Will J. D. Vance Inherit MAGA?

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0:42J. D. Vance:You see the inflation numbers? They're over 3%. Not good, Jen. I'm surprised it's just over 3%. It feels a lot more. I mean, it feels bad to go shopping just to get the groceries. I think. I've been cooking a lot more at home. Let's just say we're eating a lot more stewed meats because you can get a little more down market. Did you see there, I think it was RFK Jr. who said that you ought to try liver. You know, organ meats are cheap. I thought, wow, boy, that is really a good platform to run on. Eat your liver. Organ meats are cheap. Enjoy your two pencils, your one doll, and your weird organs.

1:17That has sort of Hoover-esque implications, doesn't it?

1:21J. D. Vance:It has a certain classic quality. A liver in every pot.

1:29J. D. Vance:Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane, and hi, Susan. Hey, Evan. Hey there, great to be with you guys.

1:49J. D. Vance:Vice President J.D. Vance is a figure who, let's face it, is a bit hard to pin down. To some, he's an American story of reinvention. Grew up in the Rust Belt, served in Iraq, went on to Yale Law School, and then wrote the very successful memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. But to others, he's something very different. He's the embodiment of Washington ambition, a kind of constantly adaptable person, opportunistic, slippery, as his critics would put it. This week, he was in the headlines. He stumped in Hungary for the autocrat Viktor Orban, who's aligned with the Kremlin and celebrated by the global far right.

2:26J. D. Vance:And this weekend, he's heading to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran, even as it's being reported that he privately voiced opposition to the war before it started. So in this episode, we want to ask, who is J.D. Vance, really? How does somebody actually go from critiquing Donald Trump as reprehensible, as Vance put it in the run up to the 2016 election, to serving as his vice president? And what does he want now as he looks toward 2028? So, guys, before we get into Hungary and Iran, all of which is very interesting, I want to just step back briefly at the outset here. J.D. Vance is a kind of fascinating protean presence in our politics.

3:09J. D. Vance:And I'm curious how you think he is interpreted right now in Washington. Well, let's be real. You know, the job has never been the best job in Washington. Most people think, in fact, it's the worst job in Washington, the John Nance Garner bucket of warm spit memorial seat. Spit being the family friendly version. Yeah, right. Exactly. And in particular, let's just say being number two to Donald Trump, who on Donald Trump's list of priorities, right, Donald Trump is numbers one through one million. You can't be number two. Mentorship is not high on his list. You can't be number two to Donald Trump.

3:50And you can't really, I think, be an heir apparent, at least one who sits easily in the seat. And so what's been fascinating to watch over this first year of J.D. Vance's vice presidency is him actually casting about in the way that we've seen other vice presidents for a lane that works for him, for a role that worked for him. And interestingly, not only has he not found one, but this war that has unfolded, which has enormous geopolitical implications, enormous political implications here in the U.S. with spiking prices. But it also it has the fate of J.D. Vance on the line. The guy who wanted to own kind of the most MAGA wing of the MAGA party finds himself at odds with the president over a war that, according to his ideology, never should have happened.

4:40I mean, first of all, how do people regard J.D. Vance? In Washington being what it is, people think constantly about ambition in the next step, in the next race. And so they're looking at him to see, is this horse going to be the winner in the next presidential race? So that's how people assess this and look at him. In many ways, it seems to me he helped himself by being the one person in the situation room who said, I think this is a bad idea about this war before it started. And I imagine, I think probably all the rest of the reporter world took a look at the account in the New York Times and thought, well, he leaked it.

5:17Yeah, that's a question. Or someone with him leaked it. But it's a dangerous place for a vice president to be in. He's separated himself from the president. We know this president values loyalty. And you now have a voice in the room that's somehow leaked, which drives him crazy, and positions J.D. Vance in a separate place from the president as a critic, really.

5:37J. D. Vance:Which is a really interesting thing because, you know, this very much in the spirit of trying to get beyond what is on the page on the front page of the newspaper. We all know here doing this kind of work in Washington, a story like the kind in The New York Times the other day, which was this kind of detailed, intricate tick tock of everybody who was involved in these negotiations in the situation room on a couple of key occasions. This is their first chance to try to stake out their position publicly. And we saw to any, I'd say, sort of close reader of the text that clearly Team Vance wants it to be known that he was against this.

6:14J. D. Vance:But it seems, Susan, like a pretty delicate line to walk for the reasons you described about Trump. Is this a sustainable position? No, the short answer is no. And yet, you know, interestingly, Donald Trump has gotten rid of two cabinet secretaries in recent weeks. The person he can't fire is the vice president. And I think it's really interesting that politically speaking, J.D. Vance has sort of stuck to the kind of more MAGA than thou lane, right? The kind of Tucker Carlson, America first in its OG version. And actually, this account by the reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who are coming out with a book in June called Regime Change that this was an excerpt from, it's actually consistent with J.D.

7:01Vance's position. If you go back to the signal gate controversy of the first year of Trump's return to power, this was a debate among his top advisers that was leaked to the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg about some airstrikes in Yemen. And even in that, J.D. Vance was the guy who said he didn't think that was a good idea. It was basically cut off. And the reason I bring it up is because I think, Jane, certainly that was the Washington conversation this week was, you know, look at the positioning by the vice president's people thinking ahead to 2028. There's a lot of time, though, between now and 2028.

7:42And I think it's going to become harder over time for J.D. Vance to represent a kind of an ideological theory of MAGA because Donald Trump put out this amazing kind of like primal scream rant of a true social post on Thursday in which he was just absolutely very Trumpy going off on Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones. these sort of MAGA media world figures who have strongly criticized him for abandoning his pledge not to start any new wars and to go to war in Iran. And he said this very revealing Trump thing, which is, you're not MAGA, your ideas are not MAGA, essentially confirming what many of us have believed for a long period of time, which is that at its base, MAGA isn't so much an ideology as a cult of personality.

8:34And for J.D. Vance, how can he be the candidate of MAGA if really MAGA is just about the cult of Donald Trump? Well, I'd point out that there was a part two of what was leaked to The New York Times about that meeting, which was that Vance said, I think it's a bad idea, but I will support you, which is the part that says I'll be loyal to you. Of course, it's kind of disloyal if he leaked it, but just the same, which is, I think, important to explain the position he's in, the complicated position, because going back to whether he will run for president and what it would mean to be the vice president to Trump running for president, vice presidents who run are essentially a third term of the president.

9:18And he may try to distance himself in some way, but on this issue in particular, but you can't really. I mean, he's stuck in the same tar that is the Trump presidency, and he has to be serving in it, and he can't really distance himself from it. So it's a complicated mess.

9:38J. D. Vance:Well, you know, the word that we've heard a couple times already is the word positioning or position. It's, you know, how many Americans get up every morning and say, God, I really want to put my hopes and dreams in somebody who positions himself well. This is the puzzle of authenticity, which seems to be at the moment, and we've talked about this in recent episodes of the show, the coin of the realm. If you can project authenticity, then that is a political superpower right now, whether or not people agree with you on every political position. Evan, can I just say, can I point out that projecting authenticity suggests perhaps one is not authentic?

10:11But it's like you have to.

10:13J. D. Vance:How about if you position yourself to project authenticity? But hold on here. This is actually like we're at an important moment here because what you've staked out, guys, is the peril, to use another P word, that confronts J.D. Vance in his positioning himself at some distance from the president. And we already have begun to see just last week during the Easter brunch of all places, when better to humiliate your political partner, there was this moment. And Dana Milbank wrote a column in The New York Times this week that drew attention to it. It was a closed door Easter event. Trump had asked Vance how the Iran negotiations are going.

10:51J. D. Vance:And then Trump said this. So if it doesn't happen, I'm blaming J.D. Vance. If it does happen, I'm taking full credit. So I want to say that may be the last happy day that J.D. Vance has for a long time. What do you think, Susan? Is this the signs of the unraveling of their partnership? Well, look, two quick points. First of all, look at how things ended between Donald Trump and Mike Pence. That's one data point to consider. Another is, to Jane's point about this sort of trap of a vice president who can't really separate from him or her president. there's a reason that George H.W. Bush was the only sitting vice president to win election as president and become in effect a third term of the Reagan era that the last guy before George H.W.

11:41Bush who did that was in the early 19th century it's just it's a very very hard political position and so that's why I've always been a little bit skeptical when people said well J.D. Vance is the heir apparent or he's definitely going to win in 2028. I think he has a tough climb to this thing of Donald Trump already essentially mocking him. You can see the assignment that Vance has drawn of going to Islamabad this weekend to sit in talks with the Iranians. If the meeting happens, it would be the highest level American meeting with Iranian negotiator since 1979. But I think this is really, frankly, a kind of a poison pill of an assignment for J.D.

12:25Vance, because what Trump is asking him to do is, in effect, to take even more ownership of something it's clear that he's not comfortable with. Unless, of course, he pulls it off. I mean, and every single commentator I've seen on this subject says it's absurd to think you could settle something this difficult in this two-week period that they have. I mean, it just is almost out of the question that this is not possible. But, you know, if he came out of this somehow with something that was a path forward and something that avoided a larger war, he will have really helped himself. I don't know that it's possible, but I'm just saying that is the ultimate challenge for him.

13:13J. D. Vance:All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to look at a couple of key moments from Vance's early career and his rather accelerated rise to power. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

13:29J. D. Vance:If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening.

14:19J. D. Vance:Guys, I want to turn to Vance's background to help us understand more of what shapes him. I think everybody has some sense, but he grew up in Middletown, Ohio. He was raised mostly by his grandparents because his mother was struggling with addiction. After high school, he enlisted in the Marines, goes off, serves in Iraq as a combat correspondent. He then used the GI Bill to go to Ohio State and then later to Yale Law School. And of course, along the way, he met some of the key people that have made his life what it is today. His wife, Usha, who he met at Yale, Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder and investor and conservative financial patron.

15:01J. D. Vance:And then also a couple of other figures like the Yale professor, Amy Chua, who you may know as the tiger mom, who was one of the key people that persuaded him to write his story, which became Hillbilly Elegy, a book, let's remind ourselves, that was blurbed by Peter Thiel. So all of these cross-cutting influences that he has in his life, guys. Susan, what do you consider now to be most significant about that origin story? Well, I mean, it tells us for sure that whatever J.D. Vance's views are today, he'll be more than willing to shed them if they're not useful to him tomorrow. So that, of course, is something that is not an uncommon trait in our politicians, whether it's Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich or, you know, whomever.

15:46We have a long tradition in this country of politicians in both parties who have made some astonishing, shape-shifting changes over the years. J.D. Vance's, I think, mirrors, of course, the Republican parties, right? That's the thing that's fascinating because the ambitious young politician, young Republican in 2015 and 2016, it was more than reasonable to make a bet that Donald Trump was going to end up on the ash heap of history, that he was a sort of a regrettable error. And I know another ambitious young guy back in 2015 and 2016 who thought Donald Trump was the death of American democracy.

16:24His name was Marco Rubio. Maybe you guys are familiar with him.

16:27J. D. Vance:Yeah, the former chief archivist of the United States. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, now the main adversary, we haven't talked about him, but, you know, he's positioned as sort of the opposite pole of J.D. Vance in this kind of future of the Republican Party bake-off in the Trump cabinet. But so both of them essentially took a very similar view. J.D. Vance was even reported to have said in a private message to, I think, a former roommate that he considered Donald Trump to be something like America's Hitler. How do you go from Hitler to I'll do anything for this man. He's the greatest thing in the world.

17:01I think that's the journey of today's Republican Party. And we're all puzzling over J.D. Vance and his biography because we're all puzzling over how did this happen to one of America's two great political parties. I think that's a great way to look at it, that he reflects that journey that the whole party has taken. And we're all just dumbfounded. Because one of the things that sticks out to me about Vance, if you read his early emails and notes to friends and interviews with his friends, is this is not an unintelligent person. This is someone who's been quite – first of all, he's a good writer.

17:37He's perceptive about many things. And so you're dealing with somebody who you sort of feel he knows better. Yet he's made these particular deals. I see him in a way, if you're trying to sort of understand his place in politics, as also the product of a paradigm shift in American politics, which happened after, believe it or not, the Citizens United decision in 2010, which is the parties no longer were the power. The power shifted where the money shifted, which was to individual billionaires. And he is the product of that system that his backer was Peter Thiel. It means that he doesn't have much of a track record himself in politics.

18:28He was plucked out as someone who looked like a rising star to a billionaire. And that's how he landed on the national political stage. He had one guy behind him who was incredibly rich, and that was Peter Thiel, who put$15 million into his race in Ohio. He had no track record politically. He had a bestselling book. That was it.

18:54J. D. Vance:So here's the thing. This is the part that I find mystifying about his story is this is a guy who staked out a very public position against Donald Trump. I mean, there was an article that he wrote called Opioid of the Masses. What we know about Trump is that he is obviously seeks vengeance. He's, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we know all that. So how did he find it advantageous to himself? What did Vance have to do to get himself back into the possibility? Well, I mean, again, Peter Thiel was the mentor who and his patron who talked him up to Trump. And he became friends with Donald Trump Jr.

19:33And that opened the door and got him in there. But I don't know. Evan, you know, I'm curious. You've looked closely at his development as a person growing up. Does it seem to you that he keeps finding sort of father substitutes?

19:48J. D. Vance:I mean, I don't think this is a psychoanalytical reach here. He's kind of talked about it himself, that he, as a child, you know, his parents split up, as he says, you know, even before he could walk. And so his life has been kind of careening between one powerful person, one influential person to another. I mean, his grandmother became his center of gravity. Then in law school, Amy Chua is actually the person who persuaded him to write about himself. He really wasn't even inclined to do it initially. He apparently wrote some kind of fairly bland essay about the Rust Belt. So and then eventually she said, all right, I'm going to introduce you to my agent as the story goes.

20:28J. D. Vance:And the rest is history. And then eventually there's Peter Thiel. He's described hearing Peter Thiel speak at Yale as the single most important moment of his time at law school. Then you fast forward and you get him circulating Donald Trump like a kind of tiny planetary object. So, look, we're not kind of armchair psychoanalyzing to say, as he wrote himself in Hillbilly Elegy, He says, of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. So, Susan, is this a sustainable family dynamic? Well, look at look at Donald Trump's up and down relationship with his own children and make your own conclusions.

21:08I think the other part of his biography that really leaps out here, because, again, I think it helps us to understand both Vance but also the Republican Party today, is that he has been an extraordinary beneficiary of these elite institutions in our society and our government itself, its programs that he's now turned upon. He was a beneficiary of the GI Bill, you know, as a veteran, probably one of the most successful government programs of all times. Now he's a member of a party that's basically spent the last 40 years telling us that government is literally evil, turning on the Ivy League. You know, the idea that this populist party that he and Donald Trump represent— I mean, and yet, again, it was at Yale that he attached himself to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Peter Thiel.

21:58Well, and it took about what's so authentic about their populism when it is the exact opposite of their real experience they've had. It's such fakery. But I suppose, to be fair, on some level, if you look at what Vance felt when he was at Yale, he felt he was the poorest kid there. And some people feel that they're not really accepted. They realize it's not just about a diploma. It's about a kind of a social class. And they're not really going to be part of it. I guess that's partly Vance's story, you know, and that if he can connect that, which he's really tried to do with American voters, there are a lot of people who feel enraged on the outs, that the insiders have it rigged, that, you know, that they're not that they feel disrespected and unseen.

22:50J. D. Vance:Well, there is another piece of his terrain that I think we need to talk about, and that's religion. This is an important piece of it because it's not something that I think was fully illuminated in his early rise, but it's really now at the core of his politics. In 2019, Vance, you'll remember, converted to Catholicism. And almost immediately, he started using it as a piece of his policy talk. He invoked the ancient Latin phrase on the order of love to justify the administration's deportation policies. He also now has a book coming out about his conversion to Catholicism. It's called Communion, Finding My Way Back to Faith.