So much for the notion that Donald Trump will pursue a kinder, gentler approach to the presidential race. In selecting J.D. Vance, Trump has doubled down on America First and the war against the liberal Left. His selection of Vance—at thirty-nine-years-old (the same age as Richard M. Nixon when Dwight Eisenhower selected him to serve as his running mate in 1952)—will likely leave a lasting imprint on the GOP. But will it help ensure Trump’s victory in November?

Like not a few Republicans, Vance has undergone something of a transformation from musing about whether Trump was “America’s Hitler” into an acolyte of the former president. The author of the national bestseller Hillbilly Elegy wasn’t chosen to deliver elegiac pronunciamientos but for his unflinching loyalty, whether the topic is defending Trump’s role in January 6 or giving Ukraine the boot. 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.”

On foreign policy, Vance is a faithful expositor of America First principles. William Ruger, whom Trump nominated as his ambassador to Afghanistan late in his presidency, has 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.” Trump has chosen someone who, unlike Senator Marco Rubio or former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, has no compunctions about terminating American support for Ukraine. Writing in a New York Times op-ed, Vance minuted that the “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.” Nor will Vance enter the lists on behalf of NATO. Quite the contrary. He is more than likely to encourage Trump to declare Article V null and void. Vance, who served in Iraq, is a staunch supporter of Israel. Speaking at the Quincy Institute in May, he observed, “It’s sort of weird that this town assumes that Israel and Ukraine are exactly the same. They’re not, of course, and I think it’s important to analyze them in separate buckets.”

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.”

Vance makes no secret of his admiration for Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. As vice president, he would fortify Trump’s instincts to create a new American republic in his own image. In selecting Vance, Trump has further clarified the stakes in the November election. He isn’t simply seeking to defeat President Biden but to crush him.

About the Author

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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