J.D. Vance

J.D. Vance is a 39-year-old junior senator from Ohio who Trump selected as his running mate. Vance has stated “We are in a late republican period” and has promoted a MAGA agenda and way of operating that pushes beyond precedent, tradition, and norms. He has said: “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.” Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book written by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. The book’s original title was: Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America.

Vance has pledged that the Heritage Foundation “is going to play a major role in helping us figure out how to govern, at the White House, at the Senate, at the House, and all across our great country.” Subsequently, the Heritage Foundation issued its Project 2025 Mandate, which includes an array of extreme plans for how to govern and radically change our country to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda. Vance has championed several of Project 2025’s approaches to remaking the Federal government. For example, Vance has proposed mass firings of federal employees that have expertise he dislikes, saying Trump should “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant” and “replace them with our people.”

Referencing President Andrew Jackson’s willingness to defy a U.S. Supreme Court order against breaking a Cherokee treaty in order to seize gold on Tribal lands, Vance continued: “And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say — ‘the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

At a campaign event Vance asserted that “A lot of what this [Trump] campaign is about — and a lot of my own thinking about politics is about — is that our institutions are corrupt […] We have to replace the people who run them. Some of those institutions we have to destroy.” In response to Rep. Marjore Taylor Greene’s endorsement, Vance tweeted “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.”

Vance has been a prominent election denier, claiming that “There were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis,” an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked as false. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Vance twisted the facts to assert “Do I think it was a problem that big technology companies, working with the intelligence services, censored the presidential campaign of Donald Trump? Yes.”

He also asserted, “Do I think it’s a problem that Pennsylvania changed its balloting rules in the middle of the election season in a way that even some courts in Pennsylvania have said was illegal? Yes, I think these were problems…,” even though the courts he cites were overruled by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which sought to protect the right of Americans to vote in the presidential election in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

Vance has also specifically promised that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have blocked certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

During Trump’s recent hush money trial in New York, Vance attended to defend Trump and pledged “If Merrick Garland wants to use these officials to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents, we will grind his department to a halt,” despite the fact that Garland had nothing to do with New York state’s prosecution of Trump for 34 felony criminal acts in that state.

He has also advocated for blocking fast-tracking of judicial and U.S. attorney nominees, as retribution for Trump’s conviction. Vance also pushed for Trump to fully politicize the DOJ, tweeting “This idea that we need to end the administrative state gets our problem totally backwards. America will have a justice department no matter what […] Take it over.” Vance also used Trump’s trials as a fundraising hook, claiming to potential donors: “This is unfair on so many levels […] President Trump has been indicted for being a patriot. Click here to demand his freedom […] Check this box to stand with Trump and JD.”

Vance has also downplayed the risks of Trump returning to power while encouraging punishment of judges and experts who would thwart the threats Trump’s authoritarian agenda poses to American freedom and stability.

In response to Washington Post journalist Robert Kagan’s reporting on the increasing odds of a Trump dictatorship, Vance called for the DOJ to investigate the reporter, making extraordinary claims of criminality for merely exercising the freedom of the press to investigate in the public interest. Vance asked “Will the Department of Justice open an investigation into Robert Kagan for potential violations of 18 U.S.C. § 241, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, or any other federal criminal statute? If not, what factors counsel against such an investigation? Why were those factors inapplicable in President Trump’s case?” Vance also questioned whether Kagan’s wife should continue to serve in the State Department and further asked if she should lose her security clearance due to her husband’s reporting.

Vance’s political positions have been influenced by his close relationship with billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who gave $15 million to a pro-Vance super PACs. Prior to running, Vance worked for Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management LLC and then went on to work with Steve Case of AOL at Revolution LLC, running its “Rise of the Rest,” an initiative focused on investing in seed stage companies outside of Silicon Valley and New York City. Vance then founded his own fund, Narya Capital, with backing from Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, and Eric Schmidt.

Vance disclosed his salary of $327,083.31 alongside millions of dollars worth of investment stakes in private companies, bitcoin, and public equities. Vance claims to be the first outside investor in Rumble, and while Vance wants to eliminate Section 230 immunity for “Big Tech” he wants to protect “alternative” platforms like Rumble from shouldering the same liability. Narya Capital and up to $100,000 of Vance’s own money is invested in AmplifyBio, a drug-testing firm that a July, 2022 USDA inspection found had 168 monkeys and 120 dogs, many of which were subject to testing and suffered from employee negligence, cruel conditions, or deadly procedures.

Thiel’s speech during Vance’s time at Yale Law School pushed Vance away from a legal career and towards forging a new political identity based on his past, for himself and for “new-right” Republicans. Beyond his connection to Thiel, Vance is also a member of Leonard Leo’s Teneo Network, a secretive, exclusive group dedicated to spreading a right-wing ideology throughout cultural, political, and educational institutions and ensuring its version of religious rules permeate all aspects of civil society.

Vance represents a version of Trumpism and populism that preaches a return to America as a manufacturing industrial power and disavows globalism. In his article for The Lamp Magazine, Vance writes about developing his relationship with Oren Cass, founder and Executive Director of American Compass and advisory board member alongside Tucker Carlson of The American Conservative: “[M]y friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. ‘Yes,’ I found myself saying, ‘Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.’”

Vance’s article “Fighting Woke Capital” argues “If you’re manufacturing something, if you depend on cheap energy, if you’re building something with your hands, or employing those who do for shipping goods from one part of the country to another, you are fundamentally less woke than the digital technology oligarchy that’s trying to destroy the country.” Vance contributed to Oren Cass’s works, and Cass’s “Rebuilding American Capitalism” frames “new conservative economics and domestic policy propounded by American Compass and politicians including Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and J.D. Vance.”

Vance, in discussing shared industrial policy ideas with Cass, criticized DEI initiatives and has called for increasing taxes on corporations that off-shore jobs. Vance praised Vivek Ramaswamy’s attack on corporate DEI initiatives, writing a blurb for Ramaswamy’s book: “In this engaging, brilliant book, Vivek Ramaswamy hits the nail on the head: companies go woke because they get richer from division rather than unity. This book is an essential weapon in the battle to reclaim America’s soul.”

Vance’s economic and domestic policy positions include climate crisis denial (“No, I don’t think there is, either”), opposition to supporting Ukraine against Russia (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” “I’m not throwing my grandparents into poverty so that we can buy Zelensky’s ministers a bigger yacht”), and smearing undocumented immigrants as prone to drugs and crime. He has also pushed the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (“Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more democrat voters pouring into this country”). His Timely Departure Act legislation would force visa holders to put up a $5,000 to a $15,000 bond or cash payment to be returned only upon their exiting the U.S. at the end of their visa term. The New York Times reported on Vance’s plans to seek revenge against Democrats’ immigration policy, advocating for the Trump Administration to “seize the assets of the Ford Foundation” and redistribute them to people suffering from “radical open-borders agenda.”

In 2021 during the Covid-19 pandemic, Vance also cast doubt on science and vaccine efficacy, claiming “Vaccine mandates infringe on our basic liberties, even as they fail to solve our COVID problem,” further explaining “People don’t trust the vaccine because our public health authorities are understood (reasonably) to be political hacks who don’t know what they’re doing.” Vance has denigrated Dr. Anthony Fauci as “a ridiculous tyrant” and telling voters Fauci should be imprisoned for his handling of the pandemic.

Vance has also attacked economist Paul Krugman, tweeting “one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country. We should change this.” Vance has also proposed legislation to ban transgender care. Vance advocates for traditional gender roles, tweeting “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”

At a 2022 speech at Pacifica Christian High School in Southern California, Vance asserted “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.”

Vance contends, “Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather.” When writing about his grandparent’s marriage in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance describes his grandmother attempting to murder his grandfather for returning home drunk: “Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their 11-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life.”

Again addressing the importance he places on marriage, Vance praised Viktor Orban’s policy in Hungary, saying “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids. Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

Reflecting on his motivations for converting to Catholicism in 2019 in an interview, Vance discussed his conversion: “One, I was pretty moved by the Confessions. I’ve probably read it in bits and pieces twice over the past 15 or so years. There’s a chapter from [St. Augustine’s] The City of God that’s incredibly relevant now that I’m thinking about policy. There’s just a way that Augustine is an incredibly powerful advocate for the things that the Church believes. And one of the subtexts about my return to Christianity is that I had come from a world that wasn’t super-intellectual about the Christian faith. I spend a lot of my time these days among a lot of intellectual people who aren’t Christian. Augustine gave me a way to understand Christian faith in a strongly intellectual way. I also went through an angry atheist phase. As someone who spent a lot of his life buying into the lie that you had to be stupid to be a Christian, Augustine really demonstrated in a moving way that that’s not true.” Vance admits “The sexual abuse crisis made me wonder whether joining the Church meant subjecting my child to an institution that cared more for its own reputation than the protection of its members. Working through these feelings delayed my conversion for at least a few months.”

In reconciling the value of his faith in his life, Vance has asserted that his new faith “demanded that I let go of grudges, and forgive even those who wronged me.” Yet in his primary campaign, Vance went on Tucker Carlson’s show, saying, “We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too… you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

When denigrating “woke” universities, Vance has threatened “The United States Senate is prepared to use its full investigative powers to uncover circumvention, covert or otherwise, of the Supreme Court’s ruling,” warning universities to “retain admissions documents in anticipation of future congressional investigations.”