The Authoritarian Ticket
What J.D. Vance represents.
Another one for the “weeks where decades happen” files: Hours before the Republican National Convention and Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate took over the news cycle, Judge Aileen Cannon squeezed in a little news of her own: She threw out the classified-documents case against Trump on the remarkable theory that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment had been unconstitutional.
Over at The Atlantic, Paul Rosenzweig—former senior counsel in the investigation of President Bill Clinton—writes:
On the merits, her opinion is a poor one, ignoring history and precedent. It will almost certainly be reversed on appeal. Even so, her actions will surely delay Trump’s trial and may even prevent it completely, should Trump return to power and dismiss the case before a verdict is reached.
Not to worry: We’re sure the Supreme Court will sort it all out eventually. Happy Tuesday.
It’s Vance
—Andrew Egger
So: J.D. for Veep! The announcement went out yesterday afternoon on Truth Social, and the Ohio senator’s transformation was complete: from O.G. Never Trumper (as Tim wrote in a must-read piece yesterday), to Senate avatar of Trumpy populism, to now the possible next-in-line to the presidency.
Trump doesn’t always make things easy for his vice president—you have to do a lot of sucking up and put out a lot of fires, and if your boss’s lunatic fans try to lynch you, it’s an open question whether he’ll side with you or them—but still: Not a bad speedrun up the greasy pole for the 39-year-old Senate freshman. Here’s a quick run-through of what the selection means.
1. The position-of-strength pick
Most running mates are selected to shore up a perceived electoral weakness. Back in 2016, Mike Pence was Trump’s olive branch to skittish evangelicals. If Donald Trump were down in the swing-state polls, still struggling mightily to overcome the stigma of 2020 and January 6th, it’s possible he’d have gone in a different direction: Many other names on his shortlist—most notably Doug Burgum and Marco Rubio—would have brought to the table a certain normie-soothing blandness. Instead, Trump went with the most base-charging option: the pugnacious populist Vance.
2. The ideological pick—and heir apparent
One of the characteristics of Donald Trump’s first term was a certain ideological fuzziness—one that let old-school conservatives cling to hope that their various policy priorities would survive Trump’s remaking of the party. Mike Pence somehow managed to leave office still believing that the MAGA movement was essentially fusionist.
“I spoke at more Trump rallies than I can remember,” he told The Dispatch last year. “I talked about a strong national defense, about American leadership in the world, about standing with our allies, standing up to enemies. I talked about less taxes, less regulation, American growth, fiscal responsibility . . . I may not be the most scintillating speaker in the world, but the roof blew off every time I talked about these things.”
Trump’s selection of Vance—someone against aid to Ukraine, skeptical of free trade, ambivalent at best toward the whole small-government thing—should finally prove a wake-up call.
Vance’s natural embodiment of Trumpism, by the way, is actually something some thought might make his pick less likely: Our Marc Caputo noted last month that some in Trumpworld felt Mr. “I Alone Can Fix It” might bristle at the notion of anointing an heir apparent. Seems Trump got over it.
3. The end-of-the-détente pick
At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Karine Jean-Pierre led things off this way: “Last night, President Biden spoke directly to the American people about the urgent need to come together and lower the temperature in our politics. We must remember that while we may disagree, we are not enemies. We are fellow Americans, and we must stand together.”
About an hour later, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon was striking a different tone on a call with reporters reacting to the Vance announcement:
“Clearly, Vance won Trump’s veepstakes by passing his MAGA litmus test with flying colors,” O’Malley Dillon said. “Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because he will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6th: Bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law, and certainly no matter the harm to the American people.”
Is that lowering the temperature? Not exactly—but what can you expect Team Biden to do? Vance has been unbelievably explicit, as we wrote last month, that he thinks Pence should have gone along with Trump’s plan to steal the election in 2020. And while Trump himself has so far refrained from such rhetoric since the attempt on his life, Vance, as we noted yesterday, has said Biden is directly responsible for that attack.
The fever is back to spiking. It will continue to spike.
—Andrew Egger
An Alarm Bell in the Night
—William Kristol
It’s hard to know if the pick of J.D. Vance will help or hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.
On the one hand, Vance is smart, young, and energetic. He’ll attack the other ticket vigorously and shamelessly. Like the last 39-year old selected as a vice presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, Vance could be an effective attack dog.
On the other hand, as Andrew noted, Vance is in some ways a riskier choice than a Tim Scott or Doug Burgum or Marco Rubio. We’re now way beyond reassuring establishment Republicans, whether business types or social conservatives or foreign hawks.
Trump is no longer in the business of balancing a ticket or uniting disparate elements in a party. We’re not in 2016 anymore.
Having turned the Republican Party into the Trump Party, he’s now turning a Trumpist party into a Trumpist movement. Indeed, the selection of Vance marks the completion of the transformation of a conservative political party into an authoritarian movement.
Vance’s past as a Trump critic, his conventional establishment credentials, and his vaulting ambition and shameless opportunism can obscure the significance of his selection. But many individuals who’ve had different views in the past, who’ve had establishment connections, who were chameleons, have become mainstays of ascending authoritarian movements. Some of the most fervent and ruthless authoritarian apparatchiks started as opportunists.
So whatever his past, Vance has cast his lot. In just eighteen months in the Senate, Vance has shown that he’s all in on autocracy, on authoritarianism, on an anti-liberal movement to transform American politics and America itself.
Vance has been more consistently and fervently America First in foreign policy than Trump. He’s more committed to ethno-nationalism and anti-“elite” populism than Trump. He’s been more committed to destroying any non-political civil service than Trump. He’s more contemptuous of the norms, institutions, and mores of liberal democracy than Trump.
Trump is a con man, a liar, and a demagogue with authoritarian tendencies who might be said to have stumbled into leadership of an authoritarian movement. As a result, Trump’s opponents have at times failed to take him seriously. That’s been a mistake.
But not to take the current Trump-Vance moment seriously would be a bigger mistake.
If Trump wins this fall, he’ll spend the next four years enjoying the presidency, boasting of what he’s done, and basking in the adulation of his crowds. Meanwhile, Vance will be building up and exercising power, staffing the administration with proteges and henchmen, and transforming the executive branch, the Republican Party, and much else.
Trump may well have in the back of his mind that he’ll run again. Good luck with that. By 2028, it will be Vance’s administration and party. He’ll have Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and all the wannabe leaders of American-style fascism organized behind him.
The selection of J.D. Vance confirms that the Trump movement now is a full-on authoritarian movement. There are no excuses for the many varieties of acquiescent Trump supporters and enablers failing to see that.
There is also no excuse for those who cherish free government not to marshal all available forces against it. The Mitt Romneys of the world can’t take refuge in writing in candidates in 2024 because they have policy differences with the Democratic party. The Joe Bidens of the world can’t stubbornly hang onto their positions by pretending that all is well as they stagger through twenty-minute television interviews.
There is a coalition of democratic forces out there to be assembled, from ex-Reaganites to ex-McGovernites, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Liz Cheney. There are political and civic figures available who could lead such a coalition with competence and conviction.
The selection of Vance is an alarm bell in the night. It’s a further wake-up call to the fact that “as our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
—William Kristol
Does Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate change your sense of the 2024 race at all—or did you know everything you needed to know about that ticket regardless? Let us know your thoughts.
Catching up . . .
How J.D. Vance won over Donald Trump: New York Times
Police were warned of Trump rally shooter at least 86 seconds before gunfire, video shows: Washington Post
Biden says his mental acuity is ‘pretty damn good’: NBC News
Elon Musk has said he is committing around $45 million a month to a new pro-Trump super PAC: Wall Street Journal
Kids’ vaccination stalls globally, WHO study finds: Axios
The Trump-Vance ticket is a repudiation of free-market conservatism: Politico
Quick Hits
1. Ukraine
Will Saletan writes for the site after watching yesterday’s Republican National Convention: “The balance of power within the GOP has shifted. This is now an isolationist party”:
A few hours before the primetime speeches began on Monday, Donald Trump announced his running mate: Senator J.D. Vance. Trump is already well known as a Putin sympathizer and opponent of aid to Ukraine; his selection of Vance reinforces that disposition. Vance was by far the most anti-Ukraine candidate on Trump’s vice-presidential short list. As a senator, he has fought against aid to Ukraine and has made clear that he isn’t particularly interested in defending Europe. Two years ago, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vance shrugged, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
The convention’s organizers gave a coveted evening speaking slot to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ukraine’s fiercest opponent in the House. Greene doesn’t just oppose aid to Ukraine; she also parrots Russian smears against its government. In her prepared remarks, Greene denounced “globalists” and protested that “the Democrats spent over $175 billion of your tax dollars to secure Ukraine’s borders.” The delegates—not waiting for her next line, about how the money wasn’t being spent on a wall to seal the Mexican border—immediately began to boo.
In his own primetime address, tech investor and CEO David Sacks went further. He blamed President Biden for Russia’s invasion.
2. A ‘Dark Place’
We mentioned Tim’s piece above, but here’s another bite at the apple. “Even if we all see who Vance is,” he writes, “there is one warning from his pre-MAGA days that is worth sitting with”:
Vance’s appointment comes in the wake of shocking violence perpetrated upon people who come from the same cultural milieu as those he wrote about in his book. Analyzing the troubles of the white working class voters in communities like Butler, Pennsylvania has been his life’s work. And per Trump’s own post, it is these voters whose mantle Vance will now claim in service to their campaign.
In an August 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, the radio home for the forgotten man, Vance made a comment about Trump’s impact on this group, almost as an aside. The implications of it echo today:
But I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.
A very dark place.
In Vance’s own telling, he believes that Trump was taking his people, the ones with whom he grew up, somewhere dark. . .
But when Vance joins the Trump ticket this week, his message to these voters won’t be one that addresses the root problems of the communities he claims to champion. Instead he will offer them the same opiates that have alleviated the pain but done nothing to address the underlying suffering.
Vance will tell them that their hero was targeted in a plot by a president that looks down at them, knowing full well that is untrue. He will suggest that the dead and wounded in Pennsylvania were victims not of gun violence or the despair of a bullied young man, but of a plot orchestrated by shadowy forces that they should hate. He will tell them that they are suffering because an election was stolen from them. He will blame immigrants for social ills. And he will argue that they can only get vengeance for that suffering by turning their fate over to two men who are happy to feed them opiates to get the recognition and power that they have always craved.
Cheap Shots
The constant gloom here isn't healthy. To that end, I've resolved to find reasons to be hopeful. It sure looks like the GOP is determined to let their freak flag fly. "Normies" will start to notice and be horrified. The election isn't over yet!
At least Tim Scott doesn't have to get married now.