ANALYSIS – No “ugly” – just the good and the bad. Former President Donald Trump has finally announced his pick to be his vice-presidential running mate. And as I predicted a while back – the man is J.D. Vance, the bearded, young, first-time senator from Ohio.
Vance is smart and well spoken and a pit bull when he is on the attack.
I think Trump-Vance will be a highly effective team.
As much as I had hoped Trump would pick a solid conservative woman as his VP, Noem Kristi shot her dog, so “no joy” on that. Maybe Vance can pick a woman as his running mate in 2028.
Trump’s pick, not only needed to help him win in 2024, but will also be the likely 2028 GOP presidential nominee moving the Trump agenda forward.
With Vance, Trump may have done both by doubling down on Trumpism.
Meanwhile, Vance, a former enlisted Marine, best-selling author and finance geek, is an interesting, if slightly contradictory and enigmatic, choice. And while I’m very supportive of the Vance pick, I do have some reservations.
The 39-year-old conservative populist rose to fame with his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a story of his upbringing in working class Ohio. A book he began writing at Yale.
Vance, a former combat correspondent in the Marines, graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, combining his working class, and elite, creds in one package. I do like this combo and am particularly proud of his experience as a fellow U.S. Marine.
This makes him the first veteran to run on a presidential ticket since John McCain in 2008, and the first Marine ever. Vance also deployed to Iraq in 2005.
I’m also strongly supportive of Vance’s stance against Joe Biden’s illegal migrant (foreigner) invasion. Can we say “mass deportation”?
Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, which I find very positive. He is staunchly pro-life, for example. But that’s a two-edged sword. Trump has been trying to minimize that highly charged topic that has energized the left, and now Democrats are homing in on Vance as an abortion “extremist.”
He has since moderated his statements on abortion, but he also has some other negatives in my book.
So, who is Vance and what does he bring to the Trump/MAGA table?
“I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve accomplished nothing great in my life,” Vance wrote in the introduction to his 2016 book. But he did make a good friend – Silicon Valley conservative billionaire Peter Thiel who he worked for at Mithril Capital, a San Francisco area venture capital firm run by Thiel.
Vance left there after he published his book in 2016.
After a few years back in Ohio, running a nonprofit he started, and harshly bashing Trump for part of that time, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022 at age 37.
This, his very first, and only, political office. And it was expensive. Vance won with the help of $10 million from Thiel and the endorsement by Trump whom he had since fully embraced.
So, Vance has minimal political or other life experience. Can we say Barack Obama, or Marco Rubio when they became senators? And, interestingly, like Bill Clinton, Vance was born with a different name, James Donald Bowman. He changed it to James David Hamel after his stepfather, and then J.D. Vance, his mother’s maiden name after she divorced.
But back to his politics.
During the 2016 presidential election, Vance came out as a harsh “Never Trumper,” calling Trump “cultural heroin,” “an idiot,” and “noxious,” adding that he thought Trump was “leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
But he went farther than that. He also wrote to a friend that year that “Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon…” or “he’s America’s Hitler.” Ouch!
Then, over the next few years Vance changed his tune completely. He claims, very plausibly, that the intense and unfair attacks on Trump helped him see Trump differently.
In April 2022,Trump endorsed Vance. “J.D. is kissing my ass – he wants my support so bad,” Trump later said.
As Politico reported:
During those eight years [between 2016 and now], Vance has undergone a dramatic — and, in the eyes of his critics, highly dubious — political transformation: from blue-collar bard and self-described “Never Trump” conservative to hard-edged MAGA loyalist and dogged defender of the former president. Vance says he’s had a genuine change of heart about Trump; his critics say he’s cynically molded himself to the times.
Now, Vance is stepping into a role that has at times seemed unfillable: the political partner to a man who considers himself to be politically peerless. In the Senate, Vance has cultivated a dual identity as key Trump ally and leader of the GOP’s populist-national wing. But who will he be as a vice presidential candidate?
It’s hard to tell who he will be as VP, but Vance brings some solid conservative views and pragmatism to the ticket. As The Spectator writes:
The positives for Vance are that he represents a loyal soldier for the Trump movement and agenda, an Aspen Ideas skeptic turned MAGA rally convert. His instinct to punch back is Trumpian — and his views on foreign policy and the nationalist economic agenda are thoroughly consistent with Trump, if not going even further. While more socially conservative than the former president, he’s also shown his pragmatism in all things when it comes to navigating the current environment. His youth renders him unattached from any of the biases of those with close ties to any past Republican administrations, and his geographic background is meant to appeal to voters in the Midwest.
Still, the outlet adds:
The negatives for Vance are also well apparent. He’s inexperienced, having run and won just one election, which ended up being more costly than expected and in which he ran far behind other successful Republican candidates. He’s been in the Senate barely long enough to do anything of note, but with a victory in November, he’ll effectively be viewed as the presidential favorite for 2028. He comes across as extremely ambitious, doubling down on the most aggressive aspects of the Trump Republican agenda, as opposed to an approach designed to appeal directly to Independent voters or make peace with the Nikki Haley faction.
I would add that Vance’s stance on Vladimir Putin and opposition to aiding Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression are also not the best, though maybe for the right reasons.
Vance favors a land-for-peace deal to end the war in Europe and allow America to pivot toward Asia and China, our biggest threat. This is something I understand. But rewarding Russian aggression would also send the wrong message to China.
And though he accused Joe Biden of “making it harder and harder for Israel to win that war” in Gaza, in his first remarks as VP candidate, Vance urged Israel to finish its Gaza war “as quick as possible.”
This could make things a lot tougher for our key ally facing down Iranian-backed terror threats.
But one of my biggest issues with Vance might be that his most prominent supporter in the conservative media is Tucker Carlson, whose views I sometimes find horrendous. I will cover this in a later piece.
Meanwhile, congrats to J.D. Vance. And onward to victory!
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
“He’s been in the Senate barely long enough to do anything of note”
Sounds like Obama… the 1/2 term senator for Illinois ….