JD Vance is the Republican National Convention’s John the Baptist to the Messianic figure of Donald Trump. As the new vice president pick introduced himself to a rapturous crowd in his first prime time speaking slot, the boss looked at his protege with the benign expression of a man assessing the outing of his new hire.
The Trump-Vance ticket doubles down on the original Make America Great Again message which has powered the rise of an erratic, mendacious but highly effective political leader. Liberals on either side of the Atlantic who underestimated Trump’s ability to win and return to the fray would be well advised not to do the same with Vance.
But this ticket also marks a shift from Trump’s first term in office. Vance is the most focused and decisive trade warrior to inhabit an influential position close to Trump. His ability to knot a homespun narrative about the harm done to his native Ohio by “unfair trade practices” and imports from China he blames for wrecking the US industrial base also connects to a much more determined vision. That is to insulate America from (as he sees it) the negative impacts of involvement with the wider world and free it of its burdens.
Vance is not the Maga hat-wearing “took our jobs” parody of right-wing thinking. He is a bridge between the worlds the Republican Party intends conquer in a re-cast second term – taking Maga mainstream, rather than a rude revolt against existing liberal elites, and sweeping up more independents, middle-class Americans and suburban female voters along the way.
There is an implied contrast in Vance’s appearance, his neat beard and unsettlingly intense blue eyes, which make him look more like a college lecturer than a firebrand. Unlike the Trumps, Vance is highly educated: a Yale Law graduate who met his wife Usha Vance there. Usha, a lawyer and the child of Indian immigrants, also studied at Cambridge University. The story of his hardscrabble upbringing with a drug and drink-dependent mother is now written firmly into the political narrative. So is his time in Iraq in the media operations of the Marine Corps.
All of this has been sedulously crafted into a story which powers his political career.
He would not, however, have edged out many other right-wing contenders for the role had it not been for his conversion from “Never Trumper” who compared the populist figure to “America’s Hitler” and wrote a detailed essay in The Atlantic about why Trump was not the answer to the woes of America’s working classes. Interviewing Hogan Gidley, press chief of Trump’s unsuccessful 2020 campaign this week, he observes that “Trump loves a convert.”
“He said some bad things about me,” Trump has mused. “But that is before he knew me and then he fell in love.”
Vance’s family life is also an endowment of American diversity (he is a practising Catholic, his wife Hindu). In his Milwaukee speech, he drew implicit contrasts with the world of glossy riches which the Trumps embody. When he proposed to his wife, he mused, all he had to offer her was sizeable college debt and a grave plot on an Ohio hillside. No Trump ever had to worry much about college fees.
In many senses, he is more decisive and extreme in his ideology than his boss. On abortion, where Trump is tactical about how to handle the issue, Vance has been a full-out opponent of the core right to termination.
He has made clear that he wants to divert funding for the support of Ukraine to the defence of Taiwan and bolstering US readiness for future conflict with Beijing. Whereas Trump’s last term flirted with tariffs, Vance is set on their implementation. He believes in US self-reliance to an extent which would disrupt much of the “special relationship” with the UK. Anticipating this, David Lammy has said he is already engaging with Vance and can identify with him because of their shared working-class and Christian backgrounds.
Well, it’s a nice try. For now, Vance is happy to tilt at the Labour government and the UK as the world’s first “truly Islamist country” to have a nuclear weapon. This was also a sign that crowd-pleasing can be a weakness – even Donald Trump does not deploy verbal missiles against the UK so randomly.
This speaks to another weakness of Vance which might become more apparent outside the Republican bubble when battle is launched in the election campaign – namely that he is an “ideas” person, not an experienced politician. “He had to be carried over the line [by the party] in his [Ohio] Senate race,” says one Republican source. “He talks a lot. Now he needs to get into the ‘doing’ bit of the campaign and the focus on key target groups.”
Fluency in articulating Trump’s gut-instincts as a philosophy is Vance’s talent. But his tendency to keep talking might come to irk his mentor, who will show in his keynote tonight that he views his place at the head of the Republican movement as unchallengeable and dislikes competition.
In the end, Trump seeks acolytes, not advisers and tends to pull down the people he builds up with ruthless regularity. Vance spoke marginally too long, even for the rapturous delegates here. John the Baptist knew that the point of an introducer is to keep things shorter than the main event, because there is only ever one Messiah.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power play podcast for POLITICO from the Republican National Convention