Understanding J.D. Vance
Donald Trump's embarrassingly unpopular running mate is stranger and more frightening than many people realise.
Good morning! There are 46 days till election day.
This morning we take a look at the dark side of J.D. Vance, including his fast-developing zeal for ethnonationalism. But first, some headlines.
The latest
😵💫 Mark Robinson, the truly unhinged Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, is the subject of a gobsmacking CNN report that unearths old online comments in which he refers to himself online as a “Black Nazi” as well as declaring himself a “perv” and a fan of transgender porn. Donald Trump once described Robinson as “Martin Luther King times two on steroids”, but this race would be eminently winnable for the GOP were he not the candidate. He has now missed the legal deadline to withdraw.
🗳️ Republicans are ramping up the pressure to stop Nebraska from allocating its Electoral College votes separately by Congressional district, thus denying Kamala Harris the chance to pick one up in the Democratic-leaning 2nd district. That single electoral vote could well decide the election. Semafor has the details.
👨⚖️ Insurrection watch: Trump has filed a new motion in the court case holding him criminally responsible for the January 6th attack and efforts to unlawfully overturn the 2020 election. In it, he argues that “Presidential immunity for official acts must be absolute”, not merely presumptive. It’s unlikely to make an impact on the judge, but the case has already been delayed until after the election.
🤞 It’s just one poll, and it’s well within the margin of error, but the latest numbers fit a trend that indicates Ted Cruz really might lose his Senate seat:
🖤 A journey into darkness
J.D. Vance is direly unpopular with the electorate and routinely embarrasses himself in what should be extremely easy interviews – but the first thing to understand about him as a candidate is that just like reality TV contestants aren’t there to make friends, he isn’t there to win votes.
Vance is not, in fact, a retail candidate. He is the agent of several interested parties – Christian nationalists, big tech authoritarians and other radical right-wingers – who view elections with a broadly inclusive franchise as inconvenient at best and perverse at worst.
In their view, Trump is not a hero. He is a device by which to achieve their goals (see: Project 2025) without having to lay their ideas out for the electorate too explicitly. For these people, getting Vance into the administration would be the start of a government takeover.
Among those pushing Vance is his longtime backer Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley titan who has funded him to the tune of millions of dollars and wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”. (You can dive deeper into this hole via The Atlantic.)
Here’s Thiel just a couple of weeks before Vance was nominated saying he would only vote for Trump “begrudgingly”.
The main criticism of Vance, aside from his noxious statements about women and his indulgence in base racism (more below), is that he is fundamentally a fake, having spent years trading on his disdain for Trump (“America’s Hitler”, “cultural heroin”) before suddenly converting to the cause when he decided to run for office, even asking people to delete articles he wrote calling out the Republicans’ embrace of racism.
But the question of Vance’s authenticity is, I think, a distraction. Whether or not he truly believes that Trump is fit to be president is a matter of speculation; the point is that in the last two months, he’s been given one of the loudest megaphones in the US, and that the things he’s using it to propagate aren’t just noxious, but dangerous.
🐈⬛ Eye on Springfield: A racist lie lives on
Trump aside, Vance remains the highest-profile Republican amplifier of the false theory that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio have been kidnapping and eating people’s pets while also spreading deadly communicable diseases. (The New Republic has put together a good across-the-board debunking.)
When Trump came out with the cats-and-dogs lie at his debate with Harris, the reaction was so negative and the theory so easily dismissed that even Vance had to tone it down a little, even though he had already told his supporters to “keep the cat memes coming”.
As with so many things since Vance was added to the ticket, Trump’s amplification of the theory has come at his running mate’s expense.
One of the biggest problems Vance has as a candidate is the perception that Trump is increasingly angry at his deepening unpopularity and reliably poor performances on the stump and in interviews. The sight of him being forced to defend racist claims he had just tried to back away from only cemented that impression of a candidate out of his depth.
But this week, Vance has leaned back into the Haitian story, and hard.
“In the town of Springfield, Ohio, which I'm honoured to represent, we've heard from a number of residents that there are certain parts of town where they won't even drive,” he said at a rally on Wednesday. He also insisted he will continue to describe Springfield’s Haitian residents as “illegal aliens” even though they are in the country legally.
(Trump himself is hardly rowing back, of course; on Tuesday, he declared that “Immigrants are not humans, they’re animals”.)
Here’s Vance denying making anything up during a press Q&A in front of a friendly crowd.
🇺🇸 ‘America is a nation’
The FT’s Edward Luce published a disturbing but dead-on (and paywalled) column this week arguing not only that Trump and Vance are fully embracing “blood and soil” ethnonationalism, but that doing so may prove to be a way to win.
I disagree (slightly) on the second claim, but the first is hard to dispute, especially where Vance is concerned.
For all his swithering between different ideological poles as election cycles suit, the idea that individual choices and life outcomes can be explained by deep cultural virtue or pathology seems like something of a constant in Vance’s thought.
Even in Hillbilly Elegy, the book that elevated him to national fame before he all but disowned its gloomy argument, he diagnosed the poor circumstances of his Scots-Irish family and community as symptoms of a deep cultural pathology that may not be curable.
“There is an ethnic component to my story,” he writes at the book’s outset, declaring (or confessing) that his Scots-Irish family and ancestors “do not like outsiders or people who are different from us, whether the difference lies in how they look, how they act, or most important, how they talk. To understand me, you must understand that I am a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart”.
(Don’t overlook the book’s subtitle: “A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis”.)
By the end, Vance is openly condemning what he sees as that culture’s predestined and possibly terminal decline, and concluding that the only hope is escape for those who merit it:
As a cultural emigrant from one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn…But I have to give it to them: Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own game.
I was able to escape the worst of my culture’s inheritance.
By the time Vance ran for the Senate, he had modulated his diagnosis of a culture doomed to destroy itself with pills, booze and violence into something rather different.
During that vile campaign, he embraced what had started as an unthinkingly crass liberal explanation for Trump’s victory and began explaining racial animus toward Mexicans as fair play for a people whose communities had been wrecked by fentanyl:
But nearly a decade after Hillbilly Elegy’s release, and before he was chosen to run alongside Trump, Vance addressed this summer’s National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Washington with a full-blown ethnonationalist speech entitled “America is a Nation”.
Here he is in a passage reflecting on his family’s cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky, where he one day hopes to be buried:
In that cemetery there are people who were born around the time of the American Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I eventually are laid to rest there and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country, who have built this country, who have made things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
That is not just an idea. That is not just a set of principles, even though the ideas and the principles are great. That is a homeland. People don't go and fight and die just for principles; they go and fight and die for their home, for their families, and for the future of their children.
If this country is going to thrive, we have to remember that America is a nation… Never forget that why we exist, why we do this, why we care about all those great ideas, is because I would like for my kids to lay me to rest in that cemetery.
You can watch the whole speech here. It is chilling.
And If you want to know more about where the American NatCons are coming from with this stuff, a bit of time on YouTube will set you right.
In another speech from the same conference, former Trump assistant Theo Wold talked about “Decolonising America” – assimilating or removing, by force if necessary, those who do not belong to the rightfully dominant culture of its white Christian settlers. (Native Americans are not mentioned.)
📺 In his own words
“She’s somehow – a woman – somehow, she’s doing better than he did” – Donald Trump accepts Kamala Harris is a stronger candidate than Joe Biden
🕵️ Further reading
Vance is just one of a number of well-groomed GOP candidates and operatives who subscribe to a radically traditional form of Catholicism. New York magazine has a brilliant long read on how Opus Dei operates in Washington, D.C. via a long-established operation called the Catholic Information Center:
The group targets, and attracts, people like Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, a convert to conservative Catholicism by way of Opus Dei-connected clergy and influencers…
…the CIC, which doubles as the Opus Dei office in Washington, and the national network of wealthy and powerful right-wing Catholics affiliated with it are among the most effective forces in MAGA world and the American Christian-nationalist movement.
There’ll be much more on Christian nationalism to come in future Substack posts. For now, have a good weekend.