JD Vance

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      JD Vance once worried Trump was ‘America’s Hitler’. Now his own authoritarian leanings come into view

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      JD Vance once feared Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”. Last Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed Democrats calling Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” caused the assassination attempt the former president survived.But on Monday, after Trump made Vance his vice-presidential pick, worries about Vance’s own authoritarian leanings came straight to the fore.“Trump picked JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: 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, Joe Biden’s re-election campaign chair, told reporters.Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice-president on 6 January 2021, he would have done as Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked certification of results in key states won by Biden during the election weeks earlier.Elsewhere on Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Zack Beauchamp of Vox, author of new book The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, outlined political views “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy”.Beauchamp described how Vance has repeated Trump’s stolen election lie; has called for a criminal investigation of a journalist he did not like; advocates politicising the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.“JD Vance,” Beauchamp wrote, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian steps are justified in response.“He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.”Trump’s lawyers recently presented that argument to the supreme court he stacked with rightwingers – and won. But Trump will be gone one day and as Vance told Politico recently, “There is a big question about what comes after him.”It looks like it’s Vance, now the leading elected exponent of “New Right” political thought, as championed by figures prominently including Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor.The biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalistic [and] longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive or … a dictator”.While Vance is a fan of writers who want “monarchist” 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 the making of Vance.Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the US marines, 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 Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.Vance returned to Ohio and ran a non-profit as well as a venture capital fund. At first 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 Reason magazine said Vance was “more willing than most on the New Right to openly declare his intent to use the state in obviously extralegal ways”.The magazine noted Vance’s contention “that conservatives should employ the taxation power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke, leftist’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has continued to target universities he says should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to Margaret Brennan of CBS, he said: “If they’re not educating our children well and they’re layering the next generation down in mountains of student debt, then they’re not meeting their end of the bargain.“I think it’s totally reasonable to say there needs to be a political solution to that problem.”Challenged about his admiration for how Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, took control of universities there, Vance said Orbán had “made some smart decisions … that we could learn from in the United States”.On Monday, responses to Trump’s selection of Vance noted his affinity for Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words for Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation and advocating radical rightwing reform to every facet of government.Trump has disavowed links to Project 2025, given the potency of Democratic attacks on the subject. But Vance has long advocated an assault 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’m sympathetic to that project.“But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I think Trump … [will] probably win again in 2024, and he’ll win by a margin such that he’ll be the president of the United States in January of 2025.“I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: fire every single mid-level bureaucrat. Every civil servant in the administrative state.“Replace them with our people, and when the courts – because you will get taken to court … stop you, stand before the country like [president] Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”As Beauchamp noted, the Jackson quote “is likely apocryphal, but the history is real”.An 1832 supreme court ruling said the government should respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored it. The result was the forcible displacement of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears. More

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      A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

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      Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “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.”Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.“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 said in response to a question on fatherlessness.Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.” More

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      RNC day two to focus on crime and immigration after energetic first day

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      Republicans could not have asked for a more eventful day to kick off their nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they will be looking to keep party members’ energy high on Tuesday.Donald Trump opened the convention on Monday with the announcement that Ohio senator JD Vance would serve as his running mate, ending months of heated speculation over who would join the former president at the top of the ticket. After formally winning the nomination in the afternoon, Trump brought convention-goers to their feet when he made a surprise appearance at Fiserv Forum on Monday evening.In his first public appearance since the assassination attempt against him on Saturday, Trump appeared at the convention with a bandage over his ear, which was injured in the attack. Multiple speakers who addressed the convention on Monday expressed deep gratitude that Trump survived the shooting, which left one rally attendee and the suspected gunman dead.“Two days ago, evil came for the man we admire and love so much,” hard-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told convention attendees. “I thank God that his hand was on President Trump.”On Tuesday, Republicans are expected to focus their attention on crime and immigration, as the theme of the day will be “Make America Safe Once Again”. Immigration has become a rallying cry for Republicans, as Trump and his allies have repeatedly and falsely accused Joe Biden of supporting “open borders”.Trump has previously called for the deportation of 15 to 20 million undocumented immigrants if he wins re-election, and Vance voiced his own support for mass deportation in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday.“We have to deport people,” Vance told Hannity. “We have to deport people who broke our laws who came in here. And I think we need to start with the violent criminals.”The speaker schedule for Tuesday remains unclear, as Republicans have not yet specified who will next be addressing the convention. But a number of Republican lawmakers and members of Trump’s family, including his sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, have been named as speakers and have not yet addressed the convention crowd.While Republicans rally in Milwaukee, Biden and his Democratic allies are resuming some campaign communications after suspending their planned anti-Trump ads in response to the assassination attempt. In an NBC News interview with Lester Holt that aired Monday evening, the president made a case for his re-election while acknowledging it was a “mistake” to say during a recent donor call that Trump should be Democrats’ “bullseye” right now.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I meant focus on him. Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on – on his – on his policies. Focus on the number of lies he told in the debate,” Biden said. “I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I’m not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election. I’m not the guy who said that I wouldn’t accept the outcome of this election automatically. You can’t only love your country when you win.”As of now, it seems like Biden still needs to sell more voters on that message. National polls show a neck-and-neck race between Biden and Trump, and Biden appears to be in trouble in several states he won in 2020. A pair of New York Times/Siena College polls conducted last week found the two candidates virtually tied in both Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Biden, and Virginia, which he won by 10 points in 2020.If Virginia is indeed competitive, Biden’s chances of re-election appear bleak. And Republicans will be looking to further damage those chances on Tuesday. More

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      Trump’s arrival and ‘our God saves’: key takeaways from day one of the RNC

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      Just two days after a gunman targeted a Trump campaign rally in Pennsylvania, leaving the candidate grazed by a bullet and one of his supporters dead, the Republican national convention kicked off in Milwaukee in a strikingly normal fashion.Donald Trump, who made his first public appearance but did not yet address the convention, has now been officially nominated as the Republican presidential candidate. Here are key takeaways from the day:1. As VP, Trump picks JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy author who once called him ‘America’s Hitler’ For his vice-president, Trump chose 39-year-old JD Vance, a bestselling author who swiftly transformed himself from a self-described “never Trumper” to a Trump loyalist.Now an Ohio senator, Vance first took public office 18 months ago, when he won a race for Senate after being backed by more than $10m in support from tech mogul Peter Thiel. Vance had previously worked as a venture capitalist, and lived for several years in the Bay Area before moving back to Ohio.Vance, who gained a national profile for a much-praised 2016 memoir about white family dysfunction in Appalachia and how he made it to Yale Law School, once publicly called Trump “reprehensible” and an “idiot”, and said he was a dangerous figure who was “leading the white working class to a very dark place”. But Vance worked hard to walk back these criticisms and gain Trump’s endorsement in his 2022 Senate race.Vance has endorsed a ban on abortion, continued to falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, said that the US should conduct “large-scale deportations”, and claimed the Democratic party is trying to “transform the electorate” amid an immigrant “invasion”, which Democrats have said is an endorsement of the white nationalist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Vance was praised today by Donald Trump Jr for being a powerful surrogate for Trump on television.2. Trump makes his first public appearance since surviving a shooting attack in Pennsylvania Donald Trump looked unusually somber as he emerged from backstage and joined his sons, and his new vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, in a VIP section of the convention hall audience.There was a stiff white bandage covering his ear, which had been grazed by a bullet on Saturday when the former president narrowly avoided an assasination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally that left one of his supporters dead.Trump waved to his supporters and occasionally held his fist in the air as he walked through the crowd. But he looked more moved than defiant in his first public appearance, mouthing “thank you”, to his supporters, and once gesturing to his ear and to the camera filming him backstage as if to suggest that he could still hear them despite the bandage.After Trump shook hands with other supporters, he joined Tucker Carlson, his sons, and Vance, to listen to the speakers, he appeared to relax somewhat, and began to smile more in response to the crowd.3. Post-shooting speeches focus on Trump’s relationship with God, not blaming Biden Amid multiple media reports that Trump wanted to strike a note of unity after what he saw as his own miraculous escape from death, Axios reported that “Trump ordered aides not to allow the convention’s prime-time speakers to update their remarks to dial up outrage over the shooting.”Many of the speeches on Monday appeared to reflect a more restrained approach to talking about the shooting, with Republicans focusing on Trump’s personal strength and framing the event in Christian terms.“Our God still saves, he still delivers, and he still sets free, because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle, but an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared!” South Carolina senator Tim Scott said.4. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praises Trump’s toughness in defiant pro-labor speech One of the most prominent labor union leaders in the US brought a fiercely anti-corporate message into the heart of the GOP convention, where he wove together a denunciation of corporate power with praise of Trump’s willingness to hear from alternate voices.Teamsters president Sean O’Brien faced sharp criticism for within his own union for what some called his “unconscionable” decision to speak at the RNC.In his speech, O’Brien pushed back at that response, saying: “The left called me a traitor,” but that “today, the teamsters are here to say, we are not beholden to anyone or to any party.”“The teamsters are doing something correct if the extremes of both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage,” he added.O’Brien used the platform to argue for changes in labor laws to protect US workers and for “corporate welfare reform”.He received some cheers from the Republican audience when he said: “Elites have no party. Elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock prices at the expense of the American worker.”But his praise of Trump prompted an even more enthusiastic responses from the crowd, particularly his comment that, whatever else people might think of Trump, after the shooting on Saturday: “He has proven to be one tough SOB.”5. Elon Musk is reportedly discussing major donations to a pro-Trump Super PacTrump’s choice of former venture capitalist and Peter Thiel protege JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee already strengthened the link between the 2024 Trump campaign and Silicon Valley.But a report from the Wall Street Journal today suggested that one of the biggest and most volatile tech titans is now considering pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into a Super Pac designed to boost Republican turnout.The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk is discussing donating $45m a month, starting in July, to a pro-Trump Pac reportedly created by members of his tech executive inner circle. How much Musk has actually given so far is unclear, and may not be made public until the next round of campaign filings are made public on 15 July, but Bloomberg reported he had already given “a sizable amount”. More