What J.D. Vance offers Trump’s ticket

With his selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate, Donald Trump has signaled that he doesn’t simply want to defeat Joe Biden. He also wants to crush the last vestiges of the Republican establishment. No other politician can help him carry out a MAGA revolution in Washington more ruthlessly and effectively than Vance. Forget the pundits who predicted that Trump would take a more emollient approach. Forget the talk about trying to be a unifier. Forget the speculation about the assassination attempt changing him.

Instead of doing what many conservatives have done in the past — waver, flinch, compromise — Trump is going all-in. There will be no Treaty of Fifth Avenue (the pact that Richard Nixon reached in 1960 with Nelson Rockefeller to water down the GOP program) that so incensed yesteryear’s conservatives. No George H. W. Bush running alongside Ronald Reagan. Say goodbye to all that.

Had Trump selected Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley, he would have been catering to the party establishment. Instead, Trump is intent on creating a new American republic in his own image. With Vance as his running mate, Trump has set a lasting impress upon the GOP, ensuring that there will be no illusions about his intentions. His ambition is to create an authoritarian, Orbán-style takeover of America, from the judiciary to the media, from the Congress to the military, that will endure for decades to come.

Like Trump, Vance is a fighter. He has steadily transformed himself from someone who once speculated that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” into a slavish MAGA pursuivant. The author of the national bestseller Hillbilly Elegy will deliver no elegies during the presidential race, no pious declarations about the need for national unity, other than to line up obediently behind Trump. After the attempted assassination of Trump, Vance immediately asserted: 

Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

Vance is a MAGA Ultramontanist in both foreign and domestic policy. Those intent on remaking American foreign policy adulate Vance. William Ruger, who Trump nominated as his ambassador to Afghanistan late in his presidency, noted: “This is a big win for Realism and Restraint in American foreign policy. Senator Vance has been a strong voice for more prudentialism in our approach to the world.”

With Vance at his side, Trump will immediately sever all aid to Ukraine and seek to force it to the negotiating table with Russia. Vance has made his disdain for Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky palpably clear, writing in a New York Times op-ed:

White House has said time and again that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.

Vance will not seek to attenuate Trump’s antipathy toward NATO either. Instead, he will bolster it. Should Trump become president, Article 5 will be null and void.

In the domestic arena, Vance has called for carrying out a purge of the civil service and stuffing it with Trump loyalists. In a September 2021 interview with podcast host Jack Murphy, Vance said: 

I think that what Trump should do, like 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, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.

Whether Vance will help Trump win the battleground states is an open question. His choice is an inflammatory one, putting the liberal left on further notice, if it’s needed, that Trump is its mortal enemy. But perhaps Trump is so confident in victory that he’s already thinking beyond it, beyond them.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.