JD Vance Is Worse Than You Think

Donald Trump surprised precisely no one by reportedly listening to tech billionaires like Elon Musk and picking JD Vance to be his running mate.

On its face, this was a logical pick; a rising star in the Republican Party, Senator from a supposed swing state, though Ohio is a deep red state engaging in voter suppression to ensure it never again turns blue. Despite calling Trump “American Hitler,” once Trump won the presidency and it became clear Trumpism was the future of the Republican Party, Vance happily began licking Trump’s boots, like all Republican officials eventually do. Vance is not only one of the most consistently bad faith politicians in Washington, but he is the most dangerous choice Trump could have made. This guy shouldn’t be anywhere near power, much less potentially a heartbeat away from the presidency.

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Vance rose to prominence following the 2016 election of Trump. Liberal elites, desperate to find an explanation for Trump’s victory, anointed Vance the “white working class whisperer” and helped his shitty book Hillbilly Elegy become a bestseller. The first thing you need to know about Vance is, despite the title of his memoir, he isn’t a hillbilly. I grew up about twenty minutes away from Vance in a town called Hamilton, Ohio. Middletown, the town Vance grew up in, isn’t in the hills of Appalachia, as Vance and the people who helped him become famous would have you think. While it is poor, Middletown is a mostly suburban city outside of Cincinnati. Vance is as hillbilly as I am: not very much. This lie is the foundation of his entire brand. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, an actual Appalachian, said as much, stating JD “ain’t from here” and defending Appalachians from this cosplayer’s moronic attacks.

I’m not going to review Vance's entire book. If you’re interested in a great takedown of his book, check out the If Books Could Kill episode on Hillbilly Elegy. I also am not going to tell you everything in the book is a lie. By all accounts, JD grew up very poor. I am going to tell you that Vance learned all the wrong lessons from this childhood in poverty. He spends most of the book either making jokes at the expense of the impoverished or blaming them for their lot in life. You see, if these stupid people would just focus on the things that are important, they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps, like JD did. Never mind that this “pulling himself up by his bootstraps” required him to be a creature of pure ambition from the time he was 12 years old.

JD makes some allusions to NAFTA and other trade deals depleting jobs in the Rust Belt, but he mostly ignores the larger systemic causes for poverty. He places all the blame on culture, completely ignoring the fact that the material conditions of a community shape that culture. He talks about things like “Mountain Dew mouth” (the idea that Appalachians have dental issues because they drink too much Mountain Dew) while ignoring that most of these people don’t have access to adequate dental care, or any at all.

Instead of understanding that most of the people who receive assistance are either disabled from working hard blue-collar jobs at a young age, and lack of access to health care, or are the working poor having their wages subsidized by the government so companies like Wal-Mart can increase their profits, he talks about lazy Appalachians living off government largesse. Vance is happy to emphasize the culture he grew up in to win political points, but when it comes to helping those same people he believes the government should play no role and that they are but lazy morons deserving of the poverty they find themselves in.

Vance likes to play up his working class bonafides, styling himself as a new, populist Republican who cares about laborers. He even has union leaders praising him for his supposed “pro-labor” posturing. This is all bullshit, pure bad faith. For all his talk about working Americans, for all his showing up for a photo op at a picket line, Vance has a 0% score from the AFL-CIO, which tracks how much legislators support unions through their votes. He has joined the rest of the Republican Party in blocking the PRO Act, which would make it much easier for workers to organize. He can posture as a “working class whisperer” all he wants, but for what really matters, his Senate voting record, he’s just another Republican who wants the United States to be an oligarchy. 

Vance possesses some very strange views on gender and how society should be structured. Vance is in deep with some of the darkest corners of the online right, down to being in discord chats, posting racist and misogynistic memes with 17-year-old edgelords. He has denigrated Kamala Harris for not having children, calling her a “crazy cat lady,” as if that is any business of his. In Vance’s world, women like Kamala would be forced to stay at home and bear children, as is a woman’s only role. Even when defending his wife from racist attacks he leaned on the fact that she’s a devoted mother. It was a tortured exchange.

Vance is hostile to the idea of women in the workplace, wanting to roll back the decades of progress in favor of women essentially being chattel. He floated the idea of only parents having the right to vote, and would have us eliminate “no fault” divorce, which many times is the only refuge for women to escape abusive spouses. If you think the elimination of “no fault” divorce is far-fetched, it isn’t. We’ve already seen cases all over the country where Republican judges have refused to grant a divorce, instead telling couples they have to “work on it.” Vance is also pro-forced birth, going as far to say there should be federal intervention preventing women from Republican-held states going to freer Democratic-led states to receive reproductive health care. In the words of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “these guys are just weird. They’re running for he-man women haters club.”

For more on JD Vance, read Anthony Reimer's Bad Faith Times piece on how Vance has exploited the nation's opioid crisis for his own gain

As if the bad-faith working class posturing and abhorrent views on gender weren’t enough to disqualify him, there is a more insidious reason Vance would be a terrible vice president. It happens to be the main reason Trump picked Vance to be his running mate. You see, Vance didn’t rise to political prominence on his own, the worst techno fascist oligarchs we have in our society back and bankrolled him. He was handpicked by Peter Theil to be his champion in Congress. For a presidential candidate in need of money to help pay his many legal fees, this was Vance’s chief strength. He has access to the type of capital most people can only dream of. But for the country, Peter Thiel having his puppet one step from the Presidency would be devastating. 

Peter Thiel is the walking embodiment of why billionaires shouldn’t exist. No one with his views should have any influence in mainstream American politics. More than a run-of-the-mill fascist, Thiel is basically a monarchist. He’s shown derision for liberal democracy, believing the unwashed masses aren’t capable of governing themselves and instead advocating for powerful men, emphasis on men, to lead them.

Thiel once wrote, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible…. If you empower the demos (regular people) it will eventually vote to restrict the power of capitalists.” He continues: “Since 1920 the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.” You read that correctly. That is a man, one with considerable power, deriding the ability for women to vote in the 2010s. Thiel doesn’t just want to turn the clock back to 1950, he wants to turn the clock back to 1850. According to Thiel, the country should operate like a company, where there is a single decision maker who believes he knows what’s best for everyone. He claims to be a libertarian, but at his core what Thiel wants is a dictatorship in the service of capital. He believes this would be best for everyone. It’s just a coincidence that this system would put men like him at the top. Thiel is also an avowed nationalist, a Catholic fundamentalist who subscribes to the same gender norms as Vance. He wants to use his money and influence to transform society in this image, and he will use puppets like JD to do it. 

One heartening fact is that by most measurements, people aren’t buying JD’s bullshit. Vance may have won the Senate seat in 2022, but he underperformed Trump by four points and underperformed Ohio Governor Mike DeWine by fourteen points. He is by all accounts a weak candidate and a bad politician. Vance has a five percent favorable rating with undecided voters and a twenty-nine percent unfavorable rating. That is unimaginably low. He has a negative five net favorable rating. For reference, Sarah Palin had a plus twenty-six net favorable rating. He may or may not have violated a couch’s autonomy and has some weird search history involving dolphins. There are already reports that Trump has buyer’s remorse, and anecdotally, I’ve talked to many normal voters in my area who can’t stand Vance. He has no charisma. Most people see Vance for what he is, a craven monster driven by pure ambition. People can see through his facade. 

Make no mistake, if Vance becomes the vice president, he will simply be a cipher for the wishes of a group of oligarchical techno fascists. We have to ensure he never gets the chance to wield that type of power.

Follow Anthony Reimer on Twitter at @mrmeseeksff.