What A Day - From Foe to Bro: JD Vance is Trump's VP

Starting point is 00:00:00 it's tuesday july 16th i'm josie duffy rice and i'm treyvel anderson and this is what a day the show where we hate watching the rnc so you don't have to i will always tune into footage of a large crowd booing mitch mcconnell just tell me time and place, I'll stream it. On today's show, former President Donald Trump's classified documents case is thrown out. Plus, the judge and rapper Young Thug's never-ending racketeering trial is officially removed. But first, the Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday with the official nomination of Donald Trump as the party's presidential nominee. Delegates participated in the roll call tradition announcing their support for the former president. On behalf of the 91 New York delegates to the Republican National Convention, we proudly cast all 91 votes for President Donald J. Trump.

Starting point is 00:01:06 New Hampshire proudly casts all 22 votes for my good friend, the 45th and soon to be 47th President of the United States, Donald John Trump. Wyoming, the cowboy state, casts all of its 29 delegates for President Donald J. Trump. votes to make him the party's presidential nominee. On behalf of our entire family, and on behalf of the 125 delegates in the unbelievable state of Florida, we hereby nominate every single one of them for the greatest president that's ever lived, and that's Donald J. Trump. Hereby declaring him the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America. My kids also think I'm the greatest president that's ever lived. That's the nice thing about having kids, you know?

Starting point is 00:02:20 And after months of anticipation, Trump finally announced Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential pick for the 2024 presidential election. Vance and his wife appeared on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday evening, where he formally received the VP nomination. The question is on the motion that Senator J.D. Vance be nominated by acclamation. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. All those opposed, signify by saying no. In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the motion is adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. Vance, a former Trump skeptic turned loyal ally, has long been a frontrunner for the VP position. He's a Marine Corps veteran, a Yale Law grad, who was first known for his 2016 book, Hillbilly Elegy.

Starting point is 00:03:16 And at 39, Vance is the first millennial on a presidential ticket. History, look at that. Josie, you said that J.D. Vance is a former Trump skeptic. What exactly does that mean here? So Vance was openly disdainful of Trump for years, saying publicly that Trump was a, quote, idiot and, quote, reprehensible, and privately referring to him as, quote, America's Hitler. Just the thing I want my VP pick saying about me. But in the years since, especially when he decided to run for Senate, Vance has become one of Trump's most vocal fanboys. He has also gotten more substantively conservative in that time and has expressed support for some of Trump's more extreme policy proposals. And he has even stated that had he been vice president in January of 2021,

Starting point is 00:04:08 he would have refused to certify the election, unlike former VP Mike Pence. So we have a guy here who is obviously willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants. Whatever he wants. That is exactly right. So to talk more about what J.D. Vance's promotion to VP candidate means for the election, for the Republican Party, and for the country, I talked to Zach Beecham, a senior correspondent for Vox and the author of a new book on right-wing authoritarianism called The Reactionary Spirit, How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.

Starting point is 00:04:40 That book comes out today. I started by asking him what Vance adds to the Republican ticket. J.D. Vance is the most intellectually in tune with the Republican, what's called the post-liberal movement, maybe, or perhaps more appropriately an authoritarian movement inside the sort of general conservative world. I mean, he's openly stated his admiration for Viktor Orban, who's the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary. He learns from Curtis Yarvin, who is a neo-monarchist blogger in Silicon Valley, where Vance has links. He's explicitly cited Yarvin as an influence on his ideas. And we could go on through the list, but Vance is, you know, he's taken a lot of positions that are not just extreme. They're actually really on the authoritarian end of the Republican Party

Starting point is 00:05:26 spectrum, right? If the Republican Party has become an authoritarian party in the Trump era, Vance is from its authoritarian wing. His political views have changed a lot since he kind of made a national name for himself as the author of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. You know, back then he was calling Trump things like cultural heroine. He wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing him. And now he's truly one of Trump's biggest, most loyal supporters in Congress. So how does his transformation emblematic of the Republican Party writ large? It's very interesting. He gets famous, right, because of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which all of us heard. It came out around the time that Trump was rising and was taken as the,

Starting point is 00:06:03 like, this explains Trump to liberals book. And in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance takes this very classic conservative position about welfare that he just applies to white people. That's sort of his innovation, right? Poor whites in Appalachia, where he says that the welfare state is a corrosive influence. These people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and the government is making them lazy and helping fuel their drug addictions, and that needs to get stopped, right? It's very normal movement conservative stuff. And he bills himself as the kind of highbrow intellectual appalled by Trumpism. But he's abandoned every aspect of that, as has much of the Republican Party, incidentally. And what Vance has really done is climb on board with Trump's cultural and kind of systemic preoccupations, this idea that Washington is rigged against the true people of America, this idea that Trump has been cheated out of winning reelection. then, I think a transformation from a relatively normal mainstream conservative to the physical

Starting point is 00:07:08 incarnation of Trumpism in some ways more aggressive about the policy and the ideology that's been built around it than Trump himself. So you wrote in your most recent piece that Vance's worldview is, quote, fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy. So talk to us a little bit more about that. How is that kind of reflected in the movement and the party right now? Vance's fundamental belief at this point, based on what you can see from his public comments, is that the American government is rigged against the Republican Party in a variety of different ways. He believes in some version of the theory of the deep state, of there being operatives who are devoted to basically Democratic Party ideas seeded

Starting point is 00:07:51 throughout the federal government who are working to undermine Trump. He believes that the electoral system is rigged against Trump, and he wants a thoroughgoing reform to bring various different aspects of the system closer in line to what he thinks would be fair or controlled by a Republican president. That means cleaning house, right? What it means is taking a system that's built around nonpartisan expertise and neutral administration of government rules, which is how our civil service works, and Vance wants to turn it all into an instrument of Donald Trump's will. And that's just not the way American democracy works. It's not the way any democracy is supposed to work. To your point, this is kind of the strain of Trumpism, right? It's very much

Starting point is 00:08:34 the mindset of Donald Trump. I guess the question is, do you see J.D. Vance bringing anyone new into the Republican Party or to the ballot box? Like, is he going to get Trump a new bunch of voters that maybe wouldn't have supported him before? Or what do we think his value add is on that level? If you weren't for Trump already, why would you now be for him? Because J.D. Vance is on the ticket. Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is. One thing I'll say to begin with is that vice presidential choices don't matter very much historically. If you were selecting a vice president because you think they will bring in a new political constituency, you're doing it wrong, right? That's not the right way to think

Starting point is 00:09:16 about it. The right way to think about it, based on what we know, is that a vice president could be president, especially when the president's quite old. When the president was almost killed this weekend in an attack, it really should hammer home how serious a decision this is, you're one heartbeat away from the presidency. If I were the Trump team, I would say my substantive reason for doing this is that I think J.D. Vance will be a good executor of Donald Trump's will. And in power, he will do what Trump needs him to do in order to enact his major plans for reshaping the American government. And so substantively, if what you want is to institutionalize Trumpism, then he's a

Starting point is 00:09:53 very good pick. So now we know who's on the GOP ticket. Trump is heading into the RNC. You know, he's kind of a messiah figure right now. He's survived this assassination attempt over the weekend. And the party is obviously pretty unified around him already. Like many of his most vocal critics have either left the party or more likely just gotten in line, just like Vance, right? So what principles would you say bind the modern Republican Party right now? Like what are they

Starting point is 00:10:18 driving home at the RNC? What are they kind of saying to the public as their principles beyond just Trump has been wronged? Or is there anything beyond that? It's that Democrats are bad and their policies are hurting our country. The Republican Party is much less unified on where it should be going forward. There are certain policy issues where Trump has succeeded in imposing as well. They really want to curtail immigration. They really want to deport lots of people They really want to deport lots of people. They want to raise tariffs. I mean, some of these are anathema to the old Republican Party, but they are what the party stands for now in specific policy areas. But they don't

Starting point is 00:10:53 really hang together without the overarching connective tissue of Trump's narrative of, you are being screwed and I am the one who can save you from it, and specifically from them. Now, who is them or they, right? You hear that a lot in conservative rhetoric nowadays. And it's just designed to conjure up the sense of an amorphous, all-powerful enemy operating through the Democratic Party who's trying to destroy their way of life. They're, in this case, being Republicans and their supporters. And that narrative, the opposition of us versus them, that is the heart of the Republican Party. There's a common pro-Trump meme that you may have seen. It's a picture of Trump's face and it says, they're not

Starting point is 00:11:36 trying to get me, they're trying to get you. I'm just standing in the way. That, to me, is what Trumpism is right now. According to recent polls, this iteration of the party seems to be resonating with more Americans, or at least more Americans than the Democratic Party is currently resonating with, depending on how you see polls. But let's just say that it's at least on the table. No, it's not going well for the Democrats right now. Yeah. That's pretty clear.

Starting point is 00:11:58 Yeah. And you have a book out today that's all about this kind of reactionary spirit in American politics that tries to undermine strides towards democracy. Would you say that this is an example of that? Is that what you're seeing right now? Yes, I think J.D. Vance is the physical embodiment of what I call in the book the reactionary spirit. You know, someone who is opposed to social change sees it happening through the democratic system. They're put in a position to choose, right? Either they fight through the system and, you know, if they lose an election or a policy they don't like gets enacted, say, well, that's democracy

Starting point is 00:12:28 and try to do what they can to fix it. Or they make the other choice and they say, no, we care so much about preserving certain elements of the existing social order. We're willing to wreck the system itself in order to save them and attack them. And that is basically what J.D. Vance's political persona has become. He is the avatar for the people who say America is changing in a way that makes us feel alienated, feel like strangers in our own home, as the sociologist Arlie Rothschild put it. And that logic authorizes really extreme anti-democratic choices, right? There's a wonderful study by two political scientists that shows that when people are really polarized, when they believe the stakes are really high in an

Starting point is 00:13:09 election, they're much more likely to condone anti-democratic behavior by candidates in their parties because they see that as a means to accomplish the ends that they want. And that's what's happening right now. That's the reactionary spirit. J.D. Vance is that. I read what he says about politics, the way that he talks about sometimes needing to do some really wild stuff in order to stop the Democrats. And I think, yeah, you are what I'm writing about in the book. That was my conversation with Zach Beecham, senior correspondent for Vox and author of the new book, The Reactionary Spirit. That book comes out today. That's the latest for now. We will get to some headlines in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and tell your friends. Let's get to some headlines.

Starting point is 00:14:06 Headlines. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said on Monday that his department is investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Mayorkas made the remarks at Monday's White House press briefing. He called Saturday's shooting a, quote, failure by the Secret Service. Take a listen. We unequivocally condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence our nation witnessed that day. Such acts are unacceptable in our country and in our democracy. Mayorkas's comments came after Biden ordered an independent review of

Starting point is 00:14:46 the security at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was shot at by a lone gunman. The secretary said Trump's Secret Service detail has been, quote, enhanced since Saturday, along with President Biden's. A federal judge dismissed former President Donald Trump's classified documents case on Monday and cited the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith as her reasoning. This is the case involving the classified documents that were found at Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to prosecute the case, but Judge Eileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the case, said on Monday that Smith's appointment violates a clause in the Constitution that requires the Senate to confirm appointees and the case should be thrown out entirely. Cannon's ruling hands another huge win to Trump and his efforts to delay the pending criminal trials against him.

Starting point is 00:15:38 A spokesperson for Smith said on Monday that he will appeal the decision. Did we mention that Judge Cannon was appointed to the federal bench by Trump? He really got his money's worth out of that one. President Biden sat down with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt for an interview that aired on Monday evening. Holt questioned Biden about the language he used to describe his opponent, former President Donald Trump, during the campaign. Trump's newly named VP, J.D. Vance, said that the Biden campaign's rhetoric the bullseye. There's some dispute about the context, but I think you appreciate that word.

Starting point is 00:16:25 I didn't say crosshairs. I was talking about focus on. Look, the truth of the matter was, what I guess I was talking about at the time was there was very little focus on Trump's agenda. Yeah, the term was bullseye. It was a mistake to use the word. I didn't say crosshairs. I meant bullseye. I meant focus on him. Uh-oh. This interview is part of a seemingly concerted effort by the campaign to get Biden in the public eye more and demonstrate the president's acuity to Dems who doubt he can beat Donald Trump in November.

Starting point is 00:16:57 Is it working? Y'all tell me. And finally, the judge overseeing the high-profile racketeering case against rapper Young Thug and his crew has been dismissed from the case here in Atlanta. Young Thug's lawyers filed a motion to remove Judge Ural Glanville from the trial after he held a private meeting with prosecutors and a witness without the defense's knowledge. The court said he should be removed to preserve, quote, the public's confidence in the judicial system. The high-profile trial has faced multiple delays since it began in January of 2023, and jury selection alone lasted 10 months.

Starting point is 00:17:33 The trial has now been assigned to another judge in Fulton County Superior Court, Judge Shakura Ingram. It is unclear if they will have to retry the case from the beginning. Young Thug and his co-defendants are being prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis and have been charged under Georgia's RICO statute, just like former President Donald Trump. Look, this case is going to last longer

Starting point is 00:17:54 than Biden-Trump's 10 years combined at this rate, so we need to get it moving. Fannie Willis can't, you know, something's going on over there in the water in Atlanta, Josie. What's going on? Well, it's Atlanta. We're historically a mess. Valid point.

Starting point is 00:18:09 But we're so charming. Valid point. And those are the headlines. One more thing before we go. It is such an uncertain time, but there is one thing that always makes us feel better, and that is buying stuff online. And obviously getting involved in progressive politics, too. So at the Crooked store, you can do both. Shop a new collection of progressive merch for summer

Starting point is 00:18:29 and feel good knowing that a portion of the proceeds from every purchase goes to support organizations doing incredible work across the U.S. to ensure every voice can be heard. So pick up an Only You Can Prevent Gender Reveals tee for your next camping trip, wear a Hot People Vote tee to your next canvassing shift, and grab a Let Women Run Everything hat for your next camping trip, wear a hot people vote tee to your next canvassing shift, and grab a let women run everything hat for your next feminist global takeover picnic. Shop new merch and let your value shine all summer long at crooked.com store. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, protect your peace by turning off the RNC when you have to, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just judge Eileen Cannon's batshit interpretation of federal law like me, well today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and

Starting point is 00:19:14 subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Trey Bell Anderson. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. And booing Mitch McConnell is for everyone. This is a true bipartisan tradition. Listen, finally something we can agree on. Yeah. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lance. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Natalie Bettendorf. We had production help today from Michelle Aloy, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare.

Starting point is 00:19:58 Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.

What A Day - From Foe to Bro: JD Vance is Trump's VP

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