J.D. Vance, a Born-Again Trumpist, Offers a Political Jackpot for Democrats

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.

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.”