Trump’s New Apprentice, JD Vance

Kurt Mahlburg
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith.

With his rough Appalachian upbringing, service in the Marine Corps, Yale Law School education, and success as an author and venture capitalist, one could hardly imagine a more colourful VP pick than JD Vance.

No doubt Vance’s zero-to-hero backstory had special weight for a showman and entrepreneur like Donald Trump, who knows a compelling story when he sees one.

In the media scramble to understand and frame this junior Ohio senator, speculations abound – and more than a few reactionary outlets have already satirised themselves in the process.

The vice-presidential path that Vance will carve is one that only time can tell, should the GOP be so fortunate. But from what we already know about him, here are three of my predictions on what Vance could bring to a second Trump presidency.

Vance, the decoder of Trumpism

Much is being made of JD Vance’s 180-degree about-face on Donald Trump.

The list of words Vance historically used to describe the 45th president is quite something to behold: “reprehensible”, “moral disaster”, “a total fraud”, “unfit for our nation’s highest office”.

While critics have used this as proof of instability on Vance’s part, they fail to see what he might represent to America’s undecided voter. Maybe it’s OK to change your mind about Trump. Maybe there’s room after all for never-Trumpers in a Trump-entrenched GOP.

Indeed, it is something of an irony that liberals despise Vance today for the same reason many of them loved him when he released Hillbilly Elegy: Vance has the ability to decode and interpret Trumpism to America’s coastal elite.

As Vance himself mused in a New York Times interview last month, liberal Americans drawn to the bestselling book were “genuinely trying to understand something about a part of the country they didn’t understand”.

Yes, unlike them, Vance finally overcame his repugnance for “the stylistic element of Trump” in favour of what the boisterous billionaire had to offer “on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration”.

While vowing at the RNC never to forget his Rustbelt roots, Vance’s life trajectory ultimately positioned him in elite company and made him highly conversant with elite sensibilities.

Some have lamented that as a VP pick, Vance secures no new voting block. I beg to differ. As a decoder of Trumpism to America’s highly educated, Vance may yet win many hearts and minds to the cause.

Vance, the heir apparent of Trumpism

Donald Trump is almost an octogenarian. If he wins back the White House, he has just four years to solidify his political legacy.

But Trumpism (which might best be described as a populist and bombastic twist on Paleo-conservatism or Buchananism) will likely outlive Trump by many decades. And Vance will more than likely be the vessel.

As JD Vance mentor Rod Dreher remarked last week in The European Conservative, the VP pick’s reception speech “sealed the realignment of American politics”. He expounded:

Given his brilliant choice of Vance, Trump has not only chosen the most articulate and credible possible advocate of his sensibilities, but laid the groundwork for the permanent restructuring not only of American conservatism, but of America itself. Because Trump chose JD Vance, Trumpism will long outlast its founder. Trump resisted the pleas of media mogul Rupert Murdoch to choose someone tamer and more controllable as his running mate, and in so doing, passed the torch to a fighting tribune of the new MAGA generation.

Like it or loathe it, to understand the heartbeat of that generation, you’ll do no better than to watch this segment of Vance’s speech:

Vance, a righteous restraint on Trumpism

In 2020 JD Vance gave a fascinating account of his conversion to Catholicism at The Lamp.

There, he weaves together sentimental stories of his Mamaw’s (grandmother’s) “deep, but completely de-institutionalized, faith”, quotes from antiquity and modern philosophers, an exposé of his fling with atheism, and an account of why Catholicism possesses such practical and social appeal for him.

Not your typical Trumpism, in other words.

Vance may be animated by the same national populist concerns as Donald Trump, but what drives him is quantitatively different.

I’ll leave it to others to articulate or defend Trump’s own internal motivators. For Vance, however, faith appears to be front and centre. He writes:

I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of [Mamaw’s] kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.

“I try to keep a little humility about how little I know, and how inadequate a Christian I really am,” he also writes.

You won’t hear this from Trump. And it is for the same reason that you will hear a lot less loose-lipped rhetoric from Vance. His Christianity is more than cultural. It even appears to have civilised him.

And wouldn’t that be a welcome restraint on Trumpism?   

This article was originally published on Mercatornet.