Today, Explained - VP J.D.

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

Donald Trump’s running mate is Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Politico’s Ian Ward describes Vance’s transformation from a self-described hillbilly to the political face of the Republican future. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn and Miles Bryan, edited by Miranda Kennedy and Matt Collette, fact-checked by Hady Mawajdeh and Peter Balonon-Rosen, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristinsdotter, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump opened the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last night. He's here tonight to show his courage, his defiance against somebody who tried to kill him. He appeared left ear wrapped in gauze alongside his newly chosen running mate. J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old senator from Ohio who is as famous for his critiques of Trump. I'm a never Trump guy. I never liked him. As he is for having a movie made about his life and his mama. You want to be somebody or not? But these two guys have warmed to each other because Vance, we're told, has vision.

What's that vision look like? It's coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM,

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Explained. 2024 Explained. explained 2024 explained all right so minutes after donald trump announced his running mate yesterday politico published 55 things to know about jd vance by ian ward ian is a reporter who spent hours interviewing vance for a profile that came to be titled, Is There Something More Radical Than MAGA? J.D. Vance is Dreaming It. I asked Ian to start us off with Vance's LinkedIn. Yeah, he was a Yale Law School graduate, a Marine veteran. He served briefly in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He was encouraged to write that memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, by his law school mentor. The book came out in

2016 and immediately became a sensation. It hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it got taken up as a sort of Rosetta Stone for liberals who were trying to understand the disaffection of middle American, blue-collar workers. Donald Trump, if nothing else, is relatable to the average working class American because he speaks off the cuff. He's clearly unfiltered and unrehearsed. And there is something relatable about that, even if, you know, half of the things that he says don't make any sense or a quarter of the things that he says are offensive. And he became a sort of national celebrity very quickly for this book, you know, went on all the talk shows.

Have you been surprised by how successful it's been? Yes. How could I not be? Why do you think? I'm sitting here talking to Megyn Kelly. This is great. It was a memoir, so it told his life story. The political kernel of the book was basically that Appalachian Americans and a certain type of blue-collar worker suffered from a set of social pathologies, you know, typical tropes, sort of laziness, a lack of personal initiative, that was the real root cause of a lot of their suffering,

and that the responsibility for rectifying the situation of middle American workers rested with the workers themselves and the people in Appalachia, that government programs and social safety nets were not the way to lift these people out of poverty and deprivation, that they had to sort of bootstraps themselves up. So a very sort of typical old school conservative message. You got to take care of business. You got to go to school. You got to get good grades to even have a chance. Mom was the best in her class. What's the point? I'm talking about a chance. You might not make it, but you sure as hell won't if you don't try. Why do you even care what I do? And so the news reporters are calling this guy and they're saying, we want to understand why white people voted for Donald Trump.

And J.D. Vance is there to explain at the time, what does he think about Donald Trump? Yeah, he did not like Donald Trump. He famously in an essay for The Atlantic called Donald Trump cultural heroin. This was in the middle of the opioid epidemic. And he said Trump offered the sort of blissful ignorance and short term gratification that heroin was providing to these middle American communities. He also famously in a text message speculated that Trump could become quote America's Hitler. That was not a public message. That was a message to a friend that later became public. But he expressed some really sincere concerns about Trump and what Trump was offering the type of people he had written about

in his book. Donald Trump famously prefers people who don't call him an idiot or compare him to Hitler. What happened to Vance in the eight years since then? Vance re-emerged on the national political scene in 2021 when he ran for United States Senate in Ohio. Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump's wall. By that point, he had become a Trump acolyte and a Trump supporter. Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016, and I asked folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I'd been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things,

and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. His explanation for this transformation is twofold. One, he says he came to see over Trump's first term that Trump was actually right on some of the policy positions that he cared about, most notably trade, immigration, economics, and cultural issues. The flip side is that he says he was sort of radicalized by the liberal reaction to Trump. You know, he had fallen in in these very elite liberal circles at that point. And he says, as he watched his liberal friends react to Trump and sort of go a little bit crazy as he sees it over what Trump was doing, it radicalized him against the sort of vision of progressive

liberalism that was dominant in those circles. There's a term in right-wing online discourse called red-pilling, which is a meme sort of taken from the Matrix movie, actually. You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. And this is a term that a lot of right-wingers use to describe their own radicalization, and Vance has described his own political journey in those terms, that somewhere between 2016 and 2021, he kind of took the red pill and came to this sort of more radical vision of American politics.

I saw and realized something about the American elite and about my role in the American elite that took me just a while to figure out. Right. And I, you know, I was red pilled. And frankly, there are a lot of. So people might say, like, J.D. Vance is a flip flopper, but J.D. Vance is going to say, no, I just I just woke up. Yeah. And, you know, there's a compelling argument to be made that there's a pretty strong degree of continuity between the political vision that he laid out and hillbilly elegy and the political vision he continues to espouse. I mean, it's changed in substantive ways. Most notably, he's taken up what could be called sort of systemic critiques of American political economy, you know, whereas his book relied very heavily on sort of individual critiques and personal moral critiques. He's taken up structural ones. So, he says, you know, the way the American economy disadvantages these people

at a sort of global and national level, It doesn't just boil down to individual responsibility, but there's a sort of conservative core to that vision that has remained unchanged. So, several people campaigned very publicly to be Trump's vice president. Tim Scott, North Dakota's Governor Doug Burgum, Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem, RIP Cricket, Marco Rubio in Florida. Why did Donald Trump pick J.D. Vance out of all of these people? I think what we do know is that J.D. Vance is very, very close with Donald Trump Jr. Donald Trump Jr. is a close personal friend of his. When I talked to Vance a couple of months ago, he said they text on a daily basis. And we do know that Donald Trump Jr. was lobbying very, very hard for his father to pick J.D. Vance.

Explain to those watching why you think J.D. Vance is the best man to run with your father. Listen, I think he's lived the epitome of the American dream story. I think he's the guy that's capable of bringing that same success that he was able to have coming from nothing, coming from Appalachia, and succeeding at a level that no one could possibly fathom. Also back in 2021 and 2022, when Vance was running for Senate, Donald Trump Jr. lobbied very hard to create the rapprochement between the two men. Their relationship had fallen out over some of Vance's critical comments, and Donald Trump Jr. brought them back together with the help of Peter Thiel, of course, who's J.D. Vance's former boss and mentor. This is a great person who I've really gotten to know. Yeah, he said some bad things about me,

but that was before he knew me, and then he fell in love. But that seems to have been one major factor. Another seems to be the political calculation. You know, picking Vance signals that Trump is taking this sort of new right, populist nationalist agenda very, very seriously. In his second term, you know, he received a lot of criticism from some circles for not going far enough in terms of implementing that agenda in his first term. And he seems to be signaling now that he's taking that seriously, and that Vance will play a big part in enacting some of those policies.

Unlike a lot of people who are talking about J.D. Vance right now, today, you actually spent considerable time with him for a big profile you did for Politico magazine. What can you tell us definitively about who J.D. Vance is and what he wants? There are a lot of Republican politicians in Washington who've taken up the Trumpian talking points and adopted the Trumpian rhetoric without thinking through a sort of comprehensive ideological or philosophical vision of what nationalist populist conservatism would look like. And J.D. Vance is not one of those people. This dude is an intellectual of a sort, and he thinks of politics in intellectual terms. He has a pretty coherent worldview and political philosophy

that justify and reinforce a lot of Trump's policies, but also, you know, at times, go even further than Trump on some things. So, you know, he's flip-flopped, but the vision he has now is pretty coherent and pretty sweeping. Not always adhered to in political practice, but when you talk to him and have him explain why he's doing what he's doing, he can marshal a whole host of arguments to explain the Nationalist Populist Project.

Ian Ward of Politico is going to explain the Nationalist Populist Project. Coming up next. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. Thank you. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from the ACLU. The ACLU knows exactly what threats a second Donald Trump term presents. And they are ready with a battle-tested playbook.

The ACLU took legal action against the first Trump administration 434 times. And they will do it again to protect immigrants' rights, defend reproductive freedom, fight discrimination, and fight for all of our fundamental rights and freedoms. This Giving Tuesday, you can support the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. I'm Noelle King. We're back with Ian Ward, who chronicled J.D. Vance for Political Magazine. Ward and others identify Vance as a leading figure of the so-called new right. And Ian says the senator has some new right plans for

America. J.D. Vance's vision has not always been articulated all that well publicly, but the vision he laid out to me and to other reporters begins with a critique. It's a critique of what he calls sort of liberal progressivism. The new right calls this sort of the regime or the cathedral at various points. But it's a vision fundamentally of progress. You know, the way that liberals think of progress in many respects is economic liberalization, technological innovation, and the relaxing of, you know, what appear to be oppressive social norms. That's a vision of progress. J.D. Vance thinks that's exactly wrong. He thinks that those things have led to a kind of regression in American life.

Well, I do not think that America's greatest and most powerful economy was built by socialism, but I also don't believe it was built by what folks often call neoliberalism or classical liberalism or whatever term you want to provide. But I believe America's wealth was built by an American system, by a recognition that we needed to build our own industries, protect our own technology and industries, and that system... He's grounded in a vision of populism that's very local, right? He says it's the vision of the country that he wants to see as a vision that would support the type of people he grew up with in Middletown, Ohio. He says he's seen that community hollowed out over the past 50 years by trade liberalization,

which took jobs and manufacturing jobs overseas, the financialization of the economy, which benefited economic elites who own things like stocks and bonds and not working class people who have a financial stake in the older industrial economies. And also the liberalization of social norms, which he thinks, rightly or wrongly, have negatively impacted working class people. And I worry a little bit that when people hear that word, the American dream, that phrase, their eyes sort of glaze over. Because the way that it's been taught to by so many establishment Republican politicians is that the American dream is the dream of Mitt Romney. It's private jets, it's fancy businesses, it's a lot of money, but that's not the American dream that most Americans actually occupy.

They just want to live a good life in their own country. So what he wants to see is a return to the political economy and social economy that he believes will support those types of people. You know, that means protective trade measures to support American manufacturing jobs. That means a type of social welfare policy to support traditional families. That means a more aggressive posture towards China. You know, that's the vision of, he wouldn't call it progress, I don't think, because I think he's skeptical of the whole idea of progress. But that's the vision of the country he has laid out.

Let me ask you for some clarification on two things. The first thing is, you mentioned social norms, J.D. Vance's belief that the liberalization of social norms has sent us down the wrong path. What are you talking about? What are we talking about when we talk about these so-called liberal social norms? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty conventional Republican culture war issues. He has taken up the issue of increased acceptance of transgender people, abortion, of course. U.S. Senator J.D. Vance has introduced legislation that would federally ban gender-affirming care for minors. He is a recent Catholic convert. In fact, he converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has come out in favor of a 16-week abortion

ban, much like Trump. He's moderated a bit on this issue in response to Trump's own moderation, but does believe in a 16-week federal ban. Another big hobby horse of his is the decline of the nuclear family. He thinks that American economic policy has not been conducive to the formation of traditional nuclear families, mother, father, three to four kids. The fact that we're not having enough babies, the fact that we're not having enough children is a crisis in this country. It's a crisis because it makes our media more miserable.

It's a crisis because it doesn't give our leaders enough of an investment in the future of their country. And it's a crisis because we know that babies are good. He has advocated for what he calls family policy, which is a set of economic policies and social policies to promote family formation. Why can't we give resources to parents who tell us the only reason they're not having kids is because they can't afford it?

Those are the kind of pillars of his social crusade. But he's also taken up things like mask mandates. He wants to ban mask mandates, DEI initiatives. He's introduced legislation to ban federal DEI initiatives. So traditional Republican culture war issues, where he diverges a bit from traditional Republicans on cultural issues is that he sees them as the flip side of economic issues often. So he has this slogan he uses often. The culture war in this country is a class war. What he means by that is that he thinks that elite liberals have basically weaponized their own social norms

as a means to reinforce their economic interests. One example he gives is hormones for transgender care. He believes those are bad not only because they've gender transitioned medicine, but because he believes big pharmaceutical corporations are in effect preying on vulnerable young people to pad their bottom lines by selling them expensive hormones, right? So he frames some of these economic issues in cultural terms, and he frames cultural issues in economic terms. So that's where he's a bit different. Let me ask you to pull out one more thing.

You mentioned social welfare for traditional families. I think people are going to hear that, and they're going to be like, hmm, what does that look like? What does that look like? Yeah, that is a good question. We don't know a ton about what that would look like. Many conservatives have actually been looking towards Viktor Orban's government in Hungary as an example of pro-family policy. You know, it's tax subsidies for having children. It's making primary education and daycare less expensive and more affordable.

It's a sort of vaguely articulated vision at this point, but it's basically welfare programs to promote having families, getting married, settling down, having the sort of white picket fence traditional American life. So you've mentioned this term a couple of times now, the new right. Today Explained did some reporting on the new right movement two years ago. Coming up on Today Explained, is the new right the future of conservatism or are they the other F word? Fascists. How popular with ordinary Americans are these new right ideas? Like paying parents for each additional child they have,

or giving them tax breaks for each additional child they have. Do people like this? I don't think we know yet. I mean, there's been some polling on discrete issues when they're presented as a coherent vision. I'm not sure how popular they will prove to be. That is what I personally am very curious about. By selecting Vance, Trump has put the new right on the ballot for the first time in a meaningful way. And I don't think we know yet

how Americans are going to respond to that. I mean, I think as people dig into Vance's intellectual influences, his political background, his associations with the new right will come to the fore, and the vision that the new right has put forward will come to the fore. I think there's a certain new right aesthetic and the new right way of talking about American politics, which is not your grandfather's conservatism, right? They adopt a rhetoric of sort of almost a revolutionary rhetoric. You know, they think that the project of post-war American conservatism grounded in sort of free market capitalism and foreign policy hawkishness

has not only failed, but really harmed the people that Vance and others want to help. And he doesn't think just going backwards in time is going to be enough. You know, they have a sort of revolutionary insurgency mentality where they're forging forward, right? They're not trying to go back. And traditionally, political candidates who've adopted a sort of insurgent attitude have not done particularly well in American electoral politics. So I think that is a potential liability. You know, parties that do well generally emphasize stability and things like that. And

Vance's vision is not premised primarily on stability. I mean, he would say in the long term it has been the short term, it is premised on a pretty radical upheaval to American life. So I think it's a big question how voters will respond to that. All right. So J.D. Vance is an intellectual with vision, which makes him a very interesting character in Washington, D.C. If Donald Trump should win, J.D. Vance will be vice president. Donald Trump doesn't particularly like sharing anything, including the spotlight. So J.D. Vance may have a vision here, but as vice president, will he be able to deliver on any of this? Yeah, vice presidents famously get shunted to the side. Hey, Sue, did the president call? No. It's not a particularly coveted role in Washington.

It tends to be highly ceremonial, you know, but different vice presidents have been able to exert different amounts of influence. I mean, think of Dick Cheney in the Bush White House. I think what we saw from the Trump term is that Trump's decision making depends in large part on who he's surrounded with and who he's listening to at any given time, right? He is a malleable political figure, to put it diplomatically. And having a figure like Vance in the room means that you have a committed advocate of the new right agenda in the room whenever Trump is making decisions.

That is not a guarantee by any means the new right agenda will be enacted into law, but it at least means they will have a seat at the table, and the person filling that seat will be one of their strongest advocates and most committed members. Politico's Ian Ward. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Miles Bryan. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and Matthew Collette. And it was fact-checked by Hadi Mouagdi and Peter Balanon-Rosen. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter are our engineers.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.