In his rapid ascent to national politics, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, named as Donald Trump’s running mate on Monday, has managed to combine two seemingly opposite traits: opportunism and fanaticism. He’s quickly climbed the greasy pole of the Republican Party by saying whatever will get him the attention and patronage he craved. As the GOP has radicalized under the Trumpian ascendency, Vance has followed suit, not just abandoning his former anti-Trump position but becoming even more zealous in promoting MAGA ideology than Trump himself. Tonight, Vance will make his debut on the national stage as he addresses the Republican National Convention.

Under the tutelage of his billionaire patron Peter Thiel, and the philosophic teachings of René Girard, Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019—just a few years before he converted to Trumpism. Conversion seems to be an integral element of his personality, mirrored by the social mobility that formed the background to his memoir Hillbilly Elegy (2016), where he recorded his journey from the white working class to the heights of the educated elite at Yale. The convert, as philosopher William James long ago taught in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1917), is a special personality type: the twice-born, the “sick soul” who seeks solace in a perfectionism of doctrine and ritual, often with a zeal that shocks those born to the faith. Vance himself is twice twice-born, making him more Catholic than the pope and more MAGA than Trump.

As a born-again Trumpist, Vance has much to repent. In his fallen days as a sinner, he was, as John Nichols recently noted in The Nation, harder on Trump than Joe Biden has ever been. In 2016, Vance famously told a friend, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” As recently as 2021, Vance described Trump as a “total fraud.”

These are hard words to take back, but such is the power of faith that Vance is now Trump’s biggest cheerleader. In fact, in terms of misogyny and xenophobia, Vance has often been much more vitriolic than the cult leader himself. This is a great opportunity for Democrats, since Vance offers an usually rich harvest of opposition research that can be used against the Republican ticket.

Current Issue

November 2024 Issue

Consider a few facts:

ITEM: The Lever reports that Vance “pressured federal regulators last June to kill a privacy rule that prevents police from accessing the medical records of people seeking reproductive services…. The rule was designed to prevent state and local police in anti-abortion states from using private records to hunt down and prosecute people who cross state lines in search of abortion services.”

ITEM: In his memoir, Vance suggested that women caught in violent marriages should stay married for the sake of their kids. In one passage, Vance wrote, “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

ITEM: In 2021, during an appearance on Fox News, Vance said, “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

ITEM: In 2021, Vance made this comment on rape and incest exemptions for abortion laws: “My view on this has been very clear and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.”

ITEM: ProPublica reports that at a 2021 meeting of the Teneo Network, an influential group of young conservatives, Vance said that the worldview of notorious extremist Alex Jones is “actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

ITEM: Earlier this month, in a speech at the right-wing Edmund Burke Foundation, Vance asked, “What is the first truly Islamist country to get a nuke? And we were like, maybe it’s Iran, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts. And then we finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK since Labour took over.”

ITEM: According to the liberal Zionist group J-Street, “Vance has said it is ‘right’ for American Jews to be ‘ashamed’ of voting for President Biden, defended Trump after dining with antisemitic white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and has repeatedly echoed the racist, antisemitic ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which has led to lethal attacks on Jews and immigrants.”

In keeping with his opportunism, Vance is now trying to soften his stance on many of these issues, notably abortion. But his chameleon act can be refuted by direct quotations. Unlike Trump, Vance has no gift for creating a media persona that allows for being polyvalent—many things to many people. Vance thus presents a rich target for Democrats to make clear the true radicalism of the Republican argument.

Unfortunately, to pursue this critique, the Democrats need a candidate who is a forceful communicator. Joe Biden has demonstrated time and again this year that this is no longer a skill he has. Vance’s MAGA fanaticism is yet another reason why the best option for the Democrats is for Biden to step aside and be replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris. As a woman and person of color, she can denounce Vance’s misogyny and xenophobia with conviction and clarity.