Is J.D. Vance the Worst Vice Presidential Pick Ever?

Vance is wildly inexperienced and widely loathed. With Joe Biden out of the race, he’s a huge liability.

 

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One week ago, Republicans were partying. The raucous scenes at Milwaukee’s Republican National Convention reflected two victories. One was Donald Trump’s now total and complete takeover of the GOP. The other was his upcoming victory in the 2024 presidential election. Sure, voters were still months away from heading to the polls. But with 81-year-old President Joe Biden topping the Democratic ticket, how could he lose?

Trump and his supporters found out how on Sunday. Biden stepped aside and quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Harris, a 59-year-old former prosecutor, can, unlike Biden, put up a fight. What looked like a cakewalk suddenly became a real campaign. And that campaign now had a huge vulnerability: J.D. Vance, who Trump had selected as his running mate just a week earlier. Arguably the most extreme candidate Trump could have chosen, Vance is also a neophyte: 39 years old, he has served less than two years in the Senate and otherwise has no experience in government. In the new race in which Republicans found themselves, Vance not only worsened everything, he exacerbated Trump’s biggest weaknesses: his own radicalism, particularly on abortion, and his status as the oldest presidential nominee in American history.

Surveying the mood within the Trump campaign after Biden’s decision to step aside, The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta found more than a little running-mate buyer’s remorse. The decision to anoint Vance, “campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” Whoops!

Vance is only a luxury pick if you are 100 percent certain that you will win, which also means that, when he was selected, Trump was also sure that Biden would stay in the race. (As Biden engaged in a weekslong ego trip and hunkered down with loyalists and close family members amid calls for him to bow out, Trump did, to be fair, have a pretty good read on his mindset—because, well, Biden was acting just like him.) But J.D. Vance was a reckless and stupid pick even in a blowout election. He is not only one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious fraud in American politics. As Election Day fast approaches and Harris mounts a forceful challenge, Trump’s regrets will only grow.

Who is J.D. Vance for? Eight years ago, that was an easy question to answer. Vance had crafted an image designed to appeal to the reigning liberal and media elites, who couldn’t get enough of him. Then a 31-year-old venture capitalist, Vance became an overnight sensation after Hillbilly Elegy was published to widespread acclaim in June 2016.

Ostensibly a memoir cataloging Vance’s escape from postindustrial Ohio, Hillbilly Elegy was celebrated as the book to read to understand Donald Trump’s hold on the white working class. Vance provided a seductive and convenient explanation: Yes, rural whites have been systematically ignored by elites—but, in Vance’s telling, they are also indolent, drug-addicted, and welfare-dependent. Some may try to blame their plight on structural forces, but they are wrong: For Vance, America’s poor whites—very much including, it’s worth underlining, several members of his own immediate family—left themselves behind. Welfare and bailouts, in his estimation, will only make things worse by rewarding the poor slobs who raised him. Instead, the only true way out of the holler is to follow in his footsteps: Lift yourself up, one bootstrap at a time, enroll in Yale Law School, and become a venture capitalist.

Touted by its many boosters (a number of whom now repent) as an insightful work of sociology, it is in fact a rags-to-riches parable perfectly calibrated to pander to elite ideas about rural whites. In truth Hillbilly Elegy actively discourages readers from trying to understand the people it is ostensibly about. In Vance’s cold narrative, the white working-class voters now flocking to Donald Trump were largely responsible for their own innumerable misfortunes. If Vance, a hillbilly himself, thinks they aren’t worth saving, why should we?

Vance may be a mediocrity, but Hillbilly Elegy reveals his one true, God-given talent: exploiting his own impoverished background to tell elites precisely what they want to hear, allowing him to elide the fact that he didn’t actually understand or, for that matter, care about the people he was writing about. As the 2016 campaign unfolded, and anxiety about Trump’s hold on the GOP grew, Vance was celebrated not just as a kind of white-trash prophet—he was at the time a principal at Peter Thiel’s V.C. firm Mithril Capital—but someone who could lead the Republican Party out of the darkness. As the election neared, he sharpened his criticism of Trump: The hillbilly soothsayer called the GOP nominee a charlatan, a sexual assaulter, an American Hitler. When the GOP collapsed after Trump inevitably lost to Hillary Clinton, he would be well positioned to pick up the pieces.