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J.D. Vance is an exceptionally confident pick by Donald Trump for his running mate — some might say an overconfident pick. Out of all the names considered strong contenders — including Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, Glenn Youngkin and Tim Scott — the Republican senator from Ohio is the Trumpiest. Picking Vance is as close as Trump can get to doubling down on himself.
When Trump chose Mike Pence in 2016, it signaled his recognition that many traditional conservatives and evangelical Christians weren’t convinced that they were getting what they wanted from Trump and needed reassurance. With Vance, there’s no broadening of appeal; Trump is rejecting the idea that it’s needed.
The selection of Vance — a few weeks before his 40th birthday! — is a declaration that if Trump wins, the Republican Party will remain fervently nationalist and populist for many years to come.
Ohio is looking redder and redder, so this doesn’t change the electoral college map much, unless the Trump team thinks Vance helps him with blue-collar white voters in the Rust Belt, especially in the critical swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
But Trump is already the embodiment of populist, working-class “retribution”; he shouldn’t need a running mate who emphasizes those traits. If there are Americans who weren’t sure they wanted another round of Trump but will jump on the bandwagon now that Vance has been named, they’re few and far between.
The Republican donor class was pulling for anyone except Vance — no doubt alarmed by the senator who earlier this year told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros,” later adding, “I’m not philosophically against raising taxes on anybody.”
With Vance on the ticket, Americans should expect the closing months of the 2024 campaign to feature the familiar Trump message — on steroids.
Vance’s first ad in his 2022 Senate campaign asked, “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth: Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs, and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
It’s red meat and firebombs, from now until November.
On foreign policy, the selection of Vance offers no reassurance to nervous U.S. allies. Vance famously quipped during a February 2022 appearance on Stephen K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” He later backtracked and declared Russian President Vladimir Putin “is the bad guy” and “we want the Ukrainians to be successful,” but it’s fair to wonder how much Vance means it.
On Taiwan, Vance told Douthat: “Our policy effectively is one of strategic ambiguity. I think that we should make it as hard as possible for China to take Taiwan in the first place, and the honest answer is we’ll figure out what we do if they attack.” (If the new vice president says he isn’t sure whether the United States would defend Taiwan, do you think that makes China less likely to attack or more likely?)
Vance could well help Trump be a much more effective president. He isn’t dumb (he graduated from Ohio State University summa cum laude and has a degree from Yale Law School), and he’s focused, caring much more about policy details than Trump ever has.
He’s also combative, perpetually itching for a fight. Vance might turn out to be a younger, Dick Cheney-esque hatchet man in a second Trump administration, the chief operations officer who makes sure presidential orders are carried out. In Trump’s first term, plenty of aides and staffers ignored his more incendiary orders, concluding that Trump would eventually forget about them. That’s not a safe bet for a second term with Vance as vice president.
Joining the ticket with Trump is a strange journey for the guy who once called himself a “Never Trump guy” and who, in 2016, said Trump “is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” In the Trump era, that’s a lifetime ago.
Jim Geraghty is National Review’s senior political correspondent, where he writes the daily “Morning Jolt” newsletter, among other writing duties.
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