JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.
But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance’s own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.
“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme Maga agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign chair, told reporters.
Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.
Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy”.
Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.
“JD Vance,” Beauchamp wrote, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.
“He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”
Trump’s lawyers recently presented that argument to the supreme court he stacked with rightwingers – and won. But Trump will be gone one day and as Vance told Politico recently, “There is a big question about what comes after him.”
It looks like it’s Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, as championed by figures prominently including Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor.
The biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalistic [and] longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive or … a dictator”.
While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchist” government or “regime change”, Thiel himself once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He also played a key role in the making of Vance.
Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the US marines, becoming a military journalist and going to Iraq. He graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School, becoming a venture capitalist, eventually for a Thiel firm in Silicon Valley.
Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.
Vance returned to Ohio and ran a non-profit as well as a venture capital fund. At first opposed to Trump, he switched sides and won his Senate seat in 2022, with Trump’s endorsement and Thiel’s financial support.
During that campaign, the libertarian Reason magazine said Vance was “more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways”.
The magazine noted Vance’s contention “that conservatives should employ the taxation power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, leftist’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard”.
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Vance has continued to target universities he says should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to Margaret Brennan of CBS, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they’re not meeting their end of the bargain.
“I think it’s totally reasonable to say there needs to be a political solution to that problem.”
Challenged about his admiration for how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, took control of universities there, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions … that we could learn from in the United States”.
On Monday, responses to Trump’s selection of Vance noted his affinity for Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and advocating radical rightwing reform to every facet of government.
Trump has disavowed links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an assault on the federal government.
As noted by Reason, Vance in 2021 told Jack Murphy, a controversial “manosphere” figure: “A lot of conservatives have said we should … basically eliminate the administrative state. And I’m sympathetic to that project.
“But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump … [will] probably win again in 2024, and he’ll win by a margin such that he’ll be the president of the United States in January of 2025.
“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state.
“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court … stop you, stand before the country like [president] Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
As Beauchamp noted, the Jackson quote “is likely apocryphal, but the history is real”.
An 1832 supreme court ruling said the government should respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forcible displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears.