Who runs for the position of Vice President is a matter of importance in any election year, but in this one the question looms particularly large. Both presidential candidates are of an age that neither can be counted on to live out his next term. Biden’s presumptive running mate, Kamala Harris, is one of the least popular Vice Presidents in history, and widely considered a liability in what will almost certainly be a closely contested election.
But she, and her wished-for replacement, is a subject for another day. Today’s focus is on the thoughts of one of Trump’s leading running mate contenders, as reflected in his own rather unbelievable words.
Trump’s choice of running mate is the subject of intense speculation among the politically obsessed. There’s Doug Burgum, governor of South Dakota, who looks like an aging Henry Winkler, but he’d be wasted as an electoral vote magnet since his home state is already firmly in Trump’s column.
There’s the formerly “Little” Marco Rubio, whose unbridled sycophancy has enlarged him in Trump’s eyes, but he suffers from the technical flaw that the 12th Amendment prohibits presidential electors from voting for both a presidential and vice presidential candidate who reside in the same state, and Trump changed his residency to Florida from hopelessly blue New York in 2019. (There are workarounds to this “little” problem, as when Dick Cheney fled Texas to become George W.’s running mate, but why go to all that bother?)
Then there’s J.D. Vance, former author, lawyer, and current senator from Ohio. His home state went for Trump in the last two presidential elections, so he might be viewed as a waste of electoral votes too, but Ohio is slightly more pink than deep-red South Dakota, and is critical to Trump’s electoral college calculus. (The consensus view is that if the election were held today, Biden would be assured of 226 electoral votes to Trump’s 236, with a total of 77 electoral votes of the necessary 270 up for grabs in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.*)
Trump is said to be impressed with Vance’s performance in debates, and he’s been unrelentingly supportive of Trump since his pre-senatorial days, when he called him “reprehensible.”
Vance first came to public view as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir of his growing up in Appalachian squalor in Kentucky and Ohio, read by many upon its publication in 2018 as an explanation —if not a defense— of Trumpian populism. I read it at the time, and though it didn’t hold a candle to Tara Westover’s gripping story of a another, more horrifically dysfunctional upbringing in Educated, published in the same year, Hillbilly Elegy brought to life the struggles of a certain American underclass that had long since been utterly forgotten, if not assumed extinct, by most liberals like me whose concerns about the underprivileged tended not to focus on rural white people.
And these were the sorts of white people who, along with many who were vastly more fortunate, had unaccountably thought it in their best interests to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, so it behooved us to learn about them.
Vance pulled himself up by his back-woods bootstraps enough to attend Yale Law School and work for Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm. Then he moved from San Francisco back to Ohio, ran successfully to succeed Rob Portman as Ohio’s Republican senator, and converted from Trump critic to full-throated Trump supporter.
This last weekend, the New York Times published an extensive interview of Vance conducted by Ross Douthat, one of the Times’ more conservative op-ed writers, titled “What J.D. Vance Believes.” In the interview, Vance spouts the usual right-wing tropes about liberals’ unfettered pursuit of power (a pot calling the kettle black if ever there was one), and the evils of leftist cancel culture.
But what’s truly eye-opening — a bit shocking, really — is how many of the views he so carefully espouses are just…dumb. Not crazy, not unhinged, just surprisingly ill thought out for a Yale Law graduate, let alone someone trying to position himself as co-leader of the Republican Party. (What is it about conservative political graduates of Ivy League law schools, the Ted Cruzes and Ron DeSantises and and J.D. Vances, that gives them amnesia about half of what they learned in those hallowed institutions about the Constitution and the rule of law?)
Asked about whether there is a coherent populist economic agenda, Vance replies that it’s about “applying as much upward pressure on wages and as much downward pressure on the services that people use as possible.” How’s that? Fewer services in exchange for higher wages? Yep. “Well, isn’t McDonald’s just going to replace some of the workers with kiosks? That’s a good thing, because then the workers [who are] still there are going to make higher wages; the kiosks will perform a useful function; and that’s the kind of rising tide that actually lifts all boats.”
Hmm. Whatever actual economic theory underpins this hypothetical is obscured by its banality. And surely, many members of Trump’s constituency would be surprised to hear that higher hourly wages coupled with reduced productivity are on their prospective VP candidate’s list of priorities.
What’s keeping wages down? Capitalists like his former employer Peter Thiel? No, it’s immigrants, of course. “What is not good is you replace the McDonald’s worker from Middletown, Ohio, who makes $17 an hour with an immigrant who makes $15 an hour….If you cannot hire illegal immigrants to staff your hotels, then you have to go to the seven million prime-age American men who are out of the labor force and find some way to reengage them.”
Now here is an interesting concept: a bunch of slothful male citizens who need to be “reengaged” to work for minimum wage. How would this be accomplished? What convinces the Peter Thiels of the world to source their labor force from unemployed American men at premium wages? Vance doesn’t say, yet those unengaged males are key to solving a number of issues, like Social Security:
“You shift millions of those men from not working to working; you increase wages across the board; you increase tariffs; and I think that you buy yourself more than the nine or ten years that the actuaries say that we have [before Social Security runs out of money].” Wow. Who knew that taxing seven million men working at minimum wage (along with higher tariffs, of course) would solve the Social Security crisis?
Some of Vance’s strangest and most feckless views are reserved for foreign policy. Asked directly if we should defend Taiwan if it’s attacked, Vance responds: “We should make it as hard as possible for China to take Taiwan in the first place, and the honest answer is we’ll figure out what we do if they attack.”
You read that right. We’ll figure it out later.
As for Ukraine? A policy of appeasement: “What I’d like to do…is you freeze the territorial lines somewhere close to where they are right now. No. 2 is you guarantee both Kyiv’s independence but also its neutrality. I think the Russians have asked for a lot of things dishonestly, but neutrality is something that they see as existential.” A Neville Chamberlain for our time, Vance conveys a counsel of despair: “There is no way with our capacity and what Russia has been doing that we can hold off the Russians indefinitely” in Ukraine. Rather, he says, we’re to hope that Ukraine is too unwieldy for the Russians to govern effectively, and that their demographics will eventually work against them.
If ever there were a Republican In Name Only, I would have thought that these foreign policy views would have defined him. But I’m remembering a different time, when Republicans cared about world leadership and the defense of democracies against totalitarian autocrats.
Douthat can’t quite let him slink away with that: “You agree it’s not in our interest right now for the Russians to roll through the rest of Ukraine?” Vance’s reply: “No, it’s not in our interest.” Well thank you for that bold insight, J.D. Vance. And we now know for sure who the Russians will be rooting and working for in the 2024 election.
But all of this pales next to Vance’s prevarication and cynicism in the face of Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election. “There were a host of institutional actors, technology companies, various forms of censorship that mobilized in 2020 a way that they hadn’t in 2016,” he complains. “I don’t see any reason to think that Dominion voting machines switched ballots, but there was a breakdown in democratic will.”
If ever a remark called for a follow-up question, this is it. What on earth does J.D. Vance mean by a “breakdown in democratic will”? Does he mean the result was undesirable, or does he mean that those in a position of power should have exerted more “will” to correct it? When a politician starts talking about “democratic will,” chills should run down your spine.
Apparently he means that Mike Pence didn’t have sufficient “democratic will” to reject electoral ballots. It’s worth quoting Vance at length on this: “I think the entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably. But at least we would have had a debate….Even under a circumstance where the alternative-electors thing works, Trump would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf. The idea that this sets off a sequence where Donald Trump becomes the dictator is completely preposterous. He was using the constitutional procedures.”
Comforting though it is to envision Trump benignly playing golf after railroading an election, I’m sure whoever taught Vance constitutional law back at Yale would hasten to remind him that the Eastman-Trump theory that the Vice President has the authority to accept or reject electoral votes is not, in fact, grounded in the Constitution (which states merely that the Vice President shall “open” the electoral certificates), but rather in the vagaries of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which muddied those waters sufficiently that a bipartisan act of Congress was passed in 2022 to correct it and remove the implication that the VP is anything more than the guy who opens the envelopes.
Worse, though, is Vance’s cynical (or is it simply ignorant?) view that a “debate” over competing slates of electors on January 6, 2021 would have been a good thing and not a further deepening of the chaos that threatened to engulf the Capitol — and the country — that day.
Trump himself is of course the real chaos agent, and his vice presidential pick will merely be his henchman. But assuming he wants someone almost as willfully obtuse and cynical as himself, my money’s on J.D. Vance.
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