JD Vance: does Trump’s VP really hate Europe?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:42BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Donald Trump and his team are, as we record this, playing down an extraordinary security breach that saw a top journalist from The Atlantic magazine added to a group on Signal, a messaging platform, where members of Donald Trump's team were messaging about actual plans to launch strikes on the Houthis in Yemen. And it seems to come down to whether those were battle plans or war plans, which tells you something about the state of modern politics. The thing that will bother politicians most on this side of the pond, though, is the disdain that's shown by leading US figures for them, for European leaders.

1:25not just from Pete Huxeth, the Defence Secretary, but critically from the man we're going to talk about today, the Vice President, J.D. Vance, who many people now think is Donald Trump's natural successor. Yeah, and J.D. Vance might think that. Listen, by any normal account or measure, J.D. Vance is one of the most interesting and obviously powerful men on the planet. We're going to get into his backstory. He grew up in extreme poverty. He's something of an intellectual figure. He served in the army. He's so extraordinarily interesting. And the thing that's so fascinating about his appointment as vice president and the way he's conducting himself is that he shows that there is a MAGA movement and make America great again.

2:06National populism that will outlast Donald Trump. Trumpism will, through J.D. Vance, outlast Donald Trump. And he has a worldview, which we want to understand today with the help of a very good friend of his. or if not a very good friend of his, someone who certainly is something of an ideological fellow traveller and who has spent time with Vance and who can help us understand the way he thinks. That is James Orr, a Cambridge philosopher, who I met last week on a live recording of the Today debate. And just talking to him during that debate, before and after, I thought James Orr was exactly the kind of person we need to invite onto the podcast.

2:39And so he'll be with us shortly. Should we do it? Let's do it.

2:56Hello, it's Amol in Salford. And it's Nick at home. And the reason you're Nick, you're being very flexible and kind. Welcome back, by the way, from your Keralyn jaunt. I've been keeping up with it on Instagram. If you come back from Keralyn, you're one of several things. You could be, you're going to be highly literate because it's got the highest literacy rate anywhere in the world. You're probably a communist, but our listeners would have known that for some time. and almost certainly you're deeply religious, either Hindu or Christian. Which one is it? Come on. Yes, all of the above, but I deny them all because of BBC impartiality.

3:26Yes, I'm just back from a glorious holiday in South India. I had 22 hours travelling last night. So if I just look ever so slightly kind of tired, that is why, but it's a joy to be back. But the thing that people need to know, Nick, is that you arrange your travel plans around the needs of our listeners, for which we are very, very, very grateful. And I should say that you've arranged your plans around my needs, because the reason I'm in Salford is because I'm doing University Challenge. So I'm hugely grateful to you and the whole team for showing your flexibility. And I should say that you missed an absolute corker last week, which is a real shame, because I don't know if you've had the chance to watch Adolescence on Netflix.

4:01It's the most talked about show in the world because it's just about the most watched show in the world. And we did an episode, Nick, last week, which I don't know if you had a chance to catch up on yet, but I know is a subject that you, not least because you've got two sons, have wanted us to focus on for a long time, which is what is going on, whether it's a crisis, it's toxic, whatever you want to call it, with modern masculinity. And I know that's a subject close to your heart. It is, and I've not heard it, and I've not seen it yet, but I'm going to tune in because it's fascinating. In fact, maybe it links, in a sense, to the political developments that we've been discussing ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House and J.D.

4:38Vance returned to his side, because there is a link, I think, between that. increase in anger amongst young men and the success of populist politicians. Don't much like the word populist, but we haven't found a language, have we? Far right, hard right populists. None of them are quite adequate, but people are not part of the conventional right wing of politics. And the reason we're talking about J.D. Vance particularly this week is because of those extraordinary messages we were talking about. Let's focus not on the breach of security, though, But on the content that they revealed, I just hate bailing Europe out again.

5:16That is the key phrase used by J.D. Vance talking about his European allies, America's European allies, and the fact that they would benefit economically from the U.S. Navy's protection of international shipping lanes. And in response, Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Defence Secretary, replied, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic. And I say it that way because that was all written in capital letters. And because of that leak, because of that scandal, we now know what they really think. Well, J.D. Vance, as students of American history will know, is an unusual vice president in lots of ways.

5:54First thing to say is that there are lots of vice presidents who actually don't do very much, frankly. You know, you could say there is some people. I'm sure those vice presidents will be offended by that idea because they say they're the second most powerful people in the world. But even as recently as Kamala Harris, you get vice presidents who are basically there as a sort of backup, reinforcer, who sometimes get key issues. In her case, it was often the southern border and issues around equal rights. But J.D. Vance is fundamentally different because he is a supreme enforcer of Donald Trump's worldview and because he is in some ways providing the intellectual heft for Trumpism.

6:28And I think the first thing to say about J.D. Vance, who's really interesting for a few reasons, and we're going to get into this with his friend James Earl in a moment, is that he is an intellectual. He's had this extraordinary upbringing. He's a systematic thinker. And he has, in a way that maybe Donald Trump even doesn't, a coherent worldview behind his America first position. And the other thing, which is my main thought as a way of introducing what we're going to discuss, Nick, is that don't you think J.D. Vance is in some ways the supreme expression of the idea that's become quite popular in Western politics, which is that globalization created losers.

7:00He had an upbringing in rural Ohio. He wrote about it in a fantastically eloquent and moving book called Hillbilly Elegy, which said that globalization was great for rich people and poor people in the poor world. In the rich world, it was good for rich people. But for families like his who grew up with nothing, it was a way of sticking two fingers up. That's what he represents. I'm fascinated that you've said that he has this very clear worldview because I, along with lots of other people, remember that J.D. Vance used to be scathing about Donald Trump. He called him an idiot. He said he was reprehensible.

7:33He privately compared him to Adolf Hitler. Now, he's been asked about this again and again, and he's explained that he has changed his mind. But he didn't always think what he now thinks. Well, let's try and get inside the mind of the man. Is he an opportunist or is he now reflecting what he really thinks? And what is it that he really thinks? Welcome to you, Professor James Orr. Thank you very much indeed for joining us on the Today podcast. Great to be with you both. James, I was just going to say, when we were talking in the green room ahead of the Today debate, I think it was last week, I can't remember the time was going so fast, you kindly and generously said to me that in fact you should be referred to as a doctor, not a professor, because you're an associate professor.

8:13Is that right? Well, remember, this is the narcissism of small differences, very important in academia. Well, if you're married to an academic, these things matter. Tell us a little bit, James, about just to establish the basics. You know J.D. Vance, which is a wonderful privilege that Nick and I don't have and most of our listeners won't have. When and where have you spent time with him and gotten to know him? I first got to know him about six, seven years ago through mutual friends. Actually got to know each other in France. We stayed in touch closely over the years. He was in England for the summer just on a family holiday.

8:51Was it two years ago? Yes, summer of 23. and I saw him, had lunch with him in, well, D.C. quite recently. In fact, I had lunch with him in the Senate just about three or four days before he flew down to Mar-a-Lago and was invited to be Trump's running mate. The same day as it happens, 13th of July of the assassination attempt that evening in Butler, Pennsylvania. So, yeah, we've stayed in touch. I'm more cautious now that he's, well, the second most powerful man in the world on some readings. So I tend not I try not to bother him too much. But we like to stay in touch. And I try to be as supportive as possible.

9:32And if I can be a J.D. Vance whisperer for baffled Brits, I'm more than happy to have a go at that role. Well, let's start with the bafflement that there is, which I just described, which is here was a guy who was incredibly rude about Donald Trump and is now seems, if anything, more Trumpy than Trump. So what went on? I think the way to understand it, I mean, first off, I mean, Roger Scruton, the philosopher, has a line that to the effect that, you know, the willingness to change your mind is the only sure sign that you've got one. And JD or the vice president is nothing if not an independent thinker.

10:13And he's nothing if not somebody who evaluates positions very, very carefully on a case by case basis. He's much less ideological than one might think. You were talking earlier, Nick, about how do we understand him? What's his organizing horizon ideologically? And I think the truth of the matter, he is a pragmatist, where the ultimate sort of organizing horizon of his pragmatism is the national interest, and specifically America's national interest and the doctrine of national preference is really what what guides his thinking. And one key moment and a moment that a moment, a point of convergence between the two of us is to be understood through this idea of national conservatism, a movement that began under the influence of the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony about six, seven years ago.

11:07It emerged out of Brexit. It emerged out of Trump 1.0. And it was a sort of a loose affiliation of conservative academics, eggheads like me, but also politicians, private citizens aspiring to high office, thinking through the sort of philosophical underpinning to pro -sovereignty, pro-nation conservatism. And that was a very exciting time. And I think it was I mean, I've heard J.D. say this in so many words that those early conferences were really where he began to understand not so much Trump as Trumpism. and where he began to start giving some intellectual flesh to, as it were, the intuitive bones that Trump had without really being able to articulate it, you know, to the to the wonks in the think tanks or in articulate op eds in The New York Times.

12:04And so I think really J.D.'s conversion was was to Trumpism and then he recognized that Trump was the only figure with, as it were, the electoral firepower and, you know, the the X factor with the American people to ensure that Trumpism was was here to stay. And I think a sort of return, you know, Trump returned that compliment in taking the great risk of inviting a, well, a young senator from Ohio who not had great press, who'd said some incocious things, had only been in office for 15 months. The question is, you know, why did he choose him? It's worth saying he was in his 30s. He was 39 when he became vice president.

12:49He's extraordinarily young. Very, very young. Well, it's the first, I mean, obviously the key thing about J.D. Vance, the most important fact is he's the first vice president of the United States of America who's younger than me. And I'm absolutely shocked and horrified by this fact that this is causing me tremendous internal conniptions. I really want to talk to you about that philosophical underpinning of national conservatism, particularly how it shapes his and Trump's thinking about Europe. Just before we get there, I think it is so important, James, because of what J.D. Vance himself has written about this, to understand the connection between, and we could do this briefly, but to understand the connection between his upbringing and his worldview.

13:25And I just wonder if you could briefly introduce for our listeners some of the themes of his upbringing as recounted in Hillbilly Elegy. It's worth saying that Barack Obama in the 1990s, long before he entered politics, wrote a bestselling book about his childhood, Dreams from My Father. It was a very literary book, lots of allusions to literary figures. J.D. Vance wrote this very literary book. I think it came out well over a decade ago. More recently, it's been turned into a Netflix series. But it's this kind of very elegiac, kind of melancholy reflection on growing up in really quite extreme poverty, from which he escaped to the U.S.

14:01Army and eventually tremendous power in business and politics. But just explain to us a bit about how that childhood shaped the Vance worldview. Yeah, I mean, Hillbilly Elegy, it came out in 2016, just a few weeks, I think, before the Trump 1.0 victory. And for a few years after that, Hillbilly Elegy was the book that coastal elites would read to try to understand what on earth had happened. And as you say, it's this incredibly wistful, moving, beautifully written, elegiac hymn to his Appalachian background, his upbringing in Ohio, the extraordinary struggles that he went through, struggles that would be recognized by at least a third of America, but struggles that, you know, affect flyover states and affect the dispossessed, the marginalized, the forgotten working classes, particularly forgotten white working classes in that the casualties of the great process of deindustrialization that America has undergone over the 1980s, 1990s, intensifying, of course, in the last 25 years as China has come on board as a much bigger player.

15:18and so he somehow just captured that voice in a way that the coastal elites new york times readers could understand and you know if not entirely get on board with it certainly sympathize with and you might say that just as jd jd is often said that he brings as you put it very well amol he brings the intellectual heft to trumpism but i think in those early years what was more interesting is that he brought the emotional heft to Trumpism. Trump is not somebody that easy to sympathise with and not that easy to empathise with. He doesn't really think of emotions and sentiment with him. But I think when you read that book, you can start to see the burning pain of the American underclass.

16:05Pain and anger, isn't it? I was struck that when he was talking about his own childhood, he said, I didn't know how to disagree without turning it into an earth-shattering argument. I get the idea that someone of that background might have a rage against the American elite, the people he thought ignored or were still contemptuous of people who came from areas like him. Why the anger at the European elite? Is it just elites that he objects to, or is there something specific about Europe that gets his goat. I should just preface that, Nick, by saying that, you know, he is both a creature of the working classes and the dispossessed and a creature of the elites.

16:50He went to Yale Law School. It's a very, very tough school to get into. He did incredibly well at Yale Law School. He then went off and had a high-flying job in Silicon Valley and moved very easily in the afterglow of hillbilly elegy among the coast elites. So he's, one misunderstands him if one just sees him as this sort of hillbilly. He's got this extraordinary capacity to understand the elites. And indeed, he married into the elites. Usher is very distinguished, I would say. She's certainly an elite. She's had a year in Cambridge in 2010, 2011. So he doesn't hate the elites. He just thinks that we need better elites.

17:27And he thinks that there's a dislocation between the elites and the dispossessed. And he thinks that those elites need to be more attuned to popular concerns. Now, on the Europe question, I mean, the first thing to say is that when he talks about Europe, and certainly when he talked about Europe in the group chat, I think the way to understand that is he's not thinking the European people, us Europeans, he's thinking specifically of what he thinks of as out of touch EU technocrats who are increasingly unaccountable to their electorate, who are increasingly unpopular with their own voters. I mean, if you look at the rise of the centre-right and beyond all across Europe, every electoral result that comes in from across the channel, you know, you guys on the Today programme are always scratching your heads and saying, what on earth happened?

18:25My goodness. There's this cry of protest, this cry of sort of resistance. We've seen it in Germany with the AFD. We're seeing it with the Rassemblement National in Italy, in France. We're seeing it with the Brothers of Italy in Italy under Maloney. So, you know, that's the way to understand that that interpretation of the group chat, I think, is very consistent with the tenor of the Munich speech. And the tenor of the Munich speech was that you, you, you leaders are not paying attention to the values that have made Europe worth defending? Sure. He, of course, is qualified to speak. He's the Vice President of the United States.

19:05He's qualified to be critical of European spending on defence. Of course he is. Many American presidents, not just Donald Trump, have been critical of that. What he is arguably not entitled to do is to go to another country and insult their elected leaders, to do it to their faces, to lecture them that they're not really Democrats, to suggest that the country he's visiting would be better off if they voted for someone else entirely. A party, incidentally, suggested by many in Germany to still have neo-Nazi roots. That, he's not really entitled to do, is he? Or let's put it a different way. No one else in that job has ever thought of doing anything like it in the past.

19:46You know, one of the big problems in understanding European-American relations since the Second World War is really just figuring out what the role of a president or a vice president is, and what is he entitled to say, and what is he not entitled to say. And I think the persistent illusion over the last decades is that we operate under a rules-based international order, when the truth of the matter is we live under a rules-based American imperium, a Pax Americana. And that means it's always very difficult when a president, I mean, Remember this with Trump making a pretty fiery, but I think very effective speech in Warsaw shortly after he was elected for the first time.

20:30Similar criticisms came in. What gives this man the right to tell us what to do and what not to do? I completely get that. And indeed, I sort of sympathize it. I sympathize with it. I'm a sovereignist. I don't like I don't think the special relationship has been that great for us, to be honest. but at the same time you look at the numbers you know 1.3 trillion dollars a year or whatever it is on on nato's annual budget america covers 830 billion of it at a time when it is reaching eye-watering levels of national debt there's poverty all over the place particularly in those places that are close to jd and to the maga movement and so i think their view is look You know, what are we paying for?

21:14And if we're paying for countries or if we're subsidizing defense budgets for countries that have forgotten what it is they're defending, forgotten the values that unite Europe and America, free speech, freedom of association, free assembly, free and fair elections, then there's a problem. and there needs to be some conditionality attached to American largesse. Now, every US administration has played something like this game. It's just to slightly different ideological ends. The Biden administration, we now know, and we knew at the time through the State Department, was pretty aggressive in imposing quite radical bits of gender and sex ideology, sort of rainbow ideology on countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, that simply weren't receptive to it, weren't ready for it.

22:12And, you know, there was a sense that certainly talking to some Eastern European friends that the State Department and the US ambassadors were effectively bullying them towards a kind of, you know, a much more celebratory, affirming public culture for issues about which there was still real division within those societies. So, you know, the Trump White House is not unique in having an ideological agenda via the State Department and wanting to press it. And it's perfectly reasonable for it to do that, particularly if it's paying so many of the bills. But you see, what you've articulated and explained in a way that's very useful for our listeners, James, is what I would say the systematic or coherent worldview that J.D.

22:57Vance has come to. But there's a different point on which his critics, including his conservative, what I would call moderate conservative critics in America, are alighting on, which is that his faulty to Trump is taking him to places which actually are rather undignified. And we have an interesting tradition, by the way, James, on this podcast, which is every week, I put in one of my favourite quotes and I see whether or not Lewis, our producer, would take it out. And this is a quote from Walter Badgett, who is the great Victorian liberal, former editor of The Economist. And he said in his writings on the...

23:28Snip, snip. Shut up, Nick. You've been away for two weeks. It was great. We didn't snip any of my Walter Badgett references out. He said, James, about the English Constitution, that a republic had insinuated itself beneath the folds of a monarchy. And I've said on this podcast a few times that in a sense, in America, a monarchy has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a republic. And there is something about the court of Trump that is king-like. And the fealty, the loyalty, the absolute determination of people to swear by what Trump's word is, is what goes, is taking people to rather strange places.

24:05And some of your fellow conservatives on the other side of the Atlantic, people like David Front, people like David Brooks, people who might write for the Wall Street Journal, are saying, hang on a second. Why have we got a Republican president who is being consistently rude about Canada? It's Canada, for goodness sake. This undignified stuff about the 51st state, it's not a question of are you taking him too literally. It's just a bit rude. And that scene with Zelensky, James, there's a lot of people who felt it's one thing to say in private, you know, you need to act in a different way. It's another thing to say to Ukraine, we're going to take a different view to the Biden administration.

24:41We're going to force an end to this war. But were you not a little bit uncomfortable when you saw J.D. Vance, who you know well, saying to Zelensky in front, in full view of all those cameras, offer thanks to the president who's brought you here and demanding him to show respect and sort of faulty to Donald Trump. Didn't that make you think, oh, that's a little bit sort of morally beneath him? Let's just start with the first one, the Badger, that brilliant Badger quote. Look, the increasingly monarchical character of the US presidency is not new to Trump. It really, you know, begins, let's say, with Roosevelt.

25:24The enormous centralization and pooling and expansion of administrative power really begins, has to begin with the response to the Great Depression and the New Deal in the 1930s is further accelerated by America moving to a war machine. turning itself into a war machine in the Second World War and then is sustained all through successive administrations. You see it with LBJ, of course, with the Great Society and Nixon tries to pull it back and so on and so forth. But it's caught up in the Cold War. And so the the monarchical question when it comes to Trump, I'd actually contest your reading of that.

26:04I also contest, by the way, though I love them both, that David Frum and David Brooks are conservatives. They're not seen as conservatives in MAGA circles, I can tell you that much, nor are they seen as conservatives in most mainstream GOP. David Frum? David Frum, who wrote a book called Comeback, Conservatism That Can Win Again. David Frum, who worked for George W. Bush and wrote The Axis of Evil Speech. David Frum, who is held up by people who work for Policy Exchange and write for The Telegraph. David Frum. Amor, this is actually a really important point, sort of personalities aside and David Frum aside.

26:36You've got to understand that for the MAGA movement, the neoconservatism, the forever warmongering of David Frum and Bush, too, is something that is loathed more within that world than than Biden and Harris and and and the sort of standard Democrat policy platform. So they do not see them as part of conservatism or the new right. They see them as a terrible road that shouldn't, a cautionary tale for conservatism in the 21st century. But just back to your excellent monarchical point. I mean, well, forgive me, I'm going to stop you going back to his interesting point, because I think you've raised an even more interesting point, the forever warmongering.