The Billionaire and the Bootlicker

Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is Donald Trump’s running mate, the former president announced on Monday. The pick not only ends months of speculation and puts the press out of its collective misery; it also ends years of effort for Vance. Once a Never Trumper, he started licking Trump’s boots years ago and never stopped. Now the billionaire has lifted up the so-called hillbilly and greater power is within the senator’s grasp. He could be a breath away from the presidency after November, a fact that will please the furthest reaches of the American right. There were strong arguments against such a pick, but Trump in the end made an ideological choice. Vance is now the natural successor to the MAGA movement.

That wasn’t always the case. In 2016, Vance was a best-selling author, Trump critic, and liberal darling, despite or maybe partly because of his right-wing politics. Trump was newly ascendant, and liberals were hunting for good conservatives, as though their existence could hold the center together. Indeed Vance sounded almost reasonable then, if you didn’t read Hillbilly Elegy closely or listen to its critics — and criticism was hard to find, at first. Liberals and conservatives alike loved Elegy and embraced Vance as a teller of hard truths. At The New York Times Book Review, Jen Senior called the book “a compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass,” and a sympathetic Washington Post review described Vance’s “key to success” thusly: “He just powered through his difficulties instead of giving up or blaming someone else.” Director Ron Howard would eventually adapt Elegy into a (terrible) movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

Vance compared Trump to Adolf Hitler in private and wrote in 2016 that “many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever,” which “enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.” In another column, he said Trump’s policies “range from immoral to absurd.” Around 2018, though, Vance began to speak less harshly and endorsed him in 2020, apologized for some of his previous comments, and deleted old social-media posts that were critical, the New York Times reported on Monday. “I regret being wrong about the guy,” he told Fox News in 2021. Since then, he’s supported Trump’s election denialism and successfully courted Trump’s endorsement during his Senate run in 2022.

When it became clear that Trump was the future of the GOP, he aligned himself behind the president. But Vance’s politics run deeper than a simple affinity for Trump or a lust for power — though that’s part of it all, too. At a far-right conference I attended last week, Vance described himself as a convert, not just to Trump but to the cause of national conservatism, and he is zealous. He once worked for far-right billionaire Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, and Vanity Fair reported in 2022 that he has become friends with Curtis Yarvin, a leading figure of the so-called New Right, which is skeptical of liberal democracy and tends to embrace nationalist politics and traditional gender norms. “​​I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” he told podcaster Jack Murphy. He then quoted Andrew Jackson, saying, “And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say, the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

The same year, while he was running for Senate,  he appeared at a gathering of New Right activists, “post-liberal” conservatives, and Catholic integralists, as the National Catholic Reporter described it at the time. (Vance is a Catholic convert.) There, he complained that it isn’t “easy to be on the vanguard of a new Republican Party when so many people are getting rich off doing things the old way.” What might that new Republican Party look like? Vance has given us glimpses over the years. It is profoundly hostile to pluralism, to multiracial democracy, to contemporary movements for progress. Asked whether there should be exceptions to abortion bans for rape or incest, Vance said that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” and added: “What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?”

Don’t expect child care after Vance’s regime forces you to give birth, either. “‘Universal day care’ is class war against normal people,” he once tweeted. He told Tucker Carlson the same year that the U.S. is “effectively 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 once suggested giving children the vote, but allowing their parents to control who or what they vote to support. “We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed,” he said. He is an enemy of LGBT people and of trans people in particular, having introduced legislation that would criminalize some gender-affirming care for youth, as The 19th reported on Monday.

At the National Conservatism conference in D.C., Vance proved he could be the least awkward person in a room full of weirdos. The bar, as they say, was in hell. Trump did not pick him because of his natural charisma or his ability to bring America’s battleground states into the fold. Vance adds little value to the ticket in a purely electoral sense: Ohio is a red state. His comments on abortion, for example, could haunt him yet. But he flatters Trump — there’s all that bootlicking — and he is ultimately a movement pick. Trump’s choice tells us something about the ideological direction the party will take under him, what policies we might come to expect. Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, which created Project 2025, told reporters on Monday that the think tank has been “really rooting” for him. The future Vance wants is not yet assured. There is an election to win, after all. But as Trump pulls ahead in national polls, Vance’s goals inch toward fruition. Years ago, liberals helped make him a star. Now we’ll all reap what they helped sow.