The liberal consensus is having a bad run of it when it comes to calling things correctly. For that strange limbo period between the US election result and Donald Trump’s second inauguration, there was a swift assumption about JD Vance that he was more a punchline than a presidential contender.
Here was a strange and supercilious figure whose oddness and history of offensive remarks had briefly threatened to derail the Trump campaign. He had been accused of everything from wearing eyeliner to having a sexual fetish about sofas. Now, surely, he was set to be vice-president in name only, sidelined if not supplanted entirely by the Trump and Musk show, made into a humiliating irrelevance.
The joke has very much been on anyone laughing at Vance. In his first few months, he is already shaping up to be one of the most consequential vice-presidents in US history.
George W Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney, was widely seen as the mastermind behind the presidency and the architect of the “war on terror”. Vance is unlikely to be seen in that same role, but his ability to influence events and policies – especially in ways that affect global security – is proving just as seismic, not least through his ability to stop people from getting along.
JD Vance is a man of two mysteries. The first is how a man as off-putting as he is can rise so far, so fast. The second is how he can leverage that quality into an outright asset for the ultra-MAGA loyalists.
The second question is the easier to answer, as it has been on full view on the world stage in recent weeks. Trump is famously susceptible to flattery. He can be praised, cajoled and wheedled into U-turning on almost every position he holds, with the right approach, not least because he holds all of his stances lightly. Trump has been persuaded by foreign leaders to change his approach on tariffs for Canada and Mexico twice in two months, and has a long track record of such reversals.
World leaders know that, and so tried desperately to get into the room with Trump to change his opinion on the Russia-Ukraine conflict – first Emmanuel Macron, then Keir Starmer, then Volodymyr Zelensky. What was notable for all three was the presence in the room of JD Vance, who was there not just for the private talks but also for the glad-handing photoshoots in front of the media.
Vance’s decision to launch into an attack on Zelensky is now infamous, though few have watched the 40 minutes prior to it in which Zelensky and Trump appeared to get on perfectly well and have a constructive discussion.
Most of us are probably unaware that Vance launched into similar broadsides against Starmer and Macron, albeit with less success on those occasions, even though he seemed to tactically choose hot-button issues likely to land with Trump. With Starmer, Vance attacked Britain for supposedly not having free speech. This left Starmer having to rebut the nonsensical accusation, but this was not enough to cut across Trump’s obvious delight at brandishing an invitation from the King.
Vance seems to be acting as a deliberate buffer, to try to keep Trump in line and to prevent the meeting from going too well – a job that he might be uniquely suited for, given his skillset and background. In an interview eight years ago in the Sunday Times, Vance said that thanks ubled childhood he didn’t deal well with conflict – not knowing how to avoid escalating it into “an earth-shattering argument”.
He seems to be deploying that to burnish his MAGA credentials and to act as the most zealous of Trump’s foot soldiers for a particular type of America First and America Only isolationism – stepping away from traditional allies and relationships. Vance could not have been clearer in this goal when he spoke at the Munich Security Conference, and at a time when Europe has an active land war on the continent, raised culture war grievances instead. With that speech, Vance may have signalled the end of the American Century. Such historic moments are rarely handed to whoever is occupying the role of Veep.
JD Vance has come to MAGA world with all the zeal of the convert and the desperate desire to fit in that can only come to a perennial outsider. Vance came to public note through his childhood autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, talking of his drug-addicted mother and his grandmother’s role doing much of the practical work of his upbringing.
His was a classic American tale of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps – breaking out of his trailer-trash background to attend first Ohio State University (using funding from the GI bill) and then Yale Law School.
Vance was described as liberal America’s favourite Republican, able through his book and background to apparently explain Trump’s 2016 victory in a way that made sense to coastal elites. His moderate credentials were burnished by a 2017 New York Times op-ed expressing his personal admiration for Barack Obama as he left office in 2017. Vance tried to make decency and Christian values an integral part of his political brand.
Or at least, he did, until it became clear that this was getting him nowhere. Vance publicly disparaged Trump as an “idiot” and said he couldn’t vote for him in 2016. He privately called Trump “America’s Hitler” in 2021, only to sharply heel turn into courting his endorsement for his run for Senate in 2022 – and today he serves as Trump’s vice-president.
As a result, Vance has combined the zeal of a convert with the aggressive showiness of someone who knows they have something to prove. Vance is not a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter, with him through thick and thin, and so he has to be Trumpier than Trump to stay in the club.
His own advancement means he’s not naturally at home either with the elites with which Trump surrounds himself – Trump prefers the company of the ultra-rich to anyone else – or with the core MAGA supporter base from which Vance worked so hard to elevate himself.
This leads Vance to some profoundly uncomfortable positions. He is married to an Indian-American and has mixed-race children – yet has publicly defended some of the worst racist excesses of the Trumpian movement, even against its own supporters. Vance stepped up to defend Trump during MAGA’s brief civil war over “Normalise Indian Hate” in such a way that it led to the Times of India running the stark headline: “Why JD Vance can’t stand up for his own wife and kids” – quite the blow on a man who supposedly believes in putting family first above all else.
Vance sits in a similarly uncomfortable, if potentially powerful, position between the various factions of Trumpdom. There is still potential for a brewing fight between the core “close the borders” MAGA fandom and the tech bros who have formed the new wing of MAGA. Vance is obviously connected to the tech bros – he worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm before his political career, and Thiel provided an unprecedented $10m to fund his primary race for the Senate.
Though his big tech mentor might have been Peter Thiel rather than Elon Musk – and Thiel once ousted Musk from PayPal, so their relationship is complex to say the least – his affiliation to that grouping seems clear. But Vance managed to oil his way into “core” MAGA too. One of the keys to this came in the form of Charlie Kirk, the Trump youth vote wunderkind and founder of Turning Point USA.
Kirk managed to convince Trump and those around him that he was instrumental in first turning young men to MAGA, and then in targeting low-propensity voters to actually turn out in 2024 – both dubious claims, seen by some as the boasts of a chancer, but which successfully convinced Trump’s inner circle of his genius and his indispensability.
In Vance, Kirk recognised something he could use, and he helped introduce Vance to Kirk’s one-time boss and friend, Donald Trump Jr. Vance cultivated this introduction into a friendship with Trump Jr, who was reportedly then able to persuade his father, who was never all that impressed by Vance, to opt for him as VP despite misgivings.
Vance, then, is a man with wide but tenuous relationships. He has no core base of his own, and similarly seems to have few core convictions. He seems to be a man desperate to prove to each power base and each faction that he is their guy, while being constitutionally unable to join any of those tribes.
One curious effect of this has been a cold indifference to the consequences of his stances. One of the few issues on which Vance was a standout during his short tenure in the Senate was Ukraine, where he was a notable outlier on the isolationist flank – always unwilling to send money to Ukraine, and seemingly intrinsically opposed to any kind of support for the nation, even as the bulk of Republican senators supported its efforts.
It is this incarnation of JD Vance that is shaping his vice-presidency – and much of US foreign policy – so far. If MAGA has indeed decided he’s their man to stop any meetings going too well, to prevent bonhomie letting Trump himself get carried away, they have found their man.
Vance has an almost preternatural ability to put people off, to throw them off balance, to pick a fight, and to appal. It is being put to good use. He is serving essentially as a presidential hand-holder – picking fights out on the world stage, and stopping their reconciliation back at home.
Perhaps he does this willingly through a new sense of conviction that isolationism is America’s best future, though that does not seem to be Trump’s view – Trump himself seems to wish to dictate terms to the world as if he’s guaranteeing its security, but without spending that money.
Vance might be working through conviction, but the safer bet is that he sees the best chance of winning a primary in 2028 coming through being the ultra-loyalist, the man more MAGA than MAGA. That is what the political calculus of today demands, and so that is what he is offering.
That leaves the matter of how the rest of the world should react: how do you handle a man like JD Vance? For so long as he’s in the VP slot, it’s straightforward, if not simple – Vance will shape himself into whatever form best suits his advancement, whatever degradation that requires. If he is understood on those terms, he can at least be accounted for.
The more troubling question is what would happen if all of this paid off, JD Vance secured the presidency, and there’s no one left to suck up to. Who does JD Vance become then, and what would he do to stay on top? And what wouldn’t he do?
