424. The Real JD Vance: From Never Trumper to Vice President (Part 3)

0:00Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics. Sign up to The Restless Politics plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolitics .com. That's TheRestlessPolitics .com. The price of getting Trump's support is you have to say the election was stolen, or you have to say that Trump won the election and Biden is not in the present. Which he doesn't believe. How is it actually possible to say, I'm this really serious, heavyweight guy who cares about morality and character in Donald Trump as a Horrenton, the Antichrist, and then say, at she I was wrong, Donald Trump's great.

0:33The shift has been so profound to accommodate Trump, to be alongside Trump, to be the vice -president and hopefully set himself up to be president. He does it by choosing to abandon the thoughtful Christian empathetic, tolerant conservative vision and instead re -embrace his hillbilly identity. This is where this other side of his personality comes through. He's reverting to blame anger, anger with immigrants. There is some talk that the Vance's favorite idea for the next election ticket is Vance Trump. A Vance with Donald J. This is running late. Correct. How better to keep Trump senior on board than to have Trump as a name, someone in the ballot.

1:18The VP.

1:27Hi there, it's Alex here. No, you may know, Rory and I are right, bang in the middle of our first ever long -form series, The Real, JD Vance. Exclusively available on the rest's politics plus. In episode one, we explored Vance's early life, the chaotic family background, the small town struggles and the personal myth making that turned Hillbilly allergy, his memoir into a bestseller and made Vance a political rising star. In episode two, we looked at the billionaires who are backing him, a really powerful network of tech elites, who frankly see democracy as a total inconvenience and who have elated upon Vance as their political vehicle.

2:06Chief among them a guy called Peter Till. He doesn't just see Vance as a future president, but as a kind of American monarch. And now in episode three, we look at frankly the most extraordinary transformation of all. That's JD Vance's journey from the days when he called Donald Trump Hitler to become his most loyal, accolite and vice presidential pick. He's abandoned the thoughtful Christian moral persona that he once performed and now leans hard into grievance, anger and conspiracy. So how do you make peace with your former self to get close to some where you once referred to as cultural heroine?

2:40What does it take to go from moral clarity to sicker fancy? And what is the end game? To hear all three episodes in full, just go to therestispolitics .com and sign up to the rest is politics plus. There's a seven day free trial, no ads, loads of bonus content waiting and it takes less than two minutes to do so. Here's a short extract from episode three, I really hope you enjoy it. The price of getting Trump's support is you have to say the election was stolen. Yeah. You have to say that Trump won the election and Biden is not the president, which he doesn't believe. But also the other thing I don't find we talked about his wife, I sure.

3:16You have to assume, I know that you know if you're in a political family, you're a political person, you have to assume there's sort of there's some kind of political crossover going on. There have been no points since he stopped being an ever -trunker and started to sort of move over. There have been no points in which he's gone home and his wife or other members of his close entourage are setting him whole line, but this is disgusting. You can't pretend you believe this or do you believe this? In which case that person that I married is that the same person? Now I don't want to intrude into their marriage.

3:50I get the feeling with Usher that she's totally on board for everything. Looks like she's really enjoying it, traveling around the world, taking the kids to this Europe that he seems to despise. But I just don't get that nobody says to him. He does occasionally do difficult interviews, but I've very rarely seen impressed. On Holden Minute, you said this, did you believe it? You now say this, do you believe it? What do you really believe? Let's go through what we think. J .D. Vance does believe. Number one, I think he's pretty consistent in his social conservatism. He's pretty consistent in believing that the world was better in the good old days when people had more traditional values.

4:29Those traditional values range from anti -abortion to the good old days when you could appear exturgitiously kill people because you thought they raped someone and throw them in a lake. There's that traditional, traditionalism. Number two, I don't think he's ever been very interested in the constitution. Oddly, when he was criticizing Donald Trump first time round, he's never been a great one for democratic theory, liberalism, human rights, constitutional protections. That's because he believes he's still the arvind stuff. Yeah, so he's an authoritarian, I think it's the second thing. Number one, he's traditional.

5:02Number two, he's an authoritarian. He buys into the kind of monochist thing. Number three, I think he has this very, very weird thing going on, which is mesmerizing in the Christian right in the US, which is the ability to project a Christian passage, which is about care for the poor, about humility, about truth and about integrity onto this figure of Donald Trump, with his gold bath taps, his contempt for the poor, his lies. His lies, yeah. And he's somehow able to do that. But how can you do that? I think it is basically ambition. And the interesting one we interviewed David from, and from now, who, of course, from people will know, is very, very, very critical of Trump.

5:47He's also very critical of Vance. I think in a way even more disaffointed, because he sees Vance as somebody who's very intelligent, very driven, got a really good brain, but actually feels that now the shift has been so profound to accommodate Trump, to be alongside Trump, to be the vice president, and hopefully set himself up to be president, is that he thinks it shows an absolute lack of character. You said to him, you once described him as having moral flexibility, were you aware of that earlier that his ambition might drive him to shift from Reaganite conservatism to Trumpism? And David says, no, not at all, not at all, quite the contrary.

6:24When he wrote his famous book, in which he has some nice things to say about me, for which I think him. When he wrote his famous book, I wrote back that I had just one criticism of it, which is he said in the introduction of the book, he says that the story I tell here, I tell not because I'm an extraordinary person, but because I'm an ordinary person enabled by the promise of America. And I remember I can say, no, that's not true, you are an extraordinary person. And I understand why you said the contrary, but it's important that you in your private thinking understand that what you did is not available to everybody, because of your extraordinary drive, but I said this as compliments, your extraordinary drive and gifts and energy and ability, they are beyond the ordinary.

7:01I think we tend to believe that when the good fairies give you some gifts, they give you all of them. And so you think with those gifts would also come integrity and character. I mean, he had showed so much character getting from point A to where I knew him that you thought that it never occurred to me that character would be the defect actually, that that was the deficit quality. And I think that's a very, very, very powerful statement. Well, I'm part of the reason why none of us saw this coming, why it's such an amazing left field, is the entire brand of JD Vance was supposed to be character.

7:31So to go back to his intellectual formation and these Catholic philosophers, he quotes, he's very interested in a guy who's currently in Hungary, no accident hanging out with Victor Orban, whose intellectual lineage goes back to Alistair McIntyre, which is all about virtue. Yeah. Virtue character. Remember I said that, you know, he'd become a Catholic because he decided what he'd realized is that what matters in life is not success, not promotion, but character. Right. So when somebody has made their entire stick character, Christianity, my love of Muslims and immigrants, my abhorrence of Donald Trump, to then turn out that actually the one thing you don't have is character.

8:06Yeah. Is kind of a problem, but I also said I also accept it isn't a problem. I mean, that tells you a lot about the sort of one political world. I mean, how is it actually possible to spend say, I'm this really serious heavyweight guy who cares about morality and character and Donald Trump is of Horrent and the anti Christ and then say, actually, I was wrong. Donald Trump's great. And I don't know. So I suppose you read out some of those statements about the things that he said about Trump when he was not a Trumper. And there's just as many then statements explaining why he didn't think that anymore, including he's the best president of my lifetime.

8:44And this was in defense of Trump's actions on January the 6th. So it really is a kind of very, very, very, very big leap. Let's just quickly get people up to date on the chronology. So I think we left it with France being a bit behind in the polls for the primary. He wins the primary because Trump had achieved for the reasons you've talked about comes strongly out behind him. And at that point, the attacks on him, he needs it, desperately needs it because the only way of killing his opponents attacks, which is this doofus was really rude about your hero Trump is to have Trump himself come out and say, I love JD Vance, which he does in classic Trump style.

9:23And so in September 2022, just before the election, he says, JD is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad. And then he adds, this is a great person who I've really got under no. Yeah, he said some bad things about me. But that was before in you me. And then he fell in love. Is it all about him? Is it a relationship? And one of the things, you know, as we know, Donald Trump lies to sort of sit and watch television all day long, he seems he watched some of the debates. Right. Vance debates and the primaries. Yeah. And one of them, he was he was pressed on this thing. How can you go from that to that?

9:55And he says, I got baptized three years ago. I've had three kids since then. A lot's different. That's it. He's found God and Trump. One of the things that's different is I've changed my mind about Donald Trump. He was a great president. So at the end of the day, one of the things this race presents is an opportunity who actually agrees with Trump on the core issues of trade immigration, who's willing to fight for an America, first foreign policy, I think is me. I mean, that's quite effective. Peace communication. And this will bring us to Senate. But in order to achieve this, he needs to do two things.

10:25He needs to as Trump says so politely kiss Trump's ass prove absolutely 100 % loyalty. But number two, he needs to psychologically get himself into the place of justifying this. And he does this. And this is something that Ezra Klein has pointed out when we interviewed him on podcasts on leading. He does it by choosing to abandon the more thoughtful Christian, empathetic, tolerant conservative vision and instead reembrace his hillbilly identity. He also starts to flirt with conspiracy theories. So listen to this. If you wanted to kill a bunch of mega voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with deadly fentanyl?

11:14This looks intentional. It's like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn't vote for him and open it up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it. So he's basically saying that Biden is targeting mega voters with fentanyl. So this is where this other side of his personality comes not the tolerant Christian intellectual side, but he's reverting to blame anger, anger with immigrants. He begins to really get into, as you see, it's being to hint that he's in charge, he's in favor of protectionism. We already know he's gone from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, he's gone from free trade to protectionism.

11:48But one of the other things he's changing on is America's road and foreign policy in Zelensky. There you go. Thank you so much for listening to that extract from episode three of our mini series The Real JD Vance. To hear the full conversation between me and Rory along with episodes one and two, just go to therestorspolitics .com, sign up to the restistis politics plus. You'll get a seven day free trial, ad free listening, new episodes of the series dropping every Friday morning. Take your lesson two minutes and just a couple of clicks, just go to therestorspolitics .com.