Heir Apparent

Trump-Vance.

That’s the ticket. To where I don’t know.

Like a lot of Donald Trump’s sycophants, J.D. Vance — officially Trump’s running mate as of Monday afternoon in the US — used to be a critic.

Trump was “cultural heroin,” a “reprehensible idiot” and might be “America’s Hitler,” according to Vance’s public remarks and private musings from 2016.

But Vance also conceded Trump might be something less nefarious. “A cynical asshole like Nixon,” maybe, “who wouldn’t be that bad and [could] even prove useful.”

Suffice to say he came around. Vance is now a full-on Trump acolyte. An unabashed disciple. The first-term Ohio senator is, without equivocation, an obsequious, often verbatim, mouthpiece for the former president.

Vance — who served in the Marines before graduating Yale law — is best-known for his 2016 bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy.” He also did time in San Francisco as a VC. Henceforth, he’ll be stumping for Trump at rallies in addition to his spaniel act on the Hill.

“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump gushed, on Truth Social.

Here’s the thing: Vance, unlike the man he once saw in Trump, is no idiot. It’s impossible to know where his buy-in to Trump’s mythology ends and opportunism begins. Here’s a guy who’s not even 40 with a chance at becoming heir apparent to a quasi-religious socio-political movement and, more importantly, to a transformed American presidency.

That’s not to suggest Vance doesn’t have a lot of genuine ideological overlap with Trump. He most assuredly does. Vance, like Trump, is a populist and he’s also a neo-isolationist who’s sharply critical of funding for the war in Ukraine.

Last month, he told The New York Times that his initial opposition to Trump was down to an excessive “focus on the stylistic element.” “I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade [and] on immigration,” Vance, who’s close to Don Jr. and beloved by the likes of Tucker Carlson, said.

Vance’s appeal to Trump is mostly about fealty (everything’s first and foremost about fealty with Trump), but the campaign doubtlessly hopes the senator can help bolster the ticket’s prospects in rust belt battlegrounds.

On Saturday, in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Vance linked the shooting directly to Joe Biden. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote, on “X.” “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

One wonders if Vance would place any blame with Trump’s rhetoric in the event of political violence against Democrats.

In the same Times interview linked above, Vance told opinion columnist Ross Douthat that the mainstream media, presumably including the Times, habitually oversimplifies Trump. “People think this guy is motivated entirely by personal grievance and by power,” Vance said. “That’s not at all who he is.”