A month ago I wrote that Donald Trump's VP choice would be guided by what he was looking for in a running mate. Ass kissing? Retribution? General shittiness? Here was my entry for the primary virtue of the senator from Ohio:
- Willingness to pretend to be an idiot: J.D. Vance
So I guess that's what Trump values the most. He wants someone who shows his loyalty by a willingness to say anything, no matter how dumb or obviously untrue he knows it to be. Congratulations, J.D.!
So, does Senator Brown have a decent shot to retain his seat this fall? In the hopefully unlikely event Vance becomes VP, who would Devine appoint to fill the seat, and would that be for the balance of the remaining term or would a special election be needed?
Huh? Brown’s race has nothing to do with Vance he was just elected to the other seat. DeWine will appoint someone to fill Vance’s seat if he vacates it.
My money was on Vance as well. He has all the qualities that Trump admires in a follower.
My money was on Ivanka. She owes me 3 bucks!
So, let's extrapolate a bit more on Vance. He's an "outsider" who came to politics late, like Trump -- hence the appeal. Not an experienced politician, a guy who rose up from humble beginnings and made something of himself (Trump also views himself as a self made man..erroneously, but we won't go there).
With Trump only getting 4 years, Vance is now the de facto leader in training of the GOP. What does he stand for? He's now getting the power he sought, what will he do with it? Tax cuts for the rich and corporations don't seem like his shtick.
What does he stand for?
exacting vengence on those perceived to have wronged him? Vance is a rather Thomas-like figure: nursing slights and humiliations handed out by snobs at the elite institutions they attended, and "getting even" by stepping on the people below them, morphing wraithlike into whatever it takes to accrue power in the process.
Ok, but retribution against elite institutions is going to cut deeply into the country club Republican establishment. I'm not sure they will stand for that.
As long as they get their tax cuts and subsidies they could care less.
Oh, you mistake me--it would be normal for Vance to take out his anger at being snubbed by the old money and old family types who (in his telling) were mean to him for being a hillbilly or whatever at Yale by attacking them (or by acting to support the underprivileged).
Instead, Vance's reaction is to fulminate against "elites" by demonizing the ACA and arguing that programs to assist poor people are corrupting our culture. All the while being a Yale-educated lawyer who worked at Sidley Austin and in venture cap with Peter Thiel and who is now a freakin' senator and vice presidential candidate.
Like Thomas, the guy has more power than his humble origins could dream of, and yet carries himself like a man aggrieved, nursing old slights, and pulling up the ladder behind him. A ghoul.
Yeah, he'll attack those "elites" like single mothers and college students.
he hates single mothers because he hates his own mother, high school valedictorian who got heavy once into drugs & didn't look after him.
jimbo vance needs therapy, not to be vp.
waa james david vance really the first person from dayton, oh, to go to yale?
his whole "i'm just a simple countryboi" shtick is nauseating. he's not from the holler, he's from the place that hosts the ncaa basketball tournament playin games every year & was the site of ceasefire negotiations for the yugoslav civil war. it's a real live city. maybe a little boring, but it's well peopled & has two prominent universities (u of dayton & wright state).
Who’s to say Trump only gets 4 more years? SCOTUS will have the final say and I have faith that they can find some bullshit reason to give him at least 8 if he wants it. This is the SCOTUS that just deletes parts of the constitution they don’t like after all.
:eyeroll:
It's exactly idiotic commentary like that that has had 70% of the country wake up after first the debate, then the shooting, and ask themselves "WTF is going on here? how come every political comment I see on Twitter or in the MSM seems to be uttered by a lunatic?"
You got your 8 years of peddling crazy nonsense. The antibodies have now kicked in and no-one outside your bubble gives a fsck about this or any other such opinion.
Do you have a good answer to this?
(Only interested in answers that reflects some actual thought, not the sort of generic 2-minute hate nonsense I can find anywhere.)
As far as I can tell (but I am prepared to be corrected) Vance's trajectory was something like
- guy from Appalachia goes to Yale and gets told a certain view of the world by school. Feels this is incorrect, is too negative against the society in which he grew up, and so writes _Hillbilly Elegy_, on the assumption that "if I just explain things clearly to my profs and fellow students, they will understand".
- response is absolutely not what he expected. Profs and fellow students are utterly uninterested in changing their views, while plenty of the people on the Hillbilly Elegy side want to play the victim as long as they can get more stuff for free.
- in disgust Vance has a Road to Damascus moment and basically pivots 180. Concludes that
+ the Yale elites are simply not worth talking to or trying to persuade. They are so set in their ways that facts just don't register. You have to route around them, you cannot try to work with them as partners.
+ plenty (not all, but also not none) of the weakest and feeblest in America enjoy being victims and being enabled by the system. Again you cannot take their complaints and concerns too seriously because they are not interested in becoming better human beings (better as defined by Aristotle, as defined by me, as defined by most Americans, and as defined by Vance).
So yes, the story looks like someone who opportunistically changed his views. Or it looks like someone who was naive and sheltered from the world while in school, and who got mugged by reality as soon as he left it.
What I'm not seeing in any of this is why I am supposed to hate him. Oh, sure, of course you lot hate him because you see him as a traitor and heretic; but I don't see why *I* as "median American independent voter" am supposed to hate him.
And I gotta say, the usual idiot left playbook of screaming "racists" "hate LGBT" etc etc has not only absolutely lost its power among "median American independent voter" (which is, let's remember, the person you actually have to persuade), the more you push this line the more you are going to look like idiots as Vance takes the stage with his very smart, very attractive, and very INDIAN wife - alongside Nikki and Vivek, to all be cheered by the Republican Party...
Umm, Vance's undergrad degrees are from *The* Ohio State University. And you might want to look into what Amy Chua and her husband were involved with up in New Haven.
"As far as I can tell (but I am prepared to be corrected) Vance's trajectory was something like
- guy from Appalachia goes to Yale and gets told a certain view of the world by school. Feels this is incorrect, is too negative against the society in which he grew up, and so writes _Hillbilly Elegy_, on the assumption that 'if I just explain things clearly to my profs and fellow students, they will understand'."
Extremely incorrect. Ex-marine Vance went to college, then to Yale, and had his feefees hurt by Yale snobs who--he claims--looked down on him because he came from Ohio or the holler or whatever.
At the prompting of Yale prof. Chua, he writes a memoir. Not to refute Yalie sentiments about the midwest, but to mostly blame the rural midwest's problems on the culture of hillbillies (but not Vance!) and an array of traditional conservative bugaboos about how people just don't want to work (but not Vance!) because they would rather rely on government handouts. (After all, Vance worked hard to go to public school and state-subsidized college after receiving a salary from the federal government as a correspondent for the marines.)
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Vance--his assertions that childless adults should have less voting power than people (like Vance!) who have children, his blinkered isolationism, his craven sucking up to Trump despite previously comparing him to Hitler, etc., but his behavior as a man aggrieved and contemptuous of public services despite his lifestory of success that came from relying on them is, at least thematically, up there.
OK, this is interesting.
Let's put aside the mocking about hurt feelings for now and try to stick to facts.
What YOU describe is essentially a straight through-line from undergrad to now - that he has always had a certain oulook and set of beliefs. Given that, why did Romney make such abig deal about his supposedly changing his political views?
as in
https://twitter.com/mckaycoppins/status/1812940103116837140/photo/1
This is what I was trying to respond to/understand. Sure, we can go the easy route of "politics I don't understand must mean is insane/evil", whatever; I'm trying to go beyond that.
I can't actually find any SUBSTANCE to why Romney is so mad at him. So I'm trying to follow two threads
- first the claim of supposedly changing his mind (which I've already described as how I *think* it played out, to be subject of course to various other interpretations, like the one above [Vance is just Nixon redux] )
- second why is Romney taking this so *personally*? To me [and maybe I'm missing something] this looks like he feels betrayed, that Vance was supposed to be "one of us", one of the Romney-style elite, the rich wing of the Republican Party, and instead he "defected" to join the populist wing. Which you can see as "opportunism" or you can see as "understanding how politics of the 2020s and 2030s will not be the politics of the 1990s".
The opinion I WOULD like to see is that of Steve Bannon on JD Vance (and vice versa). Bannon infamously (see American Dharma) complained that Trump was not populist enough, that he ran as a champion of the little man but forgot about him once he reached the White House. So is his take that Vance is being snookered by Trump? Or that Trump has changed? Or that Vance is like Trump, talks one story but really has a different set of concerns?
For people who actually want to understand the complexity of the issues I am trying to raise, and my point about political realignment, a good start is:
https://mattlakeman.org/2020/01/22/hill-billy-elegy-the-culture-of-white-american-poverty/
Let's start with the timing. V serves his Marines hitch 03-07, graduates summa as a dual major 09, goes to Yale Law (presumably) 2011 and graduates 2013, works for Cornyn and then clerks for a judge and then hires on at major prestigious government-practice firm for what looks like a year, then goes to SF in 2016 where he's with Thiel for 2 years, during which he's a very busy guy. Elegy comes out in 2016 and makes him a literary lion, he's a celebrity, does CNN commentary and is feasted everywhere. He also sets up, with VC backing, a non-profit in Ohio (501c4, which means donors' identities are shielded). From 2017 he's in Ohio, setting up investment firms with tech figure involvement. He thinks about a senate run against Sherrod Brown in 2018 but decides no. His run is in 2022, as a trumpier-than-thou trumpist.
Before 2020, and particularly in 2016 and 2017, Vance was strongly trump-negative. His opinion was sought because the rural people he was famous for writing about and interpreting to the wide world were, wouldn't you know, the very people all the political pros credited with putting trump in the White House. So after checking out the diners it was natural for media to ask a famous rural person what he thought about the whole thing. That's mostly when and where the "America's Hitler" and "racist" and similar Vance quotes about trump are from-- here's a recent review: https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/15/politics/kfile-jd-vance-comments-trump/index.html
Now per Coppins, Romney met the guy in 2018, brought him in for a big event he sponsors that's focused on big ideas and the way forward and all that good stuff. As Coppins puts it, Vance had "interesting ideas about how Republicans could court the white working class without indulging in toxic Trumpism." Very current because by that time trump has been in office for over a year and the party is groping for a way to deal with what he represents and how he operates. Presumably Vance gave good blab about that.
So again, 2018, Park City, Romney's personal imprimatur, big Romney-sponsored event, how to get the people who didn't vote for Romney but voted for trump to now get behind republicans without going all trumpist. Good for the party, good for America, Romney going out on a limb with the idea man who speaks as one of those very people they need to motivate.
Why would that matter to Romney? Well, as we recall, in 2021 Romney voted to convict trump over Jan 6 and from that point on, the rest of the republican party shunned him, wouldn't eat with him in the Senate cafeteria, crossed the street to avoid him, the whole nine yards. Voting to convict trump ruined Romney's political life and a fairly big piece of the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, back at the Vance, our man JD decides 2022 is his year to run for senate, and in 2021-- the year Romney became a pariah-- Vance became a trumpist. Indeed, an uber-trumpist. And he won. But get this-- instead of doing what he told people about at the event Romney sponsored in 2018, where Romney put Vance forward as the bushy-tailed eager beaver with the interesting ideas, and deploying those very ideas to get the rural vote without descending to trumpism, instead of doing that, Vance had done *exactly the complete opposite*, exactly what he told people in 2018 they didn't need to do, should avoid doing, and would be wrong to do.
So gee, I can't understand at all why Romney might take that personally, even setting aside the morality of it all.
Yes, that basically all repeats what I said.
The question is WHY did Vance (apparently) change his opinions?
You seem to think the answer is obvious (I don't know, some sort of "Republicans be evil, that's what they do" or something).
My answer is that people do things and change their opinions for a *reason*, so what was the reason in this case?
In your post of 2:11, the one I was responding to, you entered this: "why is Romney taking this so *personally*? To me [and maybe I'm missing something] this looks like he feels betrayed." Call me crazy, but this looks a lot like a question, not an answer, and it looks like a question about Romney, not about Vance.
You also said this: "I can't actually find any SUBSTANCE to why Romney is so mad at him." Unless there's something I'm missing, that too is a statement about Romney, rather than a question about Vance and his reversal.
Put the two together, and they look like a call to address puzzlement over why Romney felt like Vance stabbed him in the back in a personal way. Which was my earnest endeavor.
You say now that at 2:11 you were really asking about Vance and his deep motivations.
Personally, I don't think there's a lot of hidden depth as to why he reversed course and tactics, and it has nothing proximate to do with being a republican and therefore evil, or whatever you want to impute. Vance had and has big, big ambitions. He wanted to win the Senate seat in 2022. He thought adopting the trumpist approach gave him the best chance to win.
Almost everybody in politics does what they think will give them the best chance to win-- not a gop monopoly. Most try to be relatively consistent about who they are and what they stand for as public people, for both principled and tactical reasons. Vance did a complete 180. Are there hidden depths that mask a deeper consistency? If we're looking for something principled, beyond mere self-advancement, that seems kinda doubtful to me. But if you want to pursue the idea, you might try looking into his religious conversion.
I think we have hit a limit here, but as I see it the difference between us is
- you believe (or you believe Romney believes) that Vance gave them some sort of commitment that "I am one of you guys, a money Republican", and then opportunistically forgot that promise
whereas I see it as more likely that
- he listened to what Romney said (just like he listened to what Yale law school said), weighed it against his experience in the real world, and concluded that it was delusional, no longer appropriate to the real problems of the current age.
You're right that we've reached a limit on this particular line, but please don't ascribe thoughts or expressions to me that I didn't express.
I'm not speculating about any kind of commitment, expressed or implied, that Vance might supposedly have made. I'm talking about what he did and said in public.
He's entitled to change his positions for whatever reason he wants to. Which is what he did, and when did it, he changed from a position that was allied with Romney's, and in advancing of which Vance benefited from Romney's personal and public advancement of Vance, which is a kind of public vouching for Vance. Vance then did the opposite at a later point.
Vance may have been acting in complete good faith, as you seem to think. I tend to think not, but neither of us can know.
Romney, though, doesn't need to know or care whether Vance was reversing course in good faith or bad. The fact is that Romney went out of his way for Vance, who was not a political player at the time, and that Vance later reversed himself very publicly, and the way he did it repudiated very visibly what he'd been publicly doing with Romney.
Even if he did it completely in good faith I think Romney would be entitled to be miffed and wondering how he could sit in caucus with the guy-- something he might be able to smooth over with him, if he decided that Vance had been acting in good faith. Romney doesn't sound like he thinks it was good faith, though, so reconciliation doesn't seem like it could have happened.
If you're the kind of person who could see a protege, someone you'd helped and who was publicly talking your language and helping advance your point of view, and have that protege later publicly take up the mantle of what you and he had been decrying in very strong terms only a short time before-- if that didn't rub you the wrong way, then you're a better person than any 1000 of your fellow mortals.
Your starting point seems to be that Vance was and is acting completely in good faith and everybody should simply wish him well and pat him on the back for following his angels no matter what he does. I don't think that's how most people are made.
. . . . Ex-marine Vance went to college, then to Yale, and had his feefees hurt by Yale snobs who--he claims--looked down on him because he came from Ohio or the holler or whatever.
None of which ever seems to have bothered incredible hayseed Bill Clinton.
the eyeshadow piece.
From the convo that sealed the deal:
"Vlad sends his regards, J.D. Let me explain how it works. To start, you get a blanket pardon. Just do as I say and you have should nothing to worry about. That doesn't mean they won't go after you. In that case, the lawyer's on you. Let me know if you need a second mortgage, 'cause I got connections. One other thing. When we come to hang you, we need to charge you for the rope."
+1
jd paid for overnight delivery on his knee pads
i think jimmy jam has had plenty of experience in the realm of fellatio prior to this vp not.
trump has a type: closeted gay men from states with b1g schools.
Poor Tim Scott. Always a bridesmaid, and soon to be a groom, but never a bride.
If you examine the so called short list/five evil dudes, politically Vance is likely Trump's best political choice. Vance brings:
- Mid western branding/roots, were the key swing states are all mid western
- A working class effect
- Well spoken/good on TV
- Young
- Maga
He is pretty young at 39. That means he could quite possibly remain president for at least another 40 years after Trump.
the jimfirio divance thing.
yunger than tulsi, who was the vp choice that would have scared me. would have more fully wooed the 2016 bernie --& trump scumbag leftists back to the maga fold.
I'd ad white (that eliminated Rubio and Scott), and someone Trump turned from critic of his into one of his personal beaches (this eliminated Burgum).
I'm sure it was also a factor that Vance has the best access of them all, Trump included, to very deep pockets via Peter Thiel.
Perhaps Trump is actually thinking about the future. I see Vance as the choice most capable of continuing as an authoritarian after Trump (that’s not to say Trump likely expects a third term at least). Nobody has the ability to continue the cult worship but Vance is capable of being another Orban. None of the other candidates had the cold calculating smarts that Vance has.
"Perhaps Trump is actually thinking about the future."
Nonsense.
Trump currently cares only about winning this elections, and feels that Vance would help the most. He doesn't give a toss about anything after that.
Agreed. Trump isn't doing what he's doing out of a philosophical commitment to authoritarianism, he's doing it because he likes telling people what to do and seeing them jump.
Put another way: Vance =/= Trump, so why would Trump want Vance to succeed in the absence of Trump?
Now, as for what Vance is thinking, it's probably something along the lines of "I can smile for this elderly dummy because I'll outlive him by 40 years."
The only future he's thinking about is January 2029, when the VP can accept a slate of electors for DJT's third term.
"The only future he's thinking about is January 2029,.."
Wrong.
If he is still functional in 2029, he would have already have made democracy in the US non-functional, and will not have to worry about elections.
But he needs to win the coming elections, and that is the only thing he considers.
Everybody has elections nowadays, even the dictators. Even places like North Korea and Russia go through the pretenses of holding them.
While Trump gets all the attention, I think it's a mistake to think he is the one running the show. He is a showman and a frontman, and he's useful to the right-wing powers that be because he has some real and unduplicable appeal to certain voters and has a chance of getting the party elected again. But Trump is old and unpredictable, and if elected, replaceable when needed.
Trump thinks one step at a time. The powers behind the party think long-term. The Vance pick was as much their doing as Trump's. Probably more.
I agree with you.
Ah, but which powers behind which party? The establishment would want a career politician who is a reliable front man. I don't think Vance is reliable at all, he changes his game plan depending on what gets him the closest to power. He's actually pretty dangerous to the establishment.
"He's actually pretty dangerous to the establishment."
Yes.
Selecting Vance shows that it is Trump's decision, not any establishment.
Vance is a Thiel acolyte. The billionaire set see him as one who agrees that they ought to rule unchecked. I'm not sure what other "establishment" there is among republicans who would be worried--RNC co-chair Lara Trump?
"Vance is a Thiel acolyte. "
Was.
He is ambitious and skilled, and he is danger to everybody. The "billionaire set" wouldn't take him if it was their choice.
Those are the kinds of people who think any danger is worth attracting because they imagine they can exploit the chaos.
I don't know who you mean by "establishment." The media is establishment. Wall St. is establishment. That's not who's running the GOP, even if they think so.
Trump's agenda is not Trump's own idea. It's been outsourced to the Heritage Foundation. Hear about Project 2025? When it comes to SCOTUS, it's the Federalist Society. There are others.
They are quickly moving to implement their radical agendas. They are not status quo establishment types.
They likely see Vance as a useful tool. He's young, cowardly, ambitious, and willing to do anything, conservative "principles" and establishment desires be damned.
He's their perfect guy.
"He's their perfect guy."
It is the other way around: they are his perfect "useful idiots".
The 2025 agenda is a fig-leaf: the purpose of the operation, as far as Trump is concerned, is to create a Trump-loyal administration. Once that happens, he will do what he wants, not what they want.
Judges appointments were cooperative operation in his first term, but he got what he needed (e.g. Aileen Cannon). In the second term he will decide who is jduge and who isn't.
Agreed. Trump has enough power now that he can jettison the R establishment and not even follow the 2025 plan (which I fully believe he didn't have all that much to do with). A lot of people think they can use him to get carte blanche for their own agenda and they are mistaken. As you said, he does what he wants.
"Trump has enough power now that he can jettison the R establishment and not even follow the 2025 plan (which I fully believe he didn't have all that much to do with)."
That's an interesting take because I think the Vance pick shows he's more likely to be all in on the Project 2025 plan and other crazy ideas than if he'd picked almost anyone else.
I say that because Trump is not a traditional conservative. He's a business guy who finds that government just gets in the way of getting deals done. He's not a culture warrior (unless it's convenient) and has no oath of loyalty to the ideals of Federalism and state power (another thing that gets in the way of business).
So, I think his attachment to the 2025 conservative wet dream is tenuous. I think he identifies more with Vance than with the political class and his eye is looking for an apprentice...someone he would hire in his business.
I think people forget the lens he looks through, it's not a political one, it's one that's always searching for a business opportunity.
The "2025 plan" has two parts:
1) Putting Trump loyalists in all imporatnt positions in the administartion.
2) Implement the "2025 agenda" from Heritage.
Trump wants to do (1) and that is why he initiated "project 2025". He never intended (2), that was just a fig-leaf. I don't know if he actually bamboozled Heritage to believe he actually wants their agenda, or whether they just pretend to believe him.
By now he realized that the project may pt some voters off, so he pretends not to know about it.
What I mean by establishment is establishment Republicans. Traditional old school, country-club, pro-business, anti-union, Ivy League, right out of central casting Republicans. George W. Bush Republicans as opposed to the current crop of MAGA trailer park Republicans that flooded in with the Tea Party Movement and have now taken over the party.
Vance is a net negative to the ticket. He doesn't add anything that wasn't already there, and he heightens the relevance of abortion as an issue.
In 2022, he underperformed his party in Ohio by 11 points, making his win over Tim Ryan a lot closer than it might have been.
For that reason, Trump's #2 may be a good pick. A guy who has trouble winning votes.
If you have an account at The Dispatch (yeah, Jonah Goldberg's place) or have one free read, I recommend Friday's essay by Nick Catoggio (formerly Allahpundit):
The Cynical Case for Vice President Vance - What America deserves
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/boilingfrogs/the-cynical-case-for-vice-president-vance/
"J.D. Vance is good enough at being what he needs to be to have made himself the frontrunner for a national ticket before he turns 40. And you know what? Good. This country deserves him."
"Donald Trump’s Republican Party is a kakistocracy and Vance is plainly the most loathsome figure among the final three [Burgum, Rubio, Vance]"
"He’s awful, but so is the modern right. And in a representative democracy, the people deserve to see themselves reflected in their candidates. Trump should give us what we deserve [by selecting Vance]."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Also, re "Willingness to pretend to be an idiot"
Reports were that Burgum liked to talk policy *details* more than Trump was interested in, while Vance kept things simple (similar to those notorious Nat Security briefings when Trump was president).
+1 on 'pretend to be an idiot'
Unfortunately, it seems like a good choice electorally. There were far more repellant options available.
Now with Il Duce's apparent divine anointment, I can't find much hope out there.
foxnews says the FBI has found more than a dozen guns at the family’s home
wingnuts are absolutely devastated that the shooter wasn't a fully paid-up BLM member with a hammer and sickle/dems4ever tattoo on his neck
i think that's why the fbi was so slow to release his name; the nutters in the fbi were desperate to connect the dots to leftist orgs before they did their big reveal
but i'm sure they'll manufacture something in pretty short order
christopher wray won't get comey'd in the trumpfiriato. he'll get fredo'd.
he should have gone full george tenet leading up to iraq 2 & cooked the evidentiary books.
i think of vance as a man who sold his soul when he ran for the senate. but that assumes he had one in the first place. among the emptiest of empty suits.
he got his start in politics by playing the oldest con in the republican playbook:
pretend to be a sane republican right up until you can afford to tell the press to fuck off
the john mc cain after being caught with his hand down charles keating's pants piece.
Is it not humorous that he picked a guy who specifically said he would have done exactly what Pence did on January 6 and likened Trump to Hitler?
He could have picked a true MAGA but instead, he picked over a Black supporter who has long been a true MAGA and was the most beta of his concubine of fawning sycophants in Ben Carson. But he was Black.
Trump doesn't realize it but he's enabled conservatives to remove him from office and take the reins.
Also, he didn't choose loyalty; he selected the most groveling boot-licker who wasn't Black.
I'm going to second @Solar upthread and partly agree with you in reply: Vance was picked because he's simply *the* most perfect guy to personify revanchist white patriarchy-- you could say straight out of central casting-- and btw, guess what's going to be the theme and focus and (overt) subtext of the campaign.
Yes, Vance started poor and is smart. And he's an unbelievable slime bucket. He built his public cred by shitting on his mother and his family and his peeps, in print, and profited handsomely from doing it, and got inside with NYT-sympathetics on top of that. To get that far he took detailed tutelage in shinning up the greasy pole by selling his earnestness to the already-famous and voraciously ambitious Tiger Mom herself while he was at Yale Law, and then worked for Cornyn before practicing for a few years with one of the major government-affairs law firms. His Yale mentor Chua also linked him up with a very smart and ambitious woman of South Asian descent, who in the late teens clerked for both Kavanaugh and Roberts. Coincidence or not, but after her clerkships were done he decided that Catholicism was his true faith and converted. I don't know whether he's connected to the more Vermeulean or Opus Dei or Leonard Leo neo-authoritarian flavor, but wouldn't be a bit surprised at any of them (and that needs looking into).
About the time the book came out and coincident with burnishing his NYT acceptability, he was also following the money trail to VC-land under Peter Thiel's wing and also has had investment backing from Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen. One of his charitable ventures, btw, subsidized an AEI person who may have had ties with Purdue Pharma, so there's that.
In sum, sucking up to trump is just the latest of his thorough personal transformations. He seems to remake himself from the inside out whenever he spots a new rung he can reach for, never mind what identity he might have established at the last stage. He's like an insect that pupates over and over. Smart, glib, and a philosophy major, he doesn't seem to have any trouble explaining any of this to himself. And so he gets revenge on his roots.
And what trump cares about, where he lives, is in the visual and the gross ethnic caricatures. Of course a big part of the visual is green, and Vance brings a ton of it in his wake, millions from his gazillionaire Technocracy-steeped VC buds. And beyond the green, Vance delivers in optics terms. He's obviously young (young enough to need a beard so he doesn't look like the Pillsbury Doughboy), he's shorter than trump, he's visibly subservient to trump, his wife is the bet that sees Kamala and raises her one (and makes Nikki Haley superfluous, too, so there).
He's The Hillbilly Who Made Something Of Himself, with a pair of minority women around him, but as supporting characters so there's no doubt he's the master in that particular situation, the one who knows how to keep the influx in its place. And, as trump knows, Vance did it by turning on his own people the way trump himself never had the guts to do even though every cell of his body burned, and still burns, to do that. This, I think, is how trump sees Vance: the embodiment of revanchist white patriarchy, the perfect veep candidate for his campaign, with proven willingness to do whatever it takes to climb.
How trump expects to control a character so ruthless and ambitious and in such a hurry I have no idea. If (god forbid) they win, Vance will be actively undermining him inside of a few months-- Dick Cheney will be his starting point-- and the only question will be how public the infighting will get. The thing is, Vance has all kinds of institutional connections and insight that trump doesn't give a rat's ass about but that somebody who's ruthless and ambitious might be able to use to steal his administration out from under him. Maybe that's what Vance sees. It's worth remembering that the public sliminess is just the tip of the iceberg with him.
jimmy vance is a big latin mass guy.
of course he's down with adrian vermeule.
Thought it would be something like that-- makes perfect sense, and means Vance has something very much in common with a lot of highly-placed DC types, and a forum where he's been able to meet and mingle with them out of anyone's view.
Get a Grip, Democrats. You Can Still Win This,
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/07/15/get-a-grip-democrats-you-can-still-win-this/
I suspect he was picked before the assassination attempt. Why does that matter? Because back then it was assumed Trump would be the bogeyman to Dems and independents, so Vance's negatives wouldn't be noticed much. Now that Trump is wearing a halo, though, negative ads will be about his veep choice. Someone else (Nikki Haley?) might have been better. Vance adds nothing to the ticket electorally except MAGA credentials and those people will vote for Trump anyway. And like Project 2025 he reinforces the perception there's something dark going on.
The good: he's unlikely to be popular or widely trusted. The bad: he's likely to be powerful and dangerous.
MEOOOOOW...what do you expect when the republican party is lead by a whore monger. Reap what you sow. Kitties know.