J. D. Vance, American nihilist

Trump has been, in his way, quite savvy with his pick of Vance, because he’s picked someone who was by no means always on his team. Vance, an opportunistic extremist, has variously described Trump as “reprehensible”, an “idiot”, a threat to immigrant and Muslim friends Vance “cares about” and even as “America’s Hitler”.

Vance described himself as being in the “never Trump” faction of the Republican Party – until he realised that stance was incompatible with his ambitions to advance within the party. So he assiduously set about on a years-long total U-turn.

Vance courted Trump publicly and in private, first to endorse his race as US senator and then to give him a role in Trump’s personal coterie. He made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to woo the president personally, he defended him relentlessly on cable TV, and he adopted every one of Trump’s political stances. He made a point of befriending the former president’s son.

Trump is a petty man and he bears grudges. He will not be ignorant of Vance’s former opinion of him, and he will not have forgiven and forgotten. Instead, Trump loves it when people respond to his display of power – and what better abdication to power is there than someone publicly reversing their closely-held views?

Being the (vice) panderer-in-chief that he is, Vance has not challenged the Republican base on any of its most conservative position. He says marriage should be between a man and woman, though has said he personally won’t try to break up gay marriages – he doesn’t need to, though, given the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court.

He has said women should stay with their abusive partners, “for the kids”, and has become such an extremist on banning abortion that he opposes exemptions even for rape or for incest. Gilead has nothing on Vance.

If any moment encapsulated how far Vance is willing to go to abase himself to Trump and his fans, it was surely his address to the National Conservatives conference last week – the same event at which Suella Braverman launched into a tirade so virulently homophobic that even Kemi Badenoch questioned her mental health.

Vance, the same man who had worried what a Trump presidency would mean for his Muslim friends, suggested that the US should be afraid of the first “Islamist” nuclear power – before bizarrely going on to suggest that this could be the UK “since Labour took over”.

JD Vance is not a stupid man, so he must know what he said was as gratuitously stupid as it was idiotic. On its face, it is just a man playing to the prejudices of his audience. It is a popular trope among the US far right to say that “London has fallen”, or is under Sharia Law, as an Islamophobic attack on its mayor Sadiq Khan.

Vance has simply extended that attack further into the point of nonsense: there is only one practising Muslim around Keir Starmer’s cabinet table, and the chances that Vance could name her are roughly zero.

Instead, Vance is demonstrating his nihilism – his total lack of care towards anything that doesn’t advance him among the Republicans’ increasingly unhinged voting coalition. Diplomats across the world should take Vance at his word when he says he doesn’t care about anything beyond US borders.

Sycophants often go further than the tyrants they are trying to impress. Vance likely genuinely doesn’t care that he has insulted the new UK government, one of the USA’s closest and more significant allies. He genuinely doesn’t care about NATO. He would cheerfully sell Ukraine down the river.

Should Trump win, Vance will be one heartbeat from the presidency – and actuarial tables alone would suggest he would have better than a one in five chance of becoming president himself. The world needs to address what a Trump/Vance ticket means and prepare accordingly – the chances of a vice-president “moderating” Trump were always close to zero, but now the possibility is just off the table.

But while it is Trump that diplomats will have to deal with, Vance is a reminder that the playbook for dealing with Trump is very easy. Much has been made of David Lammy’s anti-Trump comments in earlier days – but the foreign secretary has never been caught calling him “America’s Hitler”.

Lammy and his counterparts need to learn one thing, and one thing only from Vance: if Trump wins, suck up to him and do so visibly. He won’t forget what you said before, but he’ll note that you’re humiliating yourself in public on his behalf – it’s degrading but it works.

Diplomacy has always been a dirty business. It could be about to get outright filthy.