The Real JD Vance: How Trump Ditched Ideology (Part 5)

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0:50Hi there, I'm Mr Campbell here. What you're about to hear is very special Q and A. This is not to be confused with question time. This week's question time episode dropped yesterday as per usual. This special Q and A is all about the mini series that Roy and I have done on American Vice President JD Vance. And all of the questions that we're answering, there are some of the many, many questions that have come in from members of Trip Plus who have been listening to the series. Now, to round off this mini series, in addition to today's Q and A, next week we're going to be speaking to somebody who knows JD Vance well.

1:27In fact, was once you could say his boss, that's David from the former speech writer to George W. Bush. These days, one of the most clear -eyed critics of the Trump administration and the Republican family more generally. He will help us really try to get right under the skin of what Vance represents more broadly in US, and therefore, global politics. So if you want to hear the mini series in full right now, just head to the rest of its politics .com for a free trial. You'll get access to this mini series. We've already started thinking, by the way, about our next one, and you will get access to that.

2:05And you'll also get our monthly bonus episodes completely unfree listening, members chat room, and much, much more. Anyway, enough for me for now. Hope you enjoy this special Q and A, which has been made by you. Welcome to a RESTIS Politics Special Q and A about our mini series on JD Vance. Thank you for all the very kind comments about it, and one or two unkind, but, you know, take the rough of the smooth. We've done four episodes now. This is our fifth in the mini series on JD Vance, but the difference with this one, it's not just me and Roy talking, it's you, it's members of Trip Plus giving us their questions about what they've heard so far.

2:46Roy, let me kick you off with this one. Jacob Wilkie King, who's a member from London, did the Democrats pave the way for JD Vance appeal and bronze out to say this? JD Vance's background of incredible social distress, feeling separated from upper class, very similar to the story of many labor MPs. How much responsibility does the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters? What do you think? I think that's firstly a really interesting observation, because of course, if you were looking for people in British politics who've come from a social background like JD Vance, you might be looking at somebody like Angela Rainer, who came from a very, very difficult trouble background.

3:25Naturally in British politics, that would draw you to the left because you would have experienced poverty very directly, you would feel a very unjust unequal society and you would be very, very focused on social justice and you would perceive the ruling elite as stacking things against you and you'd believe passionately that if you could just get rid of these people and bring in people like you, you could create a much more just equal world. And I think that that was the sense I get into doing an arena when we interviewed on leading Rachel Reeves or Bridget Phillipsson. This is very, very strong sense that their class backgrounds drive, you know, what makes them labor and peace.

4:07When you were an MP, did you have any story MPs? I mean, I think of John Major who came from a pretty tough background, but did you have any MPs in your intake that you would say came from identifiably JD Vance type of background? We had a lot of MPs who came from much tougher backgrounds than people acknowledged. I mean, you know, Patrick McLaughlin, for example, had been a coal miner. There were many, many people in my intake who'd come from very poor backgrounds, grown up on housing estates, come out of poverty, but none of them, I think, to be fair, quite the kind of extreme type of poverty and domestic violence and abuse that Vance is talking about.

4:42But many of them also were people who had felt that their lives had been turned around, for example, in some cases narratives about how their family had benefited by such as selling council housing and how they'd been able to buy their and council house. Many of them had been small business people. So there was that different tone which you sometimes get in British politics of people saying, I came from a very tough background. I pulled myself up. Other people can do it. And so you'd have these people talking about how angry they felt going on to housing estates and seeing people's curtains drawn at 11 in the morning when they were up first in the morning working.

5:19And that produced, I think, quite a sort of brusful, uncompassionate attitude towards people on welfare because they had come from those backgrounds and felt that they got away from them. Whereas strangely often the kind of more privileged, more Tory wet lot come from more privileged backgrounds and felt how lucky they were. And didn't feel that people living in poverty were there because they hadn't worked out. Now just come back to you on that because there's a lot in Hillbilly, LHG Vance's book where he sounds a bit like some of his conservative colleagues in mind where he really is pretty contemptuous of a lot of the people he's growing up around.

5:53He blames them for not working hard enough, not sorting out their addiction, not selling out in a way that someone from the left wouldn't. Anyway, I just will be interested in how you kind of reconcile this odd thing that he comes from a kind of anche -renet background and the result is he gets the right. I mean, I think what's interesting in the question is partly answered by the interview we did recently with your friend Congressman Seth Malton because he basically says that the answer, how much responsibility the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters, his answer is a hell of a lot.

6:24He basically says that the Democrats genuinely lost contact with the values, aspirations of traditional working class voters. Now he pins it a lot of it on the minority issues. I mean, he gets identified as won't, but I think what the right did very, very well and this is a big part of JD Vance and a big part of MAGA is the weaponization of wokers to mean anything that isn't sort of very traditionally almost nativeest American. I think there's a lot in what Jacob is saying. I think it's why, you know, you look across the European perspective, it's why I think the left has got to think really, really carefully about how they handle this sort of wave of the rise of the populars right that seems to be happening.

7:08I agree with you, by the way, on reading rereading Hillbilly Elegy as I did, the more I looked into it, the more I felt he's actually really contemptuous of these people. The thing about John Prescott when he was in the Labour government and Angela Reynne now, you have a really real sense that their role and their position in the government is really to fight for the people and the places that they came from. You don't get that feeling of Vance at all, he's fighting for ideology more than anything. One thing that I loved about that leading interview with Angela Reynne which I still think is one of the very best leading interviews we've done is that there's an enormous amount of compassion and good humour in the way that she talks about her family background and real compassion understanding towards her mother, who, you know, you could have been very, very angry with because basically she says, my mother didn't love me, she was obsessed with my father and she made no real life to look after me.

8:01But she's sort of processed it and she isn't in the way that Vance is driven by anger. I mean, if anger is a really important scene that we kept referring to in those four years, whereas Angela Reynne has come through that. She isn't actually somebody who sees herself as a victim really. She seems to have quite a sort of realistic nuanced good humour attitude towards a quite sort of practical sense of solving it, whereas Vance, anger, but also oddly, although he hates the idea of victimhood, there is a sense of victimhood that he hasn't quite processed this thing in the way that some like Angela Reynne has.

8:40Yeah, and the only thing I say that's really interesting about Angela is that I mean, you saw this in particular when, occasionally, she stood in for Keir Starmer at Primus' questions, particularly with Boris Johnson, where she's sensed that they're thinking she's really going to have to try a lot harder than I have to try because she doesn't come from my sort of really clever background. And she's standing there basically, listen sunshine, you're going to take me exactly as I am. Whereas actually you have a feeling with Vance that he's constantly becoming a slightly different thing. I mean, I thought the most interesting thing, given that we went through this series almost chronologically through his life, is you felt like you were talking, I think with Angela Reynne, you're always talking about the same person.

9:18John Prescott the same, you're always talking about the same person. With Vance, I always feel I'm talking about a different person at various stages of his life. And I think if he does become present, he'll have another persona that he kind of peels off and that becomes it. Let's go with this one from Ben Kelly. This is about the discussion we had about the influence of Peter Teal and Curtis Yavin. So Ben Kelly says this, is JD Vance is positioning behind Trump comparable to that of Octavian behind Caesar in the allows the latter to destroy the Republic and then goes on to rule it into a monarch.

9:51Is that placing too much of a Machiavellian level of intelligence and ambition on JD Vance? That's a great question. Well, this is such a rich theme, but we haven't really even begun to get into, but you've all know Harari who we've interviewed, I think now twice on leading, said to me this morning, actually just before we're talking, but one of the things that strikes him about the monocle thing is that it's all about the personal. So one of the points he makes about watching JD Vance, Zelensky and Trump together is that it isn't really the American government dealing with the Ukrainian government.

10:27It's Trump dealing with Zelensky. And when you question Trump about the fact that Putin has broken every deal that he's done before, again, it's like a medieval king thinking just in personal terms because his reply is yeah, he broke a deal with Obama, he broke into deal with Biden, but I'm different. I'm Trump. And the implication of that is he can make a deal with Putin and it will last as long as he's in. And when he's no longer president, the deal's not valid anymore because it's not state to state his personal person. His final point, I come back to you on this switch, I thought was, you know, it can really revealing.

11:03It's the sort of crazy idea, but it shows something about the world we're in that you can sort of imagine a world in which Trump kind of marries barren Trump to Putin's granddaughter and gives them Crimea as their territory. And that that was sort of somehow resolve the situation. Back over to you. We're recording this around the time when Donald Trump, this thing it does have surprising journalists by phoning them up and giving them an interview. And Gary O'Donnell who the BBC gets his interview, I don't know if you've heard it yet, but it's really good. Gary O'Donnell who starts asking about, you know, the state visit that's coming up to, and he says, you know, there seems to be this discussion about whether they should recall parliament for you to address it.

11:44And I'm thinking, oh God, here we go, this is going to be a nightmare for Starbary. He says, yeah, and he says, no, no, if they're all holding us, fire, let's say, you know, why? Because he wants to be at Windsor Castle. And he says, what are you looking forward to? And he said, I'm really looking forward to having a good time and being nice to the king because he's such a great gentleman. And that's your point. It's king to king. And in his head, he won't care what you think what I think. I mean, he may or may not know there are millions of people who think like we do, but he's going to be on the level with the monarch.

12:19I think was really interesting, though, about Ben's question is the monotid right word for Trump? I'm afraid it's not. The word is authoritarian autocrat. The thing about the monarch, our monarch today, unlike the monarchs in the days when they were sort of using marriage to carve out territory. And by the way, I think you put a horrible thought out there, which somebody will tell you, but they also have a good idea. I think it's not that he's a monarch. He'd love to be a monarch. But what teal and Curtis Yavin want, and I think Vance and Musk, when he was in the tent as well, is a sense of powerful politicians who will not be holding to politics.

12:57And in a way, that's what true monarchy really is. Yes, absolutely. I think this is the most interesting point. We haven't done enough on this, because a traditional dictation from the 40s or 50s was connected to the fact that they were a communist or a fascist. And that constrained them to some extent. I mean, if you were Stalin, you still had to talk about like a communist. A king can completely flip day to day, they're entire, there's no ideology. If you're Trump or your Vance, there isn't actually any ideology. And that's one of the things I think are many series is all about. And this is your chameleon point that he's a different thing every week.

13:31And kings can do that because in the end, all the loyalty isn't to their program or their policy or their manifesto. It's just personally to them. It's the cult they are a Messiah. So they can flip completely. It doesn't matter. You know, one moment we're putting tariffs on China, next minute we're not, one moment we're saying we're not bombing Iran, next minute we are, doesn't matter. And in that sense, Vance and Trump are not in the same world as Kierstamer. Kierstamer is very constrained. You know, he can't do certain kinds of things on welfare because in the end, he's a labor prime minister.

14:06He's got a labor party. He's got labor MPs. And they're going to say, we're about social justice. You don't get to cut welfare like that. Trump and Vance aren't constrained in that way at all. They've broken free of parties of ideology of institutions and made it personal. From your question. Well, okay, here we are. Diana Brocklebank, Norfolk. Trump's policies over the coming years will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. How can this possibly sit with JD Vance? We know he blows with the wind, but his base won't be able to handle the ever increasing wealth divide over the end. Can he reinvent that far or other limits even to what he can do?

14:44Well, I think it's a very good question because I think one of the reasons that Trump's ratings are actually not as good as he pretends they are is that I think a lot of people have realized, hold on a minute, your big beautiful bill is really helping rich people and it's not going to do that much for me. In fact, you might be taking my Medicaid away and all the other stuff that we know about. So I think it will increase inequality. Why do I think that? Because that is what it is designed to do. This goes back to the monotony. The billionaires, the trillionaires as they want to be, they have probably more economic and political power than business people in the American system have ever had.

15:24And they see Trump as one of them and to some extent Trump is one of them. So he doesn't care about the inequality. How does it sit with JD Vance? I would be able to end the increasing wealth divide. Yes, if he changes. And of course, what he'll do, the reason why I think he's very Machiavellian and he's sort of playing quite a canny game, he knows that Trump, well, I guess he could get rid of him up to a point. He could do what he's doing with your own power now and try to make his position untenable. But Vance is elected just the same as Trump was. I mean, okay, it's a ticket and they were voting for Trump.

15:58But Vance is there. He's the second most powerful person under their constitution. So he's there. However, if Trump does go, say, doesn't stand for third term, if Vance does stand for the Republican Party and does win, these are very big gifts, by the way, he can then change why? Because one, we know that he that's what he does. Two, because he can say, I was the loyal number two. Now I'm the number one. I've got my own agenda. Here's where I agreed with the previous administration. But these are challenges now. And we've seen wealth inequality rise and I'm going to bring it down again. You can actually turn it to his advantage.

16:32Yes. I mean, there's an interesting question maybe here just for you before we move on to the next question from listener, which is do you think that we've entered a world where in a sense reality doesn't necessarily catch up. I mean, when we're being optimistic, we keep hoping that in the end, these guys get undone by reality. But it's possible that when you've entered reality TV, they can keep spinning. They can keep blaming other people. Whatever happens, they can keep distracting, pushing so that actually maybe one of the reasons one needs to organize and push against them is that you can't sit back and say in the end, they're going to get undone by reality.

17:09They're only going to get undone by really fierce opposition. I would argue that Boris Johnson got undone by reality in the end. And it wasn't the reality of the issues on which he had been truly terrible. He was actually a tipping point issue at the end. I think Putin might in the end be undone by reality, but we don't know. He's an amazing survivor. Netanyahu is an amazing survivor. The reality surrounding Netanyahu, he ought to be in destroy many times over, but he hasn't. Trump is a bit like Putin that he has created an unreality and he's made people feel. Those people who are part of it, he's made them feel that they belong to something really, really important and that makes them feel good, even as their lives are not good.

17:48Now that is an amazing piece of political communication, conmanship, call it whatever you want. I still hold out hope that eventually reality will catch up on these guys, but I agree that you can't take it for granted. Mandelson. I saw a few Lord Mandelson. Lord Mandelson. Lord Mandelson. Former First Secretary of State, etc. Commissioner Lord Mandelson. I saw an interview with Peter Mandelson at the weekend in which he said Vance was much more thoughtful and nuanced and private than in public. Does he really believe that? Result, the kind of thing ambassadors have to say. Yes, from Florence, Hobson.

18:24That's a very, very good question. I saw one of his fellow ambassadors in Washington recently. I won't do the axon because he'll give away the country. I really enjoy Peter Mandelson's low profile approach to his abacidorship. I said, he really says, yes, I read about it at the Financial Times.

18:48Or Peter was talking about it at the Financial Times. Anyway, I did see the past of this interview. I think it was a Sunday Times and then they put some clips out on social media. And in one of them, he did say that. He was sort of hanging out of what looked like a sports car. Be filled. He said, Trump is really good fun. Vance is, as Florence said, very thoughtful, much more nuanced. So does he really believe that? Or is it the sort of thing ambassadors have to say? Well, it is certainly the latter. Whether he really believes that, Peter may well believe that. Peter does like really interesting, complicated, difficult people.

19:25He's interested in them and he will, I've no doubt at all, he's enjoying being surrounded by very interesting, difficult, complicated people. And then having to deal with another set of difficult, complicated people back in London, I think you'd be quite enjoying that. But Florence, that is a very, very good spot. Very, very, very good spot. I just put a small qualification in my two cents worth, which is of course, ambassadors don't quite have to say that. I mean, that isn't the way that Kim Derek spoke about Trump. There is another way of being an ambassador, which is more the Angela Merkel, which is that you're pretty dignified, you're pretty restrained, but you don't go over bored on the praising.

20:05I actually met a group of ambassadors as well about one of them who was no longer in the US, but was there for Trump's first term and said that they had got to the point where they were no longer putting down in their telegrams, their reports back to the fire minister, they were no longer putting down what they actually thought in a lot of occasions, because they were making assumptions that, you know, walls have ears and all that, and that they were finding other ways to communicate really what they thought about things. That's dangerous. So just a reminder, listeners, Kim Derek, who was our ambassador to the US, there was a leak of a telegram that he had sent back to London, very critical of Trump.

20:44A classified telegram was leaked, and Trump basically demanded that he be sacked, and the British government went along with it, and fired Derek. Well, Johnson went along with it. Johnson went along with it, and fired Derek. Johnson has a double problem. I mean, we talk a lot about truth, and if you can't be honest in secret telegrams from an ambassador back to headquarters, you're in real trouble. Johnson's other problem, which I saw again and again, is, and this is true, I'm sure, in the Trump administration, is that he didn't want to read anything that was uncomfortable. So that every telegram began to go another win for global Britain.

21:23It was all kind of booster -ish optimistic, because Johnson would get angry if an ambassador wrote back saying, actually, Britain doesn't have very much power in this country. The US has more influence, or India has more influence, or China has more influence. He wanted to hear that we at the center of the world. So, of course, Tom Fletcher, former ambassador, who's now doing a brilliant job at United Nations speaking up for refugees, I think that there is something, I think, really important in all of statecraft about ambassadors, the old cliche about your center broader life your country, and it is a cliche, but there is, there is also sometimes a little bit of truth in it.

22:00Peter's job is to project the interests of the Britain and the British government, but at the same time, you have to operate according to the politics that you're swimming in. It's the point that, again, to quote Seth Maltini, he said that when he's on these trips with Republicans, and they will say privately things about Trump, but he says they're terrified about getting it back to him because he will hold it against them. I think there will be a little bit of ambassadors doing that as well, and that's really bad for the foreign policy debate right around the world. It's kind of weird, isn't it, because what you're talking about there is the sort of corruption of institutions.

22:36Oddly, so much of what's going on in the world, I think, is genuinely about social media and what's happened to truth and what's happened to journalists, but that's a little bit different. That's about weird forms of almost tyranny and corruption. It's that sense in the American government that you can't really be an FBI agent doing your job anymore without risking being fired. On that, I don't know if you noticed that recently there was a story in one of the American papers that in the FBI now, they're doing lie detector tests on the staff, and one of the questions before they do the lie detector is, have they said anything critical of cash per tell?

23:12The new politically appointed head of the FBI. I mean, that is nuts. I would quite often go home from work with Tony Blair and say, if you're on a go off, fuse a fucking nightmare today, cross -dormize you, why did you do this? Right. So does that mean if I'm doing a lie jail, have you ever criticized Tony Blair to any of your friends or family? Well, the answer is yes, occasionally. So this is very weird too, because the standards that we're now asking of people, these completely unrealistic standards are actually making our institutions worse. The example that we were talking about a couple of days ago, which I'm been interested in, is that there's now this new letter from the BBC that came out on Monday requires journalists.

23:49Anyone in the rating, you have to go back through all their social media to be absolutely certain that they're completely impartial on an issue before they can present. On the surface, it sounds like that's going to make things better, but actually it's a massive drop because you're... It's terrible. Suddenly ruling out almost everybody because almost by definition somebody presenting on a subject has firm views on it. Let's imagine the BBC thought it would be fun for you or I to do a program on Trump, right? Yeah. Well, suddenly they go through our social media, they conclude we don't like Trump, so we can't present on Trump.