HAS JD VANCE SEEN THE WRITING ON THE WALL?

 

Many opponents to the Trump regime have argued that even if, whether through impeachment or enactment of the twenty-fifth amendment, Donald Trump should be removed from office, Vice-President JD Vance would be just as bad or worse. In terms of the damage he could do, I don’t completely agree. Not because I think Vance is any more democratic than Trump, but rather because JD Vance is not Donald Trump.

He’s not a particularly popular person even in Republican circles—indeed polls tend to show he’s the most unpopular VP in history. As such, he would never get away with bullying Congress and the Supreme Court the way Trump does, and could never break the Constitution and federal laws daily like Trump does either, without being consistently called on it. My guess is the Trump dictatorship will end with Trump, whether by impeachment, removal for incompetence, completion of term, or act of God.

So it is not that Vance is any more presidential than Trump is. Indeed, Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock recently described Vance as “one of the most craven politicians on the American political scene.” The only reason, then, that a Vance presidency would be different from Trump’s is that JD Vance is a flagrant opportunist who, lacking Trump’s cultist backing, would have no choice but to more closely read political climates and appetites than his current boss does, and to act accordingly. And it appears he is currently doing just that, fearing that his own political ambitions for the future will, otherwise, die with the Trump regime, which, by all appearances, is sinking into a period of decline and agonization. 

But Vance’s pusillanimous nature, contrasting with his rank opportunism, have served him incredibly well. In 2011, Vance was a law student and political nobody. But while studying for his law degree at Yale, he attended a talk by billionaire German-American venture-capitalist Peter Thiel—who, since very recently, is holed-up with his family in Argentina, as a means of fleeing proposed taxes on billionaires in his former home of California, because he feels aligned with the radically libertarian ideology of Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, and because he sees the Southern Cone as  a remote future safe haven in which to hedge against

Vance pictured with mentor Thiel

global instability, the possibility of nuclear war, and artificial intelligence meltdowns in the Northern Hemisphere.

As an aside, having lived in Argentina for half a century myself, I think Thiel might be in for a major surprise when it comes to the instability question. Argentina has proven over recent decades to be one of the most politically and economically unstable countries anywhere. But then maybe impunity rather than stability was the word he was looking for.

Anyway, following that talk, Vance, against all odds,  managed to buttonhole Thiel, and to hit it off with the magnate. Vance seems to have impressed Thiel—perhaps with an ambition and lack of empathy to match the billionaire’s own—and in short order, Thiel took Vance under his wing and made him his mentee. It’s not like this was a something-for-nothing mentor-mentee relationship. Clearly, Thiel planned to turn Vance into his political Pygmalion, the kind of young and ambitious politician who would be willing to do anything necessary to get ahead that a libertarian tycoon could love. And that’s just what Thiel did.

Not-so-long story shorter, Thiel was the key financial architect behind Vance's rapid political ascent. He not only set Vance up in venture capital management from early on, but also later contributed an estimated fifteen million dollars to his protégé’s  2022 US Senate campaign in Vance’s native Ohio.

Thiel pictured with Trump sycophant and 
libertarian Argentine president Javier Milei

It has been widely reported that it was Thiel who encouraged Vance to write what became his massive bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, at the start of the Trump Era. It was with that book that JD Vance went from being a nobody to being a household name in his Ohio, and indeed in other parts of the US as well.

Thanks to that book, which provided Vance with a public persona (an albeit fake one, since Vance was not the Appalachian hillbilly he portrayed himself as but a middle-class Ohioan), and to Thiel’s deep pockets, that a best-selling author emerged from the political woodwork to burst onto the scene as an Ohio senatorial candidate. This was in the run-up to his 2022 win (by a six percent margin) over Democrat Tim Ryan, in the race for a seat left vacant by Ohio Republican incumbent Ron Portman, who was retiring.

Thiel’s tutelage largely molded Vance’s worldview. Thiel is a techno-libertarian with far-right populist ideas. Both he and Vance share a conviction that American elites have failed, and they have both pushed back actively against institutions like the mainstream media and universities. That and Thiel’s vouching for him made Vance the perfect choice for Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. So, with a scant two-year political career, JD Vance was suddenly the VP after Trump’s Grover-Cleveland-style election win, and the definitive breakup with his first VP, Mike Pence, whom he incited MAGA rioters to almost lynch during the J-6 Insurrection in 2021.

That said, the truth is that although JD Vance would probably do no more than Trump to protect democracy, his actions might be mitigated somewhat by virtue of the fact that, as I said before, he is JD Vance, not Donald Trump. But indeed, according to advances on the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, about to be released by New York Times investigative reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathon Swan, it was Vance, during the ICE occupation of Minnesota, who took the nefarious Assistant Chief of Staff (and Trump Rasputin) Stephen Miller’s cue in passionately backing the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to that state to put down mass peaceful protests against the federal government invasion.  Note that, to date, Haberman and Swan have been so accurate in their reporting that the White House is now claiming that they could not have been so spot on about what went on in the Sit
uation Room unless they had managed to record the sessions involved.

Three faces of US neo-fascism

Again, however, it is less often ideology that triggers Vance’s actions than it is opportunism. His plea for martial law could well have been no more than a ploy to win points with the nefarious Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect for Trump’s most neo-fascist policies.

Compare this to Vance’s public viewpoint in the two years that he was a senator, when he positioned himself as a never-Trumper, and went as far as to describe Trump as “America’s Hitler”. He would, of course, later seem to forget all about his aversion to Trump’s politics when his handler, Thiel, got him a shot at the VP slot.

Now, it would appear, he is repositioning himself once more, this time to be one of the first rats in line to abandon ship, as the Trump regime sails into ever stormier weather. His recent public behavior suggests a politician engaged in a familiar vice-presidential calculation. He is remaining outwardly loyal while gradually differentiating himself from a damaged president whose controversies, legal vulnerabilities, policy failures, and declining popularity will likely threaten the future ambitions of everyone closely associated with him. Perhaps the most significant differentiation to date is reporting that suggests his strong opposition to the war in Iran. So much so that one wonders if leaks to investigative reporters might have come from his camp.    

Whatever the case might be, some of his recent statements and actions have tended to demonstrate that Vance isn’t going as far as  seeking a public confrontation with Trump, but he is quietly but definitively seeking to put distance between himself and his boss—and, clearly, between himself and hardcore MAGA politicians as well.

Once again, advanced releases of excerpts from Haberman and Swan’s new book suggest that JD Vance has been adamant about a full release of the Epstein Files and transparency regarding the entire Epstein scandal. There were reportedly bitter arguments between Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Wiles is reported to have argued that the release of many of the files would be devastating for the president and needed to be covered up. Vance reportedly posited that everyone was already aware that Trump had been found civilly liable for sexual assault, that he had revealed that he grabbed women by the vagina and kissed them without their permission and got away with it because he was a star, and that he walked in on naked beauty queen contestants whenever he felt like it because he owned the pageant. According to Haberman and Swan, Vance pointed out that Trump had done all of this with political impunity. So how would the Epstein files make any difference? It would be worse, he argued, to be caught covering it up—something about which, so far, he has been right. But Trump reportedly agreed with Wiles and ordered the cover-up to continue.

Vance tells KC workers, "Vote against crazy."

Perhaps the most telling case of separating himself from Trump lately was a baffling statement he made to a crowd of workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing in Kansas City, Missouri. At one point in his stump speech, Vance said, “What I will ask you is, if you wanna make America great... if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C.

If it hadn’t been an audience of cheering sycophants that he was addressing, the obvious question to ask would have been, “Wait a second, JD, aren’t you part of the ‘crazy leadership’ in Washington, DC?”  But maybe he figured since he was in KC and not, say, Washington, or New York, or even among his senatorial constituents in Cleveland, he could get away with it. And except for the independent liberal media that jumped on it with both feet, he may have been right, if that’s what he thought, because it seems to have been largely ignored by the corporate news outlets and even by Trump himself.

Perhaps it was just so off the wall that a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that he had simply misspoken. But if that was the case, it was one humongous Freudian slip.

But except for this particular incident, there seems to be no evidence of open rebellion on Vance’s part. Rather, he seems to be engaging in strategic hedging. It’s a strategy that doesn’t muster a great deal of scrutiny, since it is taking place in a regime in which contradictions are the norm. Trump contradicts himself from one year to the next, one month to the next, one day to the next, and, increasingly, from one hour to the next. Indeed, he will sometimes contradict himself from what he says at the start of a single sentence in a social media post before he reaches the end of that same sentence. Especially when he’s tossing out dozens of them, one after another, in the middle of the night.

As mentioned earlier, one area in which Vance is growing especially cautious is in foreign policy—particularly as regards US military intervention abroad. From the outset in his campaign for the vice-presidency, Vance bought into Trump’s prince-of-peace lie. Again and again Trump sought to portray the Democrats as hawks—ignoring the fact that the most prolonged war in US history began on a false premise entertained by a Republican administration. But Trump’s promise to voters was that he would not only not start any wars, but would also end ones that were already ongoing. He even went as far as to say he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine “on day one.”.

Yet, early in the 2.0 phase of his regime, Trump, disappointed at not getting a Nobel Peace Prize—ignoring the fact that the solution of eight wars that he has repeatedly claimed to have been responsible for, appears to exist only in his head—carried out a rocket attack, apropos of nothing, on Venezuela and sent in commandos to kidnap the Venezuelan president and his wife and spirit them away to jail in New York. He then began threatening to invade Cuba and, finally, ordered attacks on Iran that have gone exceedingly badly for the United States and ended in a clearcut US retreat.

Historically, Vance built much of his national profile around skepticism toward this sort of foreign intervention. Yet Trump’s second administration has become increasingly entangled in military escalation.

In an interview back in February, Vance emphasized:

“I think we all prefer the diplomatic option.” He added, “There is no chance the United States will be involved in a drawn-out war.”

You could say, in twenty-twenty hindsight that this was wishful thinking. Unofficially, reports from within the White House suggest that Vance was vociferously against Trump’s war in Iran from the outset, agreeing with some of the top military officials that it was a disastrous idea. If the president thought a few bombing runs would bring Iran to its knees, he was mistaken. And if that wasn’t the plan, then the US would be in for another forever-war in the Middle East. In the end, however, Vance was in the minority in Trump’s yes-man (and woman) cabinet, and the US has since suffered a humiliating defeat and weakened its position on the world stage, with the senseless Wild West “diplomacy” of Trump and the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth taking the lead.

Vance’s language in public statements is, nevertheless,  politically revealing. Rather than fully embracing Trump’s aggressive posture, Vance has repeatedly framed himself as the administration figure emphasizing restraint — preserving his long-standing anti-interventionist credentials with populist conservatives. But then, as the Washington Post would point out, the VP didn’t have a lot of choice. Trump had put him, as the Post said, “in a bind, supporting a war that could cost him politically.” This couched public language was, then, the classic political language of insulation.

JD Vance is also separating himself from Donald Trump by engaging in appearances designed to broaden his image beyond simply being Trump’s lapdog. Perhaps the best example was, once again, that Missouri appearance before workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing, where he almost said the quiet part out loud: Dump Trump!

But a much more high-profile move was his decision to appear on a premier anti-Trump TV talk show, ABC’s The View. Earlier this week, Vance sat down with the co-hosts of The View, Joyce Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Fara Griffin and Ana Navarro, ostensibly to promote his new book, Communion touted as a return-to-faith work. The show is designed to be confrontational, and this, in that sense, was a typical interview. But unlike Trump’s appearances on even mildly opposition shows, in which he always ends up insulting the interviewer, calls their media fake news, stomps on mics and storms off the set, this one was completely civil. It was like a civilized debate in which the two sides agree to disagree but continue to discuss the issues anyway in a calm and collected fashion.

He did particularly well in separating his stance on the Epstein files from that of the Bondi and Blanche DOJ, which has done everything it could to cover the Epstein affair up. Vance’s response to this was to say more or less, “don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” but at the same time confirming that he wanted the files out there in full and in compliance with the law. He managed to elevate his figure above the fray, while still protecting his boss by pointing out that the Epstein transparency legislation was signed into law by Trump and that “Trump threw Epstein out” of Mar-a-Lago, and “reported him to the police,” for “being a creep.”

Navarro calls out Vance on Epstein

Ana Navarro pushed back saying the breakup between Trump and Epstein was over real estate, not pedophilia, but Vance insisted that the media always forgot that Trump reported Epstein to the police. When another host tried to interject something, he calmly said, “Wait, Ana made an important point and I’d like to answer it,”  thus defusing what could have turned into a he-said-she-said confrontation.

The tensest moment was when Whoopie Goldberg and Sunny Hostin double-teamed Vance, asking him to explain where black people fit into his administration’s vision for America. They grilled him over Trump’s systematic erasure of black history and black heroes, and Whoopie sought to get under his skin by reminding him that he should have a better understanding of what people of color go through in the US since he had “people of color in your family,” clearly referring to the VP’s East Indian wife, Usha, and their children. Vance danced around these questions, pretending he wasn’t sure what they were referring to, which obviously didn’t fly, but managing to make it through that segment without demonstrating anger or an open unwillingness to respond.

"You have people of color in your family."

It was clearly his weakest moment, but he kept it civil. At no point was he rude or short-tempered. Throughout, he fielded questions with relative calm, if not always believable responses. He also eschewed Trump’s mindless triumphalism and made it clear that there were a lot of campaign promises that the Trump camp had made and had so far failed to produce, but “we’re working on it.” The overall good interview in clearly hostile territory was sure to contrast Vance as a “rational, tolerant figure,” perhaps even “the adult in the room,” compared with Trump’s consistently irate, prevaricating and scandalous public appearances.

In short, The View provided Vance with a golden opportunity to present himself as independently electable, as seeking to normalize his image with moderates, and as atypically willing and able to engage with Americans beyond the MAGA media ecosystem.

Vance and family in India

This appearance was, in short, a major move in Vance’s personal brand construction. At the same time, he has subtly opened the door to a possible run for the presidency once the midterm elections are over.  Indeed, according to Forbes Magazine reporting, Vance has explicitly said, “I’ve thought about what that moment might look like after the midterm elections.”

Why does this matter? It matters because, once a vice-president begins planning a presidential campaign, his or her political incentives change. It means that JD Vance’s political interests no longer mesh perfectly with those of Donald Trump.

And as if a studied opportunist like Vance needed it, he has the example of Kamala Harris to refer to. Harris came very close to matching Trump in the popular vote in the 2024 presidential race, but not close enough to win. Among other reasons—and racist and misogynist considerations aside—as an incumbent VP, Harris remained loyal to her boss and friend, President Joe Biden, to the bitter end. It was an ethically laudable stance, but it was political suicide, since her campaign failed to make it clear that she was Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, and that she had a separate set of ideas and ambitions that had nothing to do with the administration she currently represented. This led much of the all-important independent vote to see her as “just more-of-the-same,” and thus to vote for Trump.

Now the situation is the same for Vance. Trump has become toxic and is highly unpopular, particularly among independents that gravitated away from Harris and toward him in 2024. Even many Republicans who have stood by Trump up to now are having their doubts because they realize how badly Trump’s regime is hurting people like them.

An indication of the climate Vance is living in was provided earlier this week by the ultra-conservative National Review, the famous publication founded in 1955 by the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.  Conservative anger was encapsulated in an editorial headline in the Review that read, The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles.  Carrying Andrew McCarthy’s byline, the piece was a scathing attack on Trump’s so-called Memorandum of Understanding with Iran to end a war Trump himself started and to open the Strait of Hormuz which was never closed before Trump began bombing Iran.

This is a major issue that Vance must be considering in his effort to de-align himself from Trump, since he must ask himself: Which Trump controversies could damage me? Which policies are or might become unpopular? And, more complex and more important still, how do I inherit the movement without inheriting all the Trump baggage?

Trump too is apparently seeing the writing on the wall in his relationship with Vance. As early as February of 2025, Trump publicly stated he did not necessarily view Vance as his successor. This was politically significant, since it made it clear to Vance from the outset that even if he swore loyalty and had Trump’s back, the president didn’t have his. Indeed, the president’s pick to succeed him could very well be someone like Don Jr., or some other more sycophantic choice who might allow Trump to still have a hand in setting policies of personal convenience.

Once Vance understood that Trump was unwilling to guarantee him succession, the rationale behind the VP’s political strategy (as an attentive student of Peter Thiel’s tactics) was sure to change. Why should Vance remain completely tied to Trump if Trump could well abandon him?

The Washington Post as early as April of this year said that Vance was, “Praising Trump while subtly differentiating himself.” And Bloomberg Government posited in a headline that, “Vance searches for fine line between (his) current role and (his) ambitions.”

The idea of a “fine line” reflects the balancing act Vance is currently performing in remaining loyal enough to retain MAGA support, but separating himself enough to politically survive a post-Trump future.

Donald Trump is eighty, and—at least according to the Constitution—cannot have another run, even if he were in condition to accept one, which he isn’t, since this is his second term.

But JD Vance is only half his boss’s age, and, at least in his mind, his political career is just beginning. Vance, then, apparently understands what many other vice-presidents with political ambitions before him have understood. Namely, that when a presidency begins to display a high level of toxicity, the only way to survive politically is to distance yourself from it. 

The evidence strongly suggests that Vance has foreseen the future, and knows that Trump is becoming more of a liability than an asset. The trick for Vance, then, is the one Kamala Harris’s ethical stricture forced her to ignore. That’s not a problem for an opportunist like Vance and he is already engaging in the long and incrementally gradual process of ensuring that when history judges the Era of Trump, it won’t judge the VP as inseparable from Trump’s enormous failures.