Eight years ago this month, when Donald Trump was campaigning for the presidency and flying around America on his private jet, the one with “Trump” written in huge, blue letters on its fuselage to make sure everyone knew just who was in it, J.D. Vance, a San Franciscan venture capitalist at the time, wrote a blistering critique for The Atlantic about the man who would ultimately win the 2016 election.
In his Atlantic article, Vance compared Trump and his populist message to the heroin that was killing many in “the small Ohio town where I grew up.”
To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.
Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
Publicly, he called the Republican presidential candidate an “idiot” and said he was “reprehensible.” Privately, he wrote an associate on Facebook in 2016, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Back then, Vance believed (or, so he said) people would eventually realize what a charlatan-like con artist Trump really was. He didn’t know when that realization would come, but “[W]hen it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.”
That James David Vance of 2016 left the stage in 2021 to be replaced by the new and improved J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s Sycophant-in-Chief, his hand-picked vice-presidential nominee, foremost acolyte, and heir apparent. The new J.D. Vance hates the idea of America supporting Ukraine as it tries to save its country from Trump’s buddy, Vladimir Putin. The new J.D. Vance is even farther to the right than Trump himself, advocating for a total abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest (but once Donald Trump said he supported continuing to allow access to the abortion pill mifepristone, that became Vance’s position, too). The new J.D. Vance downplays, even excuses, the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters. The new J.D. Vance turned from harsh critic to puppy-loving apostle. The new J.D. Vance is the polar opposite of the old J. D. Vance.
Vance says his turnaround to Trumpism wasn’t a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment, but rather a process by which he came to see he was confusing Trump’s “style” for “substance.” “I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration,” Vance told the New York Times in June.
His explanation seems a bit thin when one considers the 39-year-old Vance’s history. Born in 1984, he grew up in an impoverished home in southern Ohio. He joined the Marines and was deployed to Iraq as a combat correspondent for six months in late 2005. Then he became a Marine Public Affairs specialist. Following his military service, and with help from the GI Bill, he got a BA from Ohio State University — in two years — after which he earned his law degree from Yale where he also won a citation-checking job on the Yale Law Journal. After a short stint working at a law firm, he founded a small venture capital firm in San Francisco and, on the side in 2016, wrote the mega-sales Hillbilly Elegy, which was made into a 2020 Netflix movie (25% on Rotten Tomatoes). In 2021, five years after condemning Donald Trump, he had his style versus substance moment, ran for the U.S. Senate, and, with Donald Trump’s endorsement, began representing the citizens of Ohio. Eighteen months later, fully joined to Trump’s hip, he’s the potential heartbeat away guy.
Does this sound like someone who would confuse style for substance?
I used to think the transformation of Elise Stefanik (R-NY) from moderate, level-headed, New York Representative to MAGA chanting, knee bending, ring kissing, Donald Trump devotee had won the gold medal in the Trump conversion Olympiad. Her prize was becoming third in the line for Republican leadership in the House, Liz Cheney’s old position before the MAGA Members threw her out for having the temerity the blame Trump for the January 6th Insurrection.
But not any more. J.D. Vance’s conversion from never-Trumper to ever-Trumper has eclipsed Stefanik’s metamorphosis by a long shot. If Trump wins in November, a national catastrophe looking more and more likely, the heartbeat away guy could become the most powerful person in the world.
And that, friends, is how politics works in 2024 America.
