Title: "Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President."

Author: Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

Last Saturday, two hours after a young man from Pennsylvania, whose political stance was unclear and motives were unknown, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, Republican Senator J. D. Vance from Ohio posted a response on social media: "Today is not just an isolated incident. The core premise of Biden's campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric directly led to the assassination attempt on President Trump."

By Washington's logic, Vance's selection as Trump's running mate on Monday makes sense. Vance is the most conservative of the three nominees, as well as the most outspokenly loyal and combative partisan, qualities that fit well with the current frontrunner in opinion polls and the candidate with prospects for future struggles. But Vance is also a figure who has rapidly shifted from moderate reform conservatism to hard-line populism, a trend that seems to be resurging, all of which is a path of anti-elitism. He is Trump's attack dog, but he is also a more emerging and interesting presence: he is the fuse lit by Trump.

Just two years ago, the 39-year-old Vance ran for public office for the first time. His rise has been as meteoric as that of any political figure since Obama, benefiting from the rare ability to transform his life experiences into compelling social narratives. Raised by his grandparents in Appalachian Ohio due to his mother's severe alcoholism, Vance served in Iraq as an ordinary soldier, and later received education at Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where his mentor Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," encouraged him to package his experiences into a memoir. The result, "Hillbilly Elegy," was published in 2016 and became a phenomenon; The New York Times listed it as one of six books explaining Trump's victory, a status bolstered by Vance's own anti-Trumpism. (During the 2016 campaign, Vance messaged his former roommate, "I'm thinking Trump is a stupid asshole like Nixon, not so bad (and may be useful), or he's America's Hitler.")

Even though some of the stereotypes in "Hillbilly Elegy" seemed clichéd at the time, Vance's rags-to-riches story and his timely analysis that economic upheaval had weakened the social fabric in areas like southwestern Ohio gave it a boost on the big screen. By 2020, Vance was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, backed by Peter Thiel, and "Hillbilly Elegy" was adapted into a film directed by Ron Howard.

The four-year journey from a recognized, disruptive young conservative intellectual to today's (right-wing vanguard and Trump's vice-presidential candidate) is equally impressive, and crucially, it involves two changes within Vance and conservatism. Vance's change is that as he prepared to run for public office, his political stance became more firm. In an extended interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times last month, he attributed this shift to his perception of liberalism's transformation in the late stages of the Trump administration. "I've been thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020, these guys have all read Carl Schmitt—no law, just power," Vance said. "The goal is to regain power. This seemed true in the Kavanaugh episode, and in the 'Black Lives Matter' moment." (Vance's wife Usha is an Indian-American lawyer whom he met at Yale, and who served as a clerk for Brett Kavanaugh. "A bit of a bookworm," Vance told Douthat, commenting on the Supreme Court justice, "never believed any of those stories.") When Vance ran for the Senate in 2022, his first campaign ad emphasized his confrontation with liberal elites. "Are you a racist?" he asked voters, "Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists because we want to build Trump's wall. They censor us, but that doesn't change the facts."

In April of that year, when I went to Ohio to watch Vance in a crowded primary for the U.S. Senate, his anti-Trumpism was everywhere. "Let me just say it straight," he said, then went on to talk about how he didn't initially like Trump, but eventually realized that the billionaire "exposed the corruption completely hidden in our country." Vance at the time was not particularly adept at retail politics (the upcoming election will test whether he has improved), and the crowd I saw was somewhat tense when he admitted he had not always been a loyal supporter of Trump. When the audience expressed distrust due to this history, Vance nodded in complete understanding. But he was also one of the most striking figures in the campaign, positioning himself as a spokesman for working-class conservatives. His self-denigration was successful: Trump endorsed him, Vance won the primary, and then the general election. Vance may have realized what it takes to succeed in today's Republican Party, so he loudly condemned the sexual assault allegations against Trump and insisted that if he had been vice president on January 6th instead of Mike Pence, he would have authorized the "alternate electors" list in Trump's fantasy, allowing Congress to "fight from there."

After the rebellion at the Capitol on January 6th, Vance can be seen as a case study in Republican loyalty, as those who supported Trump after the event often went all in—their careers and reputations were closely tied to the former president. But many Republicans still remain staunch supporters of Trump. Vance's rise also depends on his populist stance. Like other Republican senators of his generation (such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Marco Rubio of Florida), Vance often emphasizes the need for the Republican Party to break free from the absolutism of the free market in the 1980s and 1990s. "For the conservative movement to achieve lasting governing majorities, it must rethink the economic dogmas of the 1980s and 1990s," he said at an event hosted by the American Compass think tank in 2023. He supports tariffs and urges Republicans to seek more union votes. "My grandmother's politics were a mix of left-wing social democracy and right-wing personal uplift, and both worldviews have their merits," Vance told Sohrab Ahmari of The New Politician in February, although this alliance has so far existed mainly at the rhetorical level; as Ahmari pointed out acerbically, "the mainstream labor movement has yet to find a legislative partner in Vance." Nevertheless, Vance's selection as a running mate shows how Trump can interact with the party elite in a different way, unlike Pence's elevation in 2016: less piety, more cultural warfare, and a willingness to push economic nationalism further. In other words, it shows which direction conservative elites are heading in and how much the Trump era has changed them.

Of course, Pence's vice presidency ended with Trump's supporters turning against him, storming the Capitol, and calling for his hanging. Many Republicans who joined Trump's cabinet regretted it. Vance is still relatively unfamiliar with all of this, so it's hard to say whether he will be an asset to the campaign, adding seriousness to it, or a burden due to being too extreme and too strange. However, in an election largely defined by age, Vance provides Trump's campaign with something small but valuable: an opportunity to credibly suggest that Trumpism still has a future after Trump.

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