We now have a vice presidential nominee from Donald J. Trump: Senator J.D. Vance from Ohio.
It’s an audacious, confident pick from the former president of the United States. He’s making that pick because he believes he’s winning. It is that simple.
There’s a reason that Trump believes he’s winning. The swing state polling from YouGov finds that Trump is currently up nine in Arizona, five in Wisconsin, six in Georgia, three in Pennsylvania, two in Michigan, five in Nevada, and four in North Carolina. That is an extraordinary set of polls for Trump. And Michigan is the only one of those polls that seems to possibly even be within spitting distance.
This is not a strategic pick. This is not the sort of pick that is designed to win Virginia, which is what Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) likely would have done. It’s not a pick that’s designed to do outreach to Hispanics, as choosing Marco Rubio (R-FL) would have done.
It is a pick that may be designed to shore up the blue wall in favor of red in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, but more importantly, I think for Donald Trump, it’s designed to enshrine his policy legacy as a shift away from traditional conservatism.
In Trump’s statement announcing the pick, he concluded. “J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond.”
That last sentence is the one that matters the most. Trump was name-checking Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — three states he is hoping to win with this pick.
But the truth is he actually doesn’t need Vance to win those states. In fact, the last time Trump ran in 2020, Vance was running for the Senate in Ohio. Trump actually outran Vance. Vance underperformed Trump.
So the pick is not really about those states.
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Vance is quite smart and articulate; he’s an excellent writer. That, along with the fact he has become a Trump loyalist and an absolute bulldog when it comes to any debate, is presumably why Trump picked him. J.D. Vance is likely to clock Kamala Harris into next week in any debate.
There’s a contrast with Vance. The central thesis of his bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy” was that tons of people in the middle of the country had been left behind. He wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy”:
If you believe that hard work pays off then you work hard. If you think it’s hard to get ahead, even when you try it, why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mindset allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance in a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the Obama economy and how it affected his life. I don’t doubt the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask some questions about himself. There’s a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
Yet that contrasts with his industrial policy. He’s very much on the interventionist economic side of the Republican aisle. He favors government interventionism in terms of subsidies and regulations, very much like President Trump supposedly did back in 2016 — although Trump didn’t actually end up implementing a lot of that.
I would assume that if Vance were president, he would implement those kinds of policies. This is one of the areas he differs widely from traditional economic, free market conservatism.
On trade, for example, he has been very much in favor of tariffs. He suggested a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers if Trump wins a second term. Trump was aggressive on tariff policy with regard to China, largely for national security reasons.
But Vance is much more aggressive in terms of actual domestic protection for manufacturers. He told me in an interview I did with him in 2021, “But we also have this very discrete idea that while the government shouldn’t be controlling the American economy, we should have as a policy consensus, a view about what we want the economy to be, what we want the market to be able to produce, and to put a little bit of a thumb on the scale to make that possible.”
On a generalized level, I obviously disagree with that, as I told him. I’m a more free-market advocate than Vance is, but he’s an excellent and intelligent expositor of his position on these issues. On economics, he’s made common cause from time to time with Senator Elizabeth Warren, and he has cheered on Federal Trade Commissioner Chair Lina Khan.
On economics, Vance is very heterodox. He has signaled his possible willingness to hike taxes in some cases. He has spoken out in favor of breaking up some of Big Tech. That is somewhat of an open debate inside the Republican Party right now.
On foreign policy, I would say Vance is not so much an isolationist, but more of a realist. That takes a rather interesting turn when it comes to the two major hot conflicts in the world right now — one in Israel and one in Ukraine. He looks at those two conflicts and sees heavy American interest in Israel. He does not see heavy American interest in Ukraine; he is famously anti-Ukraine aid.
He wrote a piece in April in which he cited three reasons why there shouldn’t be any more aid to Ukraine:
One: Ukraine will not be able to do with the aid what they need to do Two: The lack of American military capacity and the notion we are going to be overdoing it; that essentially if we ship them more military aid, then we are emptying our own stockpiles Three: We should be spending money at home, not abroadI think the last idea is the most flimsy because that’s always true for any conflict. Any conflict could be used as an excuse for not having a foreign policy. I also think it ignores the actual American interests in, say, preventing Russia from taking over the world’s breadbasket and then putting itself on the borders of a multiplicity of NATO’s states. If you don’t want an arms race in Europe, then presumably, a level of aid sufficient to allow Ukraine to repel Russia from a full-scale win would be the thing you’re looking for.
Vance said, “I got to be honest with you; I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” That is a very strong statement. But he also said something that sounds very much like what Trump or I would say, which is that you support Ukraine up to the point peace can be reached with an eye on the off-ramp.
When it comes to Israel, however, he does see strong American interests. At the Quincy Institute, he spelled out what he thinks America’s interests are in maintaining enough aid for Israel to be able to destroy Hamas and then to broker a peace deal with the Saudis that would create a regional security bloc.
He stated:
I think we have a real opportunity to ensure that Israel is an ally in the true sense, that it’s going to pursue their interests. And sometimes those interests totally overlap with the United States, and that’s totally reasonable. But they are fundamentally self-sufficient. And I think the way that we get there in Israel is actually by combining the Abraham Accords approach with the defeat of Hamas. That gets us to a place where Israel and the Sunni nations can play a regional counterweight to Iran. Again, we don’t want a broader regional war. We don’t want to get involved in a broader regional war. The best way to do that is to ensure that Israel, with the Sunni nations, can actually police their own region of the world. And that allows us to spend less time and less resources on the Middle East and focus more on East Asia.
That is a very solid realist case: the point of American aid is to foment American interests.
On immigration, he very much mirrors Trump. Just last week, he slammed Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, on illegal immigration and its impact on the economy. He noted that if you aren’t increasing wages, then you can’t undercut the labor base.
I don’t think that’s a particularly great argument against immigration. There is a very strong cultural argument: that you actually have to screen people so you don’t have a massive influx not engaged in American taxpaying, American culture, or the Declaration of Independence.
But Vance’s perspective obviously matches up well with the perspective of President Trump.
The question I’ve always asked about Trumpism is this: Is there a Trumpism or is there only Trump?
Vance is the best exponent of Trumpism — if there is, in fact, a Trumpism.
