Overweening ambition turned him from an outspoken Trump critic to his deputy charlatan.
J.D. VANCE, ONE OF MY FELLOW O.G. Never Trumpers, was officially named former President Donald Trump’s second vice presidential nominee. The news arrived via a social media post that focused heavily on Vance’s Yale pedigree and his appeal in the industrial Midwest.
The initial response from myself and many other still-riding Never Trumpers was some deserved mockery. Vance, after all, had fretted that Trump would be “America’s Hitler” and joshed with Chris Matthews on “Hardball” about how the guy who’s now his boss is a lying rapist.
This surface-level trolling is cathartic and deserved and premised in the knowledge that there is no reason to actually engage the merits of Vance’s Saul to Mar-a-Lago parable. The notion that this person had a genuine change of heart, that there is more to the story than a smart and ambitious striver saying whatever needs saying to advance, is absurd on its face. Vance’s entire career, his entire self-narrative, has been one of a talented, aspiring man determined to rise above his humble upbringings and touch every rung on the ladder of success all the way up to the presidency. No beard can hide that.
And to his credit, he may land one short step away from that pinnacle in astonishingly quick fashion.
But even if we all see who Vance is, there is one warning from his pre-MAGA days that is worth sitting with.
Vance’s appointment comes in the wake of shocking violence perpetrated upon people who come from the same cultural milieu as those he wrote about in his book. Analyzing the troubles of the white working class voters in communities like Butler, Pennsylvania has been his life’s work. And per Trump’s own post, it is these voters whose mantle Vance will now claim in service to their campaign.
In an August 2016 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, the radio home for the forgotten man, Vance made a comment about Trump’s impact on this group, almost as an aside. The implications of it echo today.
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But I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.
A very dark place.
In Vance’s own telling, he believes that Trump was taking his people, the ones with whom he grew up, somewhere dark.
Gross doesn’t follow-up on that point, instead drilling in on Trump’s then-opponent, Hillary Clinton. So the ominous sentiment just washes over the public radio airwaves. The listeners, the host, and the guest were all able to float past it since, in their mind, there wasn’t much worry that such a thing would ever come to pass. No one, at that juncture, imagined Trump would win.
But an article Vance wrote the previous month prior for the Atlantic, Appalachia’s most popular periodical, provides a bit more insight into what he meant. Titled “Opioid of the Masses,” the article argues that Trump “feels good” but the “comedown will be harsh.”
After sharing some heartrending stories of Trump supporters living in rural America who have been left behind by their communities and leaders, Vance sums up his core argument.
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The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.
I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine.
In short, Vance argues that it’s the finger-pointing, the blame-shifting that is at the core of the Trumpian menace. That the opioid Trump offers MAGA Americans is exculpation from personal responsibility and the license to blame others for their ills: immigrants, the Deep State, Joe Biden. His view was that this type of politics will not only fix nothing, but lead to a hard and painful crash.
On this front, he was right. In the intervening years, while much has changed in Vance’s tone and in the country, the danger that he foresaw continues unabated.
The reality of Trump and the reality of rural communities that have been left behind by globalization haven’t changed much (unless they landed one of those new factories from the bipartisan CHIPs act that President Biden signed). There are still too many angry young men in these communities who have been let down by their leaders and are lashing out, sometimes by succumbing to drugs, sometimes violently. There are still too many obituaries of neighbors who died too soon.
But when Vance joins the Trump ticket this week, his message to these voters won’t be one that addresses the root problems of the communities he claims to champion. Instead he will offer them the same opiates that have alleviated the pain but done nothing to address the underlying suffering.
Vance will tell them that their hero was targeted in a plot by a president that looks down at them, knowing full well that is untrue. He will suggest that the dead and wounded in Pennsylvania were victims not of gun violence or the despair of a bullied young man, but of a plot orchestrated by shadowy forces that they should hate. He will tell them that they are suffering because an election was stolen from them. He will blame immigrants for social ills. And he will argue that they can only get vengeance for that suffering by turning their fate over to two men who are happy to feed them opiates to get the recognition and power that they have always craved.
That’s a very dark place indeed.
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Trump now has his slavishly-obedient accomplice. Like Pence, Burgum and Rubio wouldn't have been willing to literally walk themselves - and the country - off a cliff at Trump's command, and he damn well knew it.
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