JD Vance’s past attacks on Trump are not hypocrisy. They are his main argument. – Mother Jones

Donald Trump and JD Vance at the RNC.Nate Gowdy/Mother Jones

In the days when the nation’s confused liberals and bereft neoconservatives wanted to understand Rise of Donald Trump with With a lot of empathy – but without questioning too many assumptions about power structures – a respectable, wealthy, beardless man with a perfect story appeared.

On the pages of the Atlanticat various think tank meetings in Washington, DC, and in monologues with Serious journalists on TV, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler,” a “moral disaster” and a “total fraud.” But he drew a clear line between the winning candidate and his supporters: Trump’s evilness did not make his voters bad people. Vance knew these voters. In fact, he could have been one of them – until, thank God, he turned away from them.

In this way, Vance’s bestseller Hillbilly Elegyoffered (and I’m borrowing the language that was always part of his pitch) “liberal elites” a plan for Trumpism without Trump. With his humble background, military service, an advanced degree from Yale, and a career in the venture capital sector of the tech industry, Vance could switch between the voice of a heartfelt editorial about his childhood and the language of new California oligarchs touting startups for the heartland, back when they still had the sheen of Obama-era conscious capitalism. Vance seemed to have authentically lived every rung of the ladder of the American dream, and he implored liberals to listen to him.

“The great tragedy is that many of the problems identified by Trump are real,” Vance wrote in the Atlantic in 2016. The President saw the poverty that Vance saw. But his solutions were not sufficient or did not follow the cultural framework that Hillbilly ElegyVance called Trump “cultural heroin.” “He makes some people feel better for a short time. But he can’t cure what’s wrong with them.”

Now that Vance has taken the reins as Trump’s vice presidential candidate, it would be easy to think that something has changed. The running mate of “America’s Hitler” is quite a change.

But this hypocritical framework overlooks what should be a much more frightening possibility for liberal elites: that Vance’s conversion is genuine. The idea that a Yale graduate who wrote a book that many liberals liked as much as Hillbilly Elegy could love Trump seems too scary for many to consider. It makes MAGA an ideology whose purchase could soon be expanded and implemented far more competently. Seeing Vance as a 2004 version of John Kerry, swaying back and forth in the wind, is most likely a self-soothing delusion.

In this way, Vance’s past hatred of Trump becomes an advantage. Trump wants to show people that liberals are completely out of sorts and he’s not that bad. And aside from the unnecessary yelling about Trump, his agenda is exactly what America needs. And to prove it? His running mate for 2024 is one of the people who used to shout the loudest that Trump is too dangerous.

As the vice presidential candidate, Vance now faces the task of doing what he did when he rose to power in 2016: explaining to disaffected elites that Trump has been misunderstood. And his jab at Trump is the perfect vehicle, because it allows the Republican vice presidential candidate to explain his betrayal as a kind of revelation, representing Paul on the road to Damascus. (As a fellow Catholic, I can’t help but feel a sympathy with him here.) It’s a way for him to say that he, the establishment apostate, has seen how liberals speak behind closed doors and has broken with their lies. I was blind, but now I see.

To better understand this strategy, watch how Vance spoke to New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat, the quintessential intellectual conservative. Vance never apologizes for his past dislike of Trump. Instead, like so many readers of the New York Times, he was brainwashed by the liberal regime. Now he finally sees that Trump a vulgar but important messenger. “I was confronted with the reality that part of the reason anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump,” he said, “was because he posed a threat to a way of doing things in this country that was very good for them.”

Vance sees this as a war within the law as well as a broader culture war against leftists seeking to destroy Western thought. Yes, Vance notes, Trump was not his cup of tea – but he opened up space for debate. As the Trump administration developed, Vance realized, “The larger truth is that the country never really rectified its mistakes in court. of bipartisan consensus until Donald Trump came along, and on the right no one challenged the failings of George W. Bush in court until Donald Trump came along.”

Vance’s strength will not be in counting votes or influencing a state. Instead, as Ezra Klein noted in a recent podcast, he is speaking to an intellectual battle over what it means for the right’s (mostly theoretical) shift toward a party whose convention features a Teamster president. “Like many other conservative and liberal elites, I was so focused on Trump’s stylistic elements,” Vance told Douthat, “that I completely ignored that substantively he had something very different to offer on foreign policy, trade and immigration.”