JD Vance once feared donald trump He could be the “Hitler of America.” Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed that Democrats called Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” and caused the assassination attempt that the former president survived.
Related: In JD Vance, Trump chose a mini-me offering red meat to his base Maga
But on Monday, after Trump picked Vance as vice president, concerns about Vance’s own authoritarian tendencies immediately surfaced.
“Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence would not do on January 6th: 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, chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, told reporters.
Really Vance he said that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked the certification of the results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks prior.
Elsewhere on Monday, a profile by Vance was widely shared. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, author of the new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic tenets of American democracy.”
Beauchamp described how Vance repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he disliked; defends the politicization of the federal bureaucracy; and believes that presidents can simply ignore the law.
“JD Vance,” wrote Beauchamp, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian, measures are justified in response.
“He sees himself as the avatar of the virtuous people of America, whose political enemies are interlopers hardly worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above him.”
Trump’s lawyers recently made this argument to the Supreme Court, which he met with right-wingers – And won. But Trump will be gone one day and like Vance told the politician recently, “there’s a big question about what comes after him.”
It appears that it is Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, championed by prominent figures including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, tech billionaire and influential donor.
Biographer Max Chafkin described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than the libertarianism typical of Silicon Valley, “supernationalist [and] longing for some kind of more powerful chief executive or… a dictator.”
While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchical” 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 producing Vance.
Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Navy, 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 elegywas published in 2016. Subtitled Memoirs of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrayal of a region where support for Trump is strong.
Vance returned to Ohio and ran a nonprofit as well as a venture capital fund. Initially 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 magazine Reason said that Vance was “more willing than most of the New Right to openly declare his intention to use the state in obviously extralegal ways.”
The magazine highlighted Vance’s claim “that conservatives should employ tax power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, left-leaning’ nonprofits like the Ford Foundation and universities like Harvard.”
Vance continued to target universities that he said should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re saddling the next generation with mountains of student debt, then they’re not holding up their end of the bargain.
“I think it’s completely reasonable to say that a political solution to this problem is needed.”
Challenged about his admiration for the way Viktor OrbánWhen Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister took control of local universities, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions… that we could learn from in the United States.”
On Monday, responses to Trump’s choice of Vance pointed to his affinity with Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation that advocates radical right-wing reform in all facets of government.
Trump rejected links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an attack 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 support this project.
“But another option is that we should just take advantage of the administrative state for our own ends. We should fire everyone. I think Trump… [will] he will probably win again in 2024, and he will win by such a margin that he will be president of the United States in January 2025.
“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him advice: fire all the mid-level bureaucrats. Every public employee of the administrative state.
“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will be taken to court… stop, stand before the country as [president] Andrew Jackson did this and said, ‘The chief justice has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.’”
As Beauchamp noted, Jackson’s quote “is probably apocryphal, but the story is real.”
An 1832 Supreme Court ruling said the government must respect the land rights of Native Americans. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forced displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears.
