Why did Trump choose Vance as his vice presidential candidate?

Original Title: 《Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President.》

Author: Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

Last Saturday, two hours after a twenty-year-old from Pennsylvania, whose political stance was ambiguous and motives unclear, attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, Ohio Republican Senator J. D. Vance posted a response on social media: "Today is not just an isolated incident. The core premise of Biden's campaign is that Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. This rhetoric directly leads to assassination attempts against President Trump."

According to Washington logic, Vance's selection as Trump's running mate on Monday makes sense. Vance is the most conservative of the three nominees, the most outspokenly loyal, and the most combative party figure, traits that are well-suited for a candidate currently leading in polls and looking ahead to future battles. But Vance is also a figure who has quickly shifted from moderate reform conservatism to hard populism, which itself seems to be spreading again, all along an anti-elitist route. He is Trump's attack dog, but he is also a more emerging and interesting presence: he is the spark ignited by Trump.

Just two years ago, 39-year-old Vance was running for public office for the first time. His rise has been as rapid as any political figure since Obama, benefiting from a rare ability to transform his life experiences into a compelling social narrative. Vance was raised by his grandparents in Appalachia, Ohio, due to his mother's severe alcoholism. He served as a regular soldier in Iraq and later educated at Ohio State University and Yale Law School, where his mentor Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," encouraged him to package his experiences into a memoir. The result, "Hillbilly Elegy," was published in 2016 and became a phenomenon; The New York Times listed it as one of six books that explained Trump's victory, a status bolstered by Vance's own anti-Trumpism. (During the 2016 campaign, Vance texted his former roommate, "I think Trump is a stupid bastard like Nixon, and he won't be that bad (and might even prove useful), or he is Hitler for America.")

Even at the time, some stereotypes in "Hillbilly Elegy" seemed to hold true, but Vance's story of rising from poverty to wealth and his timely analysis, which argued that economic turmoil had weakened the social ties that sustained regions like southwestern Ohio, gave it a cinematic boost. By 2020, Vance was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, funded by Peter Thiel, and "Hillbilly Elegy" was directed into a film by Ron Howard.

The journey from then (recognized as a disruptive category-defying young conservative intellectual) to now (a right-wing vanguard and Trump’s vice-presidential candidate) is equally impressive, and crucially hinges on two changes within Vance and conservatism. Vance's change is that as he prepared to run for public office, his political stance became more resolute. In an extended interview with The New York Times' Ross Douthat last month, he attributed this shift to his perception of liberalism's transformation during the latter part of Trump's presidency. "I was thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020, these guys had all read Carl Schmitt—there's no law, only power," Vance said. "The goal is to regain power. This seemed real in the Kavanaugh incident and during the 'Black Lives Matter' moment." (Vance's wife, Usha, is an Indian-American lawyer he met at Yale, who clerked for Brett Kavanaugh.) "A bit of a nerd," Vance told Douthat, commenting on the Supreme Court justice, "never believed those stories." When Vance ran for the Senate in 2022, his first campaign ad emphasized his opposition to liberal elites. "Are you a racist?" he asked voters, "Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists because we want to build Trump's wall. They shut us down, but that doesn't change the facts."

In April of that year, when I traveled to Ohio to watch Vance participate in a crowded U.S. Senate primary, his anti-Trumpism was everywhere. "Let me be clear," he said, then delivered a speech about how he initially didn't like Trump but eventually realized that the billionaire "revealed the completely hidden corruption in our country." At that time, Vance was not particularly gifted as a retail politician (the upcoming election would test whether he had improved), and the crowd I saw was somewhat tense when he admitted he had not always been a loyal supporter of Trump. When the audience expressed that this history made them distrust him, Vance nodded in complete understanding. But he was also one of the most prominent figures in the campaign, positioning himself as a spokesperson for working-class conservatives. His self-denial paid off: Trump endorsed him, Vance won the primary, and then the general election. Vance likely realized the conditions necessary for success in the current Republican Party, thus he loudly condemned the sexual assault allegations against Trump and insisted that if he had been vice president instead of Mike Pence on January 6, he would have authorized Trump's fantasy "alternate electors" list to let Congress "fight from there."

After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, Vance can be seen as a case study in Republican loyalty, as those who supported Trump after the event often went all in—their careers and reputations had become closely tied to the former president. But many Republicans remain staunch Trump supporters. Vance's rise also relies on his populist stance. Like other Republican senators of his generation (such as Tom Cotton from Arkansas, Josh Hawley from Missouri, and Marco Rubio from Florida), Vance frequently emphasizes the need for the Republican Party to move away from past free-market absolutism. "For the conservative movement to achieve a lasting governing majority, it must rethink the economic dogmas of the 1980s and 1990s," he said at an event hosted by the American Compass think tank in 2023. He supports tariffs and urges Republicans to seek more union votes. "My grandmother's political stance is a mix of left-wing social democracy and right-wing individual uplift, both of which have their merits," Vance told Sohrab Amari of The New Politician in February, although this alliance has so far existed mainly at the rhetorical level; as Amari pointedly noted, "the mainstream labor movement has yet to find a legislative partner in Vance." Nevertheless, Vance's selection as a running mate indicates how Trump can interact with party elites differently, contrasting with Pence's elevation in 2016: less piety, more culture wars, and a willingness to push economic nationalism further. In other words, it shows the direction conservative elites are heading and how much the Trump era has changed them.

Of course, Pence's vice presidency ended with Trump supporters turning against him, storming the Capitol, and shouting for his execution. Many Republicans who joined Trump's cabinet regret it. Vance is still relatively new to all this, so it is hard to say whether he will be an asset to the campaign team, adding seriousness, or become a burden due to being too extreme or too odd. However, in an election primarily defined by age, Vance offers Trump's campaign something small but valuable: a credible opportunity to suggest that Trumpism has a future beyond Trump.