opponent, Sen. JD Vance has conducted over 70 media hits, sat down with liberal podcast hosts and conservative commentators alike, appeared on all five Sunday shows and regularly engaged with reporters.
But his effort to reach out to a wider array of voters now faces a setback. Vance and Trump both claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets — a move that has alarmed some Republicans who want the campaign to focus on their opponent Harris and the state of the economy, a top issue for both parties ahead of November.
JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers
(AP) … His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
The professors and media personalities in this network don’t all agree on everything but most go by “postliberal.” Vance has used that term to describe himself, though the Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to questions about where Vance sees himself in the movement and whether he shares some of the beliefs promoted by many postliberals.
Catholic conservatives of the past have seen big government as a problem rather than a solution, the postliberals want a muscular government.
They envision a counterrevolution in which they influence government bureaucracy and institutions like universities from within, replacing entrenched “elites” with their own and acting upon the “common good.”
… “What is needed … is regime change — the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order,” wrote Patrick Deneen, a prominent author in the movement, in his 2023 book, “Regime Change.”
Vance has signaled his alignment with some of what Catholic postliberals advocate. He’s said the next time his allies control the presidency or Congress, “we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power” and said Republicans should seize institutions, including universities “to make them work for our people.”
9 August
We Mapped JD Vance’s Inner Circle
Silicon Valley donors, MAGA allies, and political operatives: The networks behind Trump’s VP pick.
(Politico)… Vance’s inner circle already bears the imprint of Trump’s influence, with a handful of advisers and staffers who have one foot in Vance’s camp and one foot in Trump world. But unlike Trump, Vance is deeply plugged into the New Right intellectual circles that have been driving the political debate within the conservative movement since 2016, and he looks to a core group of these writers, academics and right-leaning policy wonks for informal counsel and advice. Thanks to his days as a venture capitalist, he is also closely tied to the right-most flank of Silicon Valley and its techno-libertarian ideologies — some of which have been branded as “weird” by his new opponent, Democratic vice presidential pick Tim Walz.
8 August
The Post-liberal Catholics Find Their Man
As vice president, J. D. Vance would elevate their disdain for American liberalism to the highest levels of government.
By Damon Linker
(The Atlantic) This group of Catholic intellectuals—which includes Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, and Sohrab Ahmari, a founder and an editor of the eclectically populist magazine Compact—is known for its sweeping attack on classical liberalism. It claims that a long list of contemporary problems (rising rates of economic inequality, drug addiction, suicide, homelessness, childlessness) can be traced back to moral-philosophical errors made centuries ago by the American Founders and their ideological progenitors. In place of our polity’s commitment to individual rights, autonomy, and pluralism, the post-liberals aim to create a society unified around the common good, which is itself fixed on a theological vision of the Highest Good.
4 August
Sofa so bad for JD Vance as Trump’s VP pick faces swirling speculation
(The Guardian) Vance enters the final 100-day stretch of the election season as one of the most unpopular running mates in recent history. According to a CNN analysis, Vance is the least liked non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee since 1980.
… Critics have dug up his past comments supporting a nationwide abortion ban and attacking women without children. In a clip from 2021 that has circulated widely over the past two weeks, Vance told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the US was managed 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”.
JD Vance’s Marine buddies back his service over his politics
(WaPo) Critics call his about-face on Trump an affront to the military’s most basic values. His friends say attacks on his service are out of bounds.
2 August
“Testament to Donald Trump’s strength”: JD Vance credits Trump in Biden hostage deal
Vance, in a stretch of imagination, explains how Trump was responsible for Biden’s deal to free Russian hostages
(Salon) Simone Biles wasn’t the only American doing gymnastics today: JD Vance jumped through hoops to give his running mate undue credit for President Joe Biden’s deal to release four American hostages held in Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, and journalist Alsu Kurmasheva.
The Ohio Senator and vice presidential candidate, who’s proven to be a liability for Trump since he joined the ticket, was asked about the hostage deal in an interview with CNN in Arizona on Thursday.
“We certainly want these Americans to come back home. It was ridiculous that they were in prison to begin with,” Vance said. “But we have to ask ourselves, why are they coming home?”
The Ohio Senator, who acknowledged that the Biden administration’s successful negotiations were “great news,” then made a bold suggestion that former President Trump should be owed credit.
“I think it’s because bad guys all over the world recognize Donald Trump’s about to be back in office, so they’re cleaning house. That’s a good thing, and I think it’s a testament to Donald Trump’s strength.”
A true millennial, JD Vance posted his whole life — and his dog’s — online
People are scouring the vice-presidential nominee’s internet history for clues about his past.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s newly minted running mate, has posted his life on the internet for nearly two decades.
31 July
The Mystery of JD Vance Is Unraveling
By Thomas B. Edsall
JD Vance embodies the pros and cons of political competition in a divided America. He helps and he hurts.
In Vance, Trump clearly sought as his running mate someone young enough, aggressive enough and engaging enough to mobilize a collection of millennials, working-class Midwesterners, families wrecked by opioid abuse, a subset of Ivy League lawyers, Marines, crypto bros, conservative progressives and centrist liberals, among others — an emerging populist coalition designed to beat Trump’s adversaries by nibbling at, or even swiping away huge chunks of, the traditional Democratic electorate.
His obvious talent notwithstanding — and despite his early stumbles — it’s too early to know whether Vance will turn out to be a boon or a bust for the Trump campaign.
30 July
Murkowski slams Vance’s ‘childless cat ladies’ comments as ‘offensive’ to women
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hit her party’s own vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), for what she called “offensive” comments about “childless cat ladies.”
“If the Republican Party is trying to improve its image with women, I don’t think that this is working,” Murkowski told POLITICO, calling Vance’s comments unfortunate, unnecessary and “offensive to many women.”
28 July
Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance
A small influential network of right-wing techies orchestrated Vance’s rise in Silicon Valley — and then the GOP. Now the industry stands to gain if he wins the White House.
(WaPo) For Thiel, Vance’s presence on the ticket is the payoff on a prescient bet placed a decade ago, when he embraced the Yale Law School graduate with Rust Belt roots as his protégé — joining a roster that included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
Especially after the publication in 2016 of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance impressed Thiel’s rarefied Silicon Valley set with what they saw as an omnivorous intellect, mild manner and outsider story of growing up working-class in Ohio — a narrative that resonated after the 2016 election, as tech elites sought to understand how their obsession with building the future was leaving so many Americans behind.
26 July
What’s in a name? Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has had many of them
(AP) Over the course of his 39 years, Vance’s first, middle and last names have all been altered in one way or another. As Vance is being introduced to voters across the country as Donald Trump’s new running mate, his name has been the source of both curiosity and questions — including why he no longer uses periods in JD.
Republicans are already souring on JD Vance
“I’m a little surprised they didn’t vet him as thoroughly as they should have,” said one GOP strategist.
(Politico) Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro bluntly questioned whether Trump should have picked Vance, saying on his show: “If you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, would [Trump] have picked JD Vance again? I doubt it.”
Other Republicans also wondered aloud if the Trump campaign had truly anticipated the tidal wave of resurfaced comments, book writings and remarks that would come with picking a 39-year-old, recently elected senator who had grown up online and was firmly seated on the right of the Republican Party.
“Of the people that were mentioned as finalists, he had the most risk, because he had never been vetted nationally,” said Bill McCoshen, a Republican strategist in Wisconsin.
27 July
Politico Playbook: The JD Vance remorse parade
By Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.
THE VANCE CATFIGHT —The WSJ editorial board is joining the pile-on over Sen. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies.”
In a tough piece posted last night, Paul Gigot and colleagues call the comment “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
They see the speed and breadth of the coverage of Vance’s remark as evidence “that this is Mr. Vance’s first big cultural impression, and not a good one.”
They are unimpressed with Vance’s efforts to clean things up on Megyn Kelly’s podcast yesterday (“he wasn’t at all apologetic”), and they come away with this surprising conclusion about the episode: “One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices.”
And then they move on to attack some of Vance’s other past ideas. His proposal that families without children should pay higher taxes is “bad policy” and “bad politics” and would amount to using the tax code “as a political and cultural weapon against people who don’t share his values.”
The editorial gives voice to what’s been a quiet murmur we’ve been hearing from some corners of the right all week: Does DONALD TRUMP regret picking Vance?
The cliche in politics is that the first rule for a running mate is do no harm. Vance already started off “as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party’s convention,” CNN numbers guy Harry Enten said recently.
Theoretically, Trump could replace Vance if he wants, Business Insider notes. But Trump so far has stood by his man. “He’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump said on Thursday.
JD Vance is giving Republicans buyer’s remorse
Americans on both sides of the political divide are talking about the candidate’s stumbles.
(WaPo) Is there anyone in America who hasn’t heard in recent days what JD Vance said in a 2021 interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson? The best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” who was embarking on a U.S. Senate race in Ohio, asserted that Democrats — including Vice President Harris, whom he called out by name — are “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.”
… Trump surely doesn’t enjoy being asked, as he has, whether he regrets his impulsive choice of a Mini-Me as a running mate. “He’s doing really well,” the former president has insisted. “He’s really caught on.” And in one sense, that is true. Vance is giving people a lot to talk about.
25 July
Paul Krugman: JD Vance’s ‘Cat Ladies’ Riff Has Serious ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Vibes
You may have heard about JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” riff. But even if you have, it’s worth revisiting the full quote — and reminding yourself of what it says about the movement that may wind up in charge of this country after this year’s election.
In 2021, while running for the Senate, Vance explained what he saw as one of the biggest problems facing America: It’s being run “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 name-checked, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris. …
As I see it, one of the great virtues of modern America is the freedom it offers its citizens to decide for themselves how to live their lives — a freedom, ironically, that Republicans used to tout all the time. And I see the increase in women’s freedom, including the protection of their right to decide whether to have children, as something that benefits all of us — men included.
But there are many people like Vance who want to limit or even take away that freedom.
“We are not going back” has already emerged as perhaps the key slogan of Harris’s presidential campaign. But depending on how this election turns out, we may indeed be going back — way, way back.
24 July
J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion
How might the Republican V.P. nominee’s conversion to conservative Catholicism influence his political world view?
(New Yorker) … He became a Catholic in 2019, and since then he has aligned himself with conservative-Catholic currents of thought that have already had profound effects on the Supreme Court—and, through the Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, on American life broadly. Should Vance become the Vice-President, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—all conservative Catholics—would have a Catholic ally of like mind in the executive branch. (President Biden’s Catholicism leans progressive, and is more devotional than doctrinal.) For now, Vance’s presence on the ticket represents the union of Trumpism and a movement that sees Catholicism as the embodiment of tradition, stability, and a top-down ordering of society, which would be enshrined through regime change. That’s a lot of symbolism to lay on a commitment of faith that a thirty-nine-year-old man made just five years ago, but Vance’s embrace of Catholicism is deeply bound up with his stated belief that religion has the power to shape the country.
20 July
Sean Speer: The rise of JD Vance and the reshaping of the Right
(The Hub) … I encountered Vance again months later at a National Review event in Washington where he spoke about the pros and cons of a conservative message focused on personal responsibility and how conservatives might reconcile their free-market thinking with the working-class people that he wrote about. At the time, his focus on “forgotten people and places” was unique in conservative circles but his political orientation was not. He was, like me, a rather conventional conservative.
I’ve continued to follow his own extraordinary political trajectory due in part to this past connection, and in part because his personal transformation into a leading conservative populist and now Trump’s vice-presidential candidate has reflected broader changes in Anglo-American conservatism. Although he may now be the most significant figure in the conservative realignment, he’s by no means the only one.
19 July
What is Catholic Integralism?
Mathew Schmalz,Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross
(The Conversation) Since his nomination as the Republican candidate for vice president, focus has intensified on JD Vance’s religious beliefs and how they connect to his politics.
Vance is a convert to Catholicism and seems to have the same policy positions that many American Catholic conservatives hold: opposition to abortion, support for the traditional family, skepticism regarding liberal immigration policies and efforts to combat climate change, and advocacy of economic tariffs.
Some news reports have also referenced Vance’s apparent association with Catholic Integralism, although Vance himself has not addressed the issue publicly.
So, now might be a good time to ask: What is Catholic Integralism?
19 July
Leaked memo shows J.D. Vance’s anti-woke ideology on foreign affairs
Trump’s VP pick froze dozens of ambassador nominations over issues like gender transition care and diversity hiring, offering a glimpse into his anti-establishment views.
(WaPo) Before J.D. Vance became Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, he was known in the most powerful offices of the State Department as the single biggest obstacle to confirming career ambassadors in the Senate.
Armed with a questionnaire on hot-button social issues about gay and lesbian rights, gender transition care and hiring practices related to diversity, equity and inclusion, Vance (R-Ohio) held up for more than a year the nominations of dozens of diplomats assigned to serve in posts across the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
… For many conservatives, Vance’s oversight was a welcome response to long-standing concerns within the GOP that the United States has elevated left-leaning social values at the expense of American interests and alienating partners in more conservative regions of Africa, Latin America or Asia.
How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics
‘A lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien.’
(Politico Magazine) When Donald Trump selected JD Vance as his running mate, he elevated the first millennial who will appear on a presidential ticket. That makes Vance the first politician who came of age during the Iraq War and the Great Recession, an internet native whose political rise coincided with the development of a new group of conservatives that would become the New Right.
But perhaps Vance’s most millennial trait is just how geeky he is about Lord of the Rings. The trilogy of novels has been a longstanding nerd favorite for decades, but it became the center of culture during Vance’s high school years thanks to Peter Jackson’s movies.
…true fans know there are a total of 20 rings of power. Vance is apparently among those ranks, as the venture capital firm he founded in 2019 is named Narya, named after one of those other rings that Gandalf wears. Vance’s mentor Peter Thiel similarly named his company Palantir after the crystal ball used by Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and Vance has invested in the defense startup Anduril, named after Aragorn’s sword.
Luke Burgis, author of a book about René Girard (another of Vance’s intellectual heroes) and Catholic University of America professor, said he suspects “Vance’s appreciation of Tolkien is not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism in 2019. Of the many ways that Tolkien’s work exemplifies the Catholic imagination, one is the relationship between the visible and the invisible. I think it’s fair to say that Vance believes there is real spiritual evil in this world, and it can become embodied in rites and rituals.” (At a closed-door speech in September 2021, Vance said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society.)
… Those close to Vance say he has been undergoing an awakening since he converted to Catholicism in 2019.
Conservative writer Rod Dreher, who Vance invited to his initiation to the faith in 2019 and was present for his first communion, told me that Vance “is thinking broadly about how all must join in the great struggle against darkness — there is no avoiding the struggle — and how God can use the humble and the lowborn to do great things.”
“Think about it: Who would have imagined that sad, scared little Ohio boy living in a wreck of a family would have come through it all, and risen to the gates of supreme political power? What might God be doing with him? J.D. Vance might be Frodo of the Hollers, a veritable hillbilly hobbit.”
18 July
J. D. Vance’s Permanent Grin
The Republican vice-presidential candidate’s MAGA transformation is complete.
By John Hendrickson
(The Atlantic) J. D. Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention completed his transformation from Never Trumper to Trump’s MAGA torchbearer.
Vance dutifully spent his first five minutes praising the GOP leader sitting in front of him. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump,” he told the crowd. “And then look at that photo of him, defiant fist in the air.”
When he turned to policy, he sounded especially Trumpian. Under the Trump-Vance administration, he said, “When we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” He spoke of preserving “the continuity of this project,” of reopening factories and making products “with the hands of American workers.” He blamed the country’s real-estate woes on the “millions of illegal aliens” Democrats had “flooded” into the United States. Citizens, he said, “had to compete with people who shouldn’t even be here for precious housing.” …
Many Republicans seem enamored with Vance’s life story: He grew up poor in Middletown, Ohio, joined the Marines, then earned degrees from Ohio State and Yale Law School. Plus he’s only 39. “Very, very smart, remarkable entrepreneur, great background in middle America,” Newt Gingrich told me of Vance while posing for selfies on the convention floor. “It will be fascinating to watch him debate Kamala.” Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told me that Trump had made “a great pick” in selecting the Ohio senator. “He’s going to be able to go into areas in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that normally don’t vote for Republicans, and when people get to know his life story, I think it’s going to resonate pretty well,” McCarthy said. …
At a panel this morning hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and The Cook Political Report, the Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio….said that Trump’s easiest path to 270 electoral votes is to win every state he won in 2020, plus Georgia and Pennsylvania. Vance, he predicted, would appeal to blue-collar voters. As proof, he pointed to the way the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, had praised Vance during his fiery RNC speech on Monday night. Without holding the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, Biden cannot win this election. Trump’s team is ready to exploit this weakness. “You will see J. D. Vance planted in Rust Belt states very heavily between now and election day,” Fabrizio said. As it happens, Trump and Vance are already scheduled to appear at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this coming Saturday.
17 July
I Thought I Understood the GOP. I Was Wrong.
The Ohio Republican Party has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance.
By Stuart Stevens
(The Atlantic) What happened to the Ohio GOP? For generations, it was the epitome of a sane, high-functioning party with a boringly predictable pro-business sentiment that seemed to perfectly fit the state. Today, it has been remade in the image of native son J. D. Vance, the first vice-presidential candidate to sanction coup-plotting against the U.S. government.
In a speech to the Republican National Convention tonight that was virtually devoid of policy, he railed against corrupt elites and pledged his fealty to the man he once compared to heroin, suggesting that the American experiment depended on former President Donald Trump’s election.
Heather Cox Richardson July 16, 2024
The last time a Republican vice presidential nominee has been named so late was 1988, and while announcing at the convention has the benefit of generating enthusiasm for the novel story, it has the downside of bringing an avalanche of opposition. Vance brought the latter.
JD Vance And Peter Thiel: What To Know About The Relationship Between Trump’s VP Pick And The Billionaire
Antonio Pequeño IV
JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, has had a long, collaborative relationship with GOP donor and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, one that has aided Vance from his time in venture capital to his role as an Ohio senator.
(Forbes) Vance and Thiel’s relationship dates back to 2011, when the senator met Thiel following a talk the venture capitalist gave at Yale Law School that Vance has characterized as “the most significant moment of my time” at the institution, according to a blog post he wrote for Catholic magazine The Lamp.
Vance began planning for a career pivot outside of law following the talk, noting Thiel was “possibly the smartest person” he ever met and that Thiel’s Christian faith “defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists,” according to the post.
Thiel later became a “pretty good mentor” to Vance, according to The Washington Post, with Vance making the switch to venture capital and joining the Thiel-co-founded Mithril Capital in 2015 as a partner, according to Politico.
Trump chose Vance to reinforce his message
Elaine Kamarck
(Brookings) For much of American history, vice presidents were chosen to “balance” the ticket.
It was only when the reinforcing model came into vogue that the Office of the Vice President developed its own importance and influence, beginning with Al Gore and increasing with Dick Cheney.
Trump has made an effective choice in Senator Vance. Vance will not only reinforce Trump’s core messages, but also he will be trustworthy as a vice president.
The inside story of how Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate
Once a critic, Vance repositioned himself as a faithful ally eager to defend Trump on TV, carry a torch for a younger generation of MAGA figures and fight for voters in the Midwest.
(NBC) …Donald Trump met privately to discuss his running mate search with two of his closest advisers: his sons.
“They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.
15 July
What to Know About J.D. Vance, Trump’s Running Mate
(NYT) Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, the newly announced running mate to former President Donald J. Trump, has gone on a rapid journey over the past eight years from best-selling author and outspoken Trump critic to one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders and, now, his would-be second in command.
Before running for office, Mr. Vance, 39, was known as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a best-selling memoir recounting his upbringing in a poor family that also served as a sort of sociological examination of white working-class Americans. The book was published the summer before Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, and many readers looked to it after his victory as a sort of guide to understanding Mr. Trump’s support among white working-class communities.
Personal background: He was born in Middletown, Ohio, and spent part of his childhood in Jackson, Ky., raised by his maternal grandparents as his mother struggled with drug addiction, before returning to Middletown. After high school, he enlisted in the Marines and was deployed to Iraq, doing public affairs work. He later attended Ohio State University and Yale Law School.
Career in finance: Mr. Vance worked for the conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel before founding his own venture capital firm. Mr. Thiel donated millions of dollars to Mr. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign.
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The Moral Collapse of J. D. Vance (archive)
Instead of a truth-teller in his own community, Vance as a candidate has become a contemptible and cringe-inducing clown.
By Tom Nichols
(The Atlantic) …what should we call J. D. Vance, the self-described hillbilly turned Marine turned Ivy League law-school graduate turned venture capitalist turned Senate candidate? Words fail. His perfidy to his own people in Ohio is too big to allow him to escape with the label of “opportunist,” and yet the shabbiness and absurdity of his Senate campaign is too small to brand him a defector or a heretic.
… Some people back in Vance’s home region of Appalachia thought his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was hollow and inaccurate, but for a time, other people—including me—were intrigued by his writing and public speaking. Vance lived as a child in a steel town in Ohio and spent his summers in the hills of eastern Kentucky, while I grew up amid the rotting factories of New England, solidly in the working class but not poor. I welcomed his willingness to cast a critical eye on his (and my) people, especially after years of conservative hand-wringing focused solely on the dysfunction of minority communities.
Vance gained early support in the political center, particularly among conservatives. The American working poor, no matter where they are, do in fact need civic representatives from the center-right, people who can talk candidly about the limits of government and who can make a moral case for tough love and personal responsibility, but one based on a sense of shared experience, common values, and genuine compassion. Someone like Vance could be that candidate.
Someone like Vance, perhaps, but as we now know, not Vance himself. Not so long ago, he talked about the self-defeating bias against education among poor whites. He acknowledged the self-destructive habits of some of the people he grew up around. Vance wrote, in this very magazine, that Donald Trump “is cultural heroin”—a powerful charge from someone who hails from the epicenter of the opioid epidemic—and provided a “quick high” that could not fix what ails the country. All of that vanished once Vance decided he wanted to go to Washington—and after the Trump supporter Peter Thiel dropped $10 million into a political action committee.
1 July
Republican JD Vance journeys from ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ memoirist to US senator to VP contender
(AP) — It was March 2022 and Senate candidate JD Vance was standing under hot lights in a Cleveland television studio debating four fellow Republicans on whether the U.S. should support a no-fly zone over Ukraine, not a month into its grinding war with Russia.
“Absolutely not,” Vance said.
“I’m in the minority up here,” the Marine veteran added, “because, at the end of the day, we can accept as individuals, look, it’s tragic, it’s terrible. What Vladimir Putin did was wrong in invading a sovereign country on his border. But we have our own problems in the United States to focus on.”
Vance was “putting America’s priorities ahead of all else,” his campaign said — and he had caught Donald Trump’s attention.
Within 25 days, the former president had endorsed Vance, helping the “Hillbilly Elegy” author and Yale-educated Silicon Valley venture capitalist defeat a crowded Republican field and ultimately win Ohio’s open Senate seat.