2024-11-02 04:50:02
JD Vance speaks in Racine, Wisconsin.Scott Olson/Getty
If Donald Trump wins a second term, he will enter the White House at 78 years old, making him the oldest person ever elected president. Anything can happen over four years, and there is, of course, a chance he will not complete his term. The former president, who has already been the subject of two impeachment efforts, has refused to release even basic information about his health.
Given that state of affairs, it seems important to have a sense of how his vice president might govern if elevated to the top job. That person would be Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance.
“We’re going to have to get pretty wild.”
Vance vaulted to celebrity with the publication of his book, Hillbilly Elegy, in 2016, in which he brought attention to the down-and-out white working class in the midwest. In the memoir, Vance describes how he worked his way into the belly of elite America, namely Yale Law School, where he felt out of place and unschooled in the mores of the upper class.
But after law school and the conclusion of that book’s story, Vance joined the elite as a protege of far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. Ahead of the 2022 elections, Thiel spent a critical $15 million funding Vance’s victorious Senate race, before reportedly lobbying Trump this summer to select him as running mate.
In a short span, Vance’s has transformed from a self-appointed speaker for the masses to a protege of his billionaire patron—and along the way, adopted much of the techno-authoritarian, anti-democracy ideas of Thiel and other Silicon Valley rightwingers. He’s also associated with a crowd of highly online Christian nationalists, the so-called “TheoBros,” who want the United States to be both Christian and white while seeking a return to archaic gender roles, including by ending women’s right to vote. Vance converted to Catholicism under the influence of a thinker named Patrick Deneen, who advocates for an end to liberal democracy.
With such a background, what kind of president would Vance be? According to Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist who studies democratic backsliding, Vance could choose between two paths. As a power-seeking pragmatist, he could decide that his best route to sustained success is through a more traditional Republican politics. Or, he could attempt to push on and bring about the extremist, anti-democratic worldview he has been marinating in for several years.
One of Vance’s most chilling quotes, from a 2021 podcast appearance, promises the latter. Vanity Fair quoted parts of it in a profile the following year, as a summation not only of Vance’s views, but of those of Thiel and the far-right community he has become a part of:
“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
This is a description, essentially, of a coup.
“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
If fate gives Vance a chance to put these words to action, his past policies and ideas are the best indication of the kind of president he would be. Here’s an incomplete list of what America could expect.
Abortion
Without Roe v. Wade, Vance would be free to pursue a nationwide abortion ban. And while Vance has recently tried to moderate his stance by favoring the euphemistically named “minimum national standard,” that sounds like Yale Law-speak for a ban.
He has previously stated his opposition to any exceptions for rape and incest, and compared abortion to slavery. Vance would use the tools of government to enforce such bans, as laid out in Project 2025. Vance also supports the ability of local law enforcement to obtain women’s private medical records, which would be key evidence in prosecuting women, doctors, and possibly others who may have aided in obtaining an abortion.
Vance is also an adherent of pronatalism, a movement associated with Elon Musk and far-right Silicon Valley circles. In addition to banning abortion, Vance would likely implement policies to encourage larger families, possibly through a larger child tax credit, as he has supported in the past.
He’d also like to tie those families together by making it harder for people to get divorced. Family law is traditionally a state-level issue. But if it were up to Vance, divorce, even in a violent relationship, would be a lot harder to obtain.
Despite his emphasis on making babies, Vance would likely there’s evidence he might oppose IVF. In 2017, he wrote the forward to a Heritage Foundation report on how to encourage women to have children earlier and return to “traditional” family structure, according to the Guardian. The report included an essay denigrating in vitro fertilization and argued that women spend their reproductive years on advanced degrees and careers, rather than having kids, thanks to the promise of having children later with IVF. (Vance’s spokesperson said the essay did not necessarily reflect his views).
Transgender rights
Vance would seek to ban gender-affirming care. In the Senate, Vance is a sponsor of legislation to impose a 12-year federal prison sentence for providing gender-affirming care to a minor. His bill also targets transgender adults by cutting funding from any health plan that covers gender-affirming care. And in a jab at the First Amendment, it prohibits institutions of higher learning from teaching about gender-affirming care—a move that signals Vance would be open to using the tools of government to regulate curriculums.
Foreign policy
Upon the selection of Vance, European diplomats reportedly worried what a Trump-Vance presidency would mean for Europe’s security. The answer, they concluded, is not good.
As a senator, Vance has been a vocal critic of sending military aid to Ukraine. If Vance became president, the United States could (if it hadn’t already under Trump) cease its support of Ukraine against Russian aggression, a move that could signal that Russia might get away with invading more neighbors without pushback from Washington.
Vance has instead argued for focusing US military resources in a fight against China. This would include additional tariffs on Chinese goods, likely causing prices in the US to rise. Vance hopes that limiting imports from China would boost US manufacturing as part of a broader withdrawal from economic globalization.
Economy
Aside from tariffs, Vance has supported other government policies aimed at bolstering production in the US. Vance has co-sponsored legislation to raise the minimum wage to $11 per hour—more than the current $7.25 per hour, but much lower than the $17 favored by some Democrats. Perhaps he’d follow through, especially if tariffs cause prices to rise. He also sees immigrants as a cause of depressed wages, citing that as a reason they should be expelled. Vance’s minimum wage bill, for example, includes increased penalties for hiring undocumented workers.
Vance is pro-crypto. According to NPR, he owns over $100,000 worth of Bitcoin and has fought efforts to regulate the industry, even as ordinary people, like those who put their money in FTX, lose money.
In addition to protectionist trade policy and tariffs, Vance has spoken in favor of breaking up monopolies a point of convergence between the left and the right. But his antipathy can be focused on Big Tech companies, which may have less to do with their size than his perception they are liberal. In a February X post calling for Google to be broken up, he complained that “monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.” Perhaps if Google were more reactionary, he wouldn’t mind so much.
Whatever antitrust sentiment he sincerely holds would be paired with a typical GOP deregulatory scheme that allows billionaires, oil executives, and Wall Street to plunder the economy and environment to further line their pockets.
Labor
Vance has paid lip service to unions, but he opposes the PRO Act, which would bolster union organizing and bargaining. Vance is aligned with individuals who oppose unions, including Elon Musk who is currently waging a court battle against the constitutional underpinnings of the National Labor Relations Board.
Vance has given a frank and pragmatic reason for opposing union power. “I think it’s dumb to hand over a lot of power to a union leadership that is aggressively anti-Republican,” Vance told Politico. Indeed, authoritarians do not like other centers of power, particularly those that might challenge their authority.
Immigration
At the Republican National Convention, Vance described the United States as “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” As my colleague Kiera Butler explains, this line was a wink to Christian nationalists who view immigration as a threat to the country’s white, Christian identity.
In the Senate, Vance sponsored a bill to ramp up deportations, crack down on asylum claims, and resume construction of a wall along the southern border. He also proposed a resolution backing a radical constitutional theory that would allow governors to round up and deport immigrants—and possibly even carry out their own military operations in Mexico. He has also fundraised on the promise of the mass deportation of every undocumented immigrant.
Clearly, Vance would seek to limit immigration, deport millions, and curb the rights of all immigrants. He’d justify this agenda by scapegoating immigrants with false smears, as he did to the community of legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming without evidence that they were snatching and eating pets.
Free speech
In the Senate, Vance supported legislation to crack down on protest encampments on college campuses. It’s probably safe to say he wouldn’t like protests against his own policies either, and would crack down on those as well. Trump wanted to use the military to do that. Vance hasn’t himself said he would go that far, but has defended the ex-president’s recent remarks on the subject.
There is one kind of protest Vance approves of, which is demonstrators who interfere with people’s right to enter an abortion clinic. But with abortion outlawed, that kind of protest probably won’t be happening.
Civil Servants
As Vance’s quote from 2021 shows, he favors a hostile takeover of the federal government to enact his own vision for the country. So if Trump hadn’t already replaced the civil service with loyalists, Vance would try to finish the job.
Pushing through a change creating a new federal employment category known as “Schedule F,” as Project 2025 envisions, would allow the president to purge non-partisan government workers and instead fill agencies with loyalists. Trump actually attempted to enact the change at the end of his first term, but Biden promptly revoked it.
Democracy
Vance, by his own admission, would have helped Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election had he then been his vice president. That is, above all else, why Trump selected him. Vance would put Trump over free and fair elections. And if he’d do that for Trump, you have to ask, would he do it for himself?
Certainly, he’d support laws that make it harder to cast a ballot, and nominate judges who would help his party win elections through legal challenges. Vance probably wouldn’t feel too bad about it, as his intellectual influences include neo-monarchists who advocate for the end of popular democracy.
When thinking about the possibility of a President Vance, remember what he said on that podcast in 2021: “We are in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild.”
