In 2016, the Washington Post reported that bestselling author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance had decided to “use his newfound fame and fortune to return home to Ohio and make a difference.” Vance wanted to help the people of Ohio deal with the crises of poverty and addiction that he documented in his book Hillbilly Elegy. “Rather than just collect royalty checks and give TED talks, Vance wants to do something to deal with these afflictions.” To that end, Vance started a nonprofit called Our Ohio Renewal, which would be part of “a focused effort on solving the opioid crisis.” Vance said that “it irked him when people assumed that” he was just returning to the state to launch a political career. “I actually care about solving some of these things,” Vance insisted.

In fact, he didn’t care. The nonprofit was essentially a fraud. The New York Times summarized its pitiful history: 

Mr. Vance’s nonprofit group raised only about $220,000, hired only a handful of staff members, shrank drastically in 2018 and died for good in 2021. It left only the faintest mark on the state it had been meant to change, leaving behind a pair of op-eds and two tweets. 

One former employee said that “in hindsight, [Our Ohio Renewal] had seemed aimed at serving Mr. Vance’s ambition by giving him a presence in a state where he had not lived full-time for several years” and “it had felt as if much of the job involved giving outsiders the impression that Mr. Vance was in the state.” The nonprofit had “spent more than 95 percent of its 2017 fundraising on staff salaries and overhead, and $0 on charitable activities or grants.” It made the Trump Foundation look like Habitat for Humanity. 

But while Vance may have resembled Trump in his penchant for disguising self-advancement as altruism, in those days he was staunchly anti-Trump. In The Atlantic in 2016, Vance, who by this time had a platform as a commentator, correctly pointed out that Donald Trump was nothing more than a snake oil salesman preying on the desperation of the broken communities Vance had written about in Hillbilly Elegy:  

Many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers… It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump. … What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. … He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.

Vance was scathing about Trump, in other contexts calling him a “total fraud,” a “reprehensible” “moral disaster” who might be America’s Hitler. But Vance, like many other Republicans including Ted Cruz and his Yale Law School classmate Vivek Ramaswamy, soon realized that to get ahead in right-wing politics, it would not do to tell the truth about Donald Trump. Vance reportedly commissioned polling to test whether his comments would hurt him politically, and “was particularly concerned that his opposition to Trump would turn off base GOP voters.” Since then, he has become one of Trump’s most aggressive defenders. I try to avoid using polemical epithets like “bootlicker” and “toady,” but if anyone has earned them, J.D. Vance has. And because Donald Trump loves bootlickers and toadies, as a 39-year-old freshman senator, Vance has earned himself a slot on the presidential campaign ticket. He will be set up to be the de facto leader of the Republican Party after Trump. 

With many Trump supporters, it’s possible to wonder whether they know better. Do they realize that Trump’s promises are all bogus? That he isn’t an anti-imperialist or a man of the people? That his signature policy in office was giving the rich a giant handout? That he couldn’t care less about the lives of his supporters? We are facing down a terrifying climate crisis, with heat records being shattered left and right. When asked what he would do about it at the presidential debate, Trump replied that he believed in clean water and that during his administration “we had H2O.” And that’s when he’s not calling the climate crisis a “Chinese hoax.” The man does not know anything. He’s not going to “make America great again.” But Trump is a brilliant showman, which is why plenty of people are sincerely taken in.

J.D. Vance, on the other hand, clearly knows better. The striking thing about his earlier observations is that they’re astute and accurate. Vance clearly understood that what Trump was selling wasn’t real. “He’s noxious and is leading the White working class to a very dark place,” Vance correctly said. “I’m a Never Trump guy.” 

Well, never say never. Vance saw a path to power and soon began to regret how frank he’d been about the fraudulence of the right-wing “populist” project. He deleted his negative tweets about Trump and has embraced exactly the kind of political program that he had previously acknowledged to be vacuous. Incidentally, this means that Vance is something of a liability as a VP pick for Trump, because he’s essentially on record admitting that what he’s now involved with is a massive attempt to deceive the public. Every time a journalist gets a chance to question him, they should just relentlessly ask why he is now part of an enterprise that he once thought was the equivalent of heroin at best and Hitlerism at worst. Judging by the way Vivek Ramaswamy squirmed when asked to defend his prior anti-Trump comments, this may put Vance in a tough spot. Trump clearly picked Vance because he has demonstrated he will jettison all semblance of principle and be slavishly loyal, but he’s probably a bad pick. The Democrats will surely blast ad after ad using Vance’s own words to describe Trump, and the selection of Vance would increase the Democrats’ odds of winning if they had a solid presidential ticket themselves—which, unfortunately, they do not. 

Vance has pivoted in another important way. His book Hillbilly Elegy, which was heavily criticized by people from Appalachia and beyond, became somewhat infamous for appearing to blame the poor for their poverty and dysfunction. (Interestingly, Vance’s initial fame was due largely to his being elevated by liberal pundits and the Ivy League he now denounces.) He put all of his mother’s character flaws on display as an example of the pathologies of the white working class. (Incidentally, who does this to their own mom?) Vance criticized social welfare programs and related tales of lazy food stamp recipients, suggesting that poor white people needed to exercise some personal responsibility the way he had.  

The J.D. Vance of today does not emphasize themes of personal responsibility. Instead, he helps people find villains to blame for all their problems. And like many right-wing “populists,” he directs them toward every villain but the rich. (Unless they’re the “woke” rich.) “The professors are the enemy,” Vance thundered at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, echoing Richard Nixon. Universities, he says, “no longer serve a useful social function.” Instead, they’re woke brainwashing centers or whatever. 

But it’s not just the professors. The immigrants are also the enemy, and in the heartland, he claims, “A third of the local county health budget is tied up in giving free benefits to illegal immigrants.” Oh, and don’t forget the sexual revolution, which convinced people they should be able to easily leave abusive or unhappy marriages and which Vance says messed up generations of children. “There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government,” Vance had written in Hillbilly Elegy. But isn’t it “blaming problems on society” to rant about the sexual revolution and all the immigrants in America? 

The kind of right-wing “populism” pushed by Vance and Trump accepts that many left-wing diagnoses of social ills are real. (Unlike certain strains of liberalism, which insist that everything is amazing and people need to stop whining.) But rather than, say, respond to unaffordable healthcare by making healthcare affordable, and reining in the corporations getting rich from extorting people, the right-wing populist directs the public’s rage toward immigrants, trans people, The Globalists, the Deep State, DEI, the Chinese Communist Party, and random ordinary people online. Whereas the “personal responsibility” conservative says, “your problems are your own fault,” the “populist” conservative says, “your problems are the fault of people who don’t look like you, or sinister shadowy government forces.” So much for pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Instead, just find the right population to resent. Once elected, both types of conservatives use their power to further enrich the already-rich. Neither actually solves the problems. 

The fraud is so transparent that I feel like I’m insulting the reader’s intelligence by pointing it out. J.D. Vance laid out the playbook himself! Take a social problem like addiction, promise to solve it by building a wall, and use this to portray yourself as someone who cares and will help. We could laugh at what an obvious con this is, but the men selling it are currently on a path to becoming the president and vice president. 

Ask a “populist” conservative about pro-worker policies and all of a sudden, they start sounding much more like a traditional Chamber of Commerce Republican. How does J.D. Vance feel about unions, for instance? Well, he opposes the PRO Act, which would substantially improve workers’ bargaining power and help them better employment contracts. He says that there are “good unions” and “bad unions,” with police unions being an example of “good unions” and Starbucks unions an example of “bad” ones. (This is the standard Republican position.) He distrusts union leaders because they are “aggressively anti-Republican,” which he sees as reasons to oppose unions rather than reason to think the interests of labor may depart from the agenda of the Republican Party. J.D. Vance has a rather impressive 0% score on pro-worker policies from the AFL-CIO. 

What about universal childcare? Vance says it’s a subsidy for elites (because, as his tweet suggests, apparently working-class women want to be tradwives). Medicare For All? It’s a “handout” to doctors and Big Pharma. Raise the minimum wage? It will kill jobs. Vance’s most notable legislative initiative as a senator, the Railway Safety Act, does take the “populist” position that railway companies should keep their trains on the tracks and not be allowed to poison people with toxic chemicals. This may be a radical departure from the standard Republican position that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of the harm it causes others. But as The Lever reports, Vance weakened his rail safety bill after industry lobbyists pressed him to delay its implementation. It’s also notable that it took a catastrophic train derailment, which made a crusade against corporate crime good politics in the state of Ohio, for Vance to actually act on his “populist” commitments. 

As Ben Burgis points out, Vance is a multi-millionaire who has espoused “pretty much the views you’d expect from a Yale-educated venture capitalist whose campaign is primarily financed by a libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire.” Indeed, free market libertarian Peter Thiel (who distrusts democracy, in part because women have the vote) put a staggering amount of money toward getting Vance elected to the Senate. If Vance did have serious economically populist commitments, it’s hard to think Thiel would be getting his money’s worth. 

Scrutinize Vance’s criticisms of corporate power, and it quickly becomes obvious that his problem isn’t with the structure of corporations (the workers follow orders, the bosses make the money). For instance, he says that “it’s time to break Google up.” Is this because its for-profit search results have had a deeply corrosive effect on our ability to attain reliable knowledge? No, its’ because it’s “an explicitly progressive technology company.” Unfortunately, Vance’s branding exercise has even been swallowed by the New York Times, which obediently calls him “an economic populist skeptical of large corporations.” But Vance has made it clear that when he talks about class, he really means “culture,” meaning that he’s not with the poor against the rich, he’s with the people who drive trucks against the people who drive Priuses, even if the person driving the Prius is an underpaid schoolteacher and the person driving the truck owns the truck dealership. 

It’s hard to know exactly what J.D. Vance really believes, and what’s mere opportunism. A transgender Yale classmate recalls that he “delivered [them] home-baked treats when they underwent top surgery.” Was he disguising his real beliefs back then? Or he did he simply sense that introducing a bill banning nonbinary designations on U.S. passports and stopping the U.S. Census bureau from collecting gender identity data would establish his bona fides as a culture warrior? He seems willing to say things that are transparently false if they aid Trump. (He praised Trump’s “command of the facts” at the first presidential debate!) He’s often inconsistent, just like Trump, who panders to his audience and has few genuine convictions. But a number of Vance’s stated beliefs are disturbing. He wants to ban abortion. Like Trump, he thinks the most serious crisis of our time (the climate catastrophe) doesn’t matter. Having once, in his more honest days, admitted there was a climate problem, he now waves the whole issue away. He says that the climate always changes, he spreads falsehoods about the supposedly damaging effects of green energy, and he uncritically boosts the fossil fuel industry. Thus, a man with a supposed “anti-corporate record” wants to help corporations destroy the prospects for humanity’s future. 

Vance’s hypocrisy is easy to skewer. After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, he blamed Democratic rhetoric about Trump being an authoritarian. But if extreme rhetoric about the threats posed by politicians fuels political violence, what is one to make of J.D. Vance’s conspiracy theory that Joe Biden deliberately fueled the fentanyl crisis to kill MAGA voters? (“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl. . . . It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”) Vance is someone who can tweet that “elitism has destroyed the media,” and then issue the following campaign call to action: “Want to have dinner with me and Peter Thiel? Donate $10,800 by tomorrow and I’ll send you the details. This will be a small group, with good food and better company.” Donate $10,000 and you can join a millionaire and a billionaire in bashing “elitism”! 

There are alarming signs that Vance will encourage Donald Trump’s most authoritarian tendencies. He has said outright that he thinks Trump should ignore the law, purge the civil service, and thumb his nose at the courts if they try to stop him from entrenching his own authority. (He says that Trump needs to go in “directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with,” by which he seemed to be indicating that Trump should have less respect for the law, as if such a thing were even possible.) Vance is an admirer of Curtis Yarvin, who thinks the country ought to be a monarchy ruled by a kind of absolutist CEO, and Vance has already encouraged the federal government to investigate an anti-Trump journalist. “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” Vance has said. 

Because this is J.D. Vance, whose opinions shift radically in accordance with political necessity, it is difficult to know what to take seriously. But given the connection to Thiel, whose biographer says he has a philosophy that “border[s] on fascism,” we should be very, very concerned at what such a man will do once in power. Vance has advocated “completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class,” a phrase that should tell you all you need to know about whether he is a man of the people. A true populist believes in replacing the ruling class with authentic popular rule. Vance just wants “another” ruling class, one presumably dominated by anti-woke men like himself, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel.

The pseudo-populist rhetoric is indeed a political asset. The traditional Republican position (“shut up and let your boss tell you what to do”) is a tough sell, and Republicans are probably better off pretending that they care about workers. Vance has certainly broken with Republican orthodoxy on some issues, such as his apparent belief that corporations ought to pay their taxes. But voters need to know that if they expect something different, they’re very unlikely to get it. For instance, perhaps Vance’s boldest criticisms of fellow Republicans come in the realm of foreign policy, where he has argued that the U.S. should facilitate a diplomatic settlement to the war in Ukraine. His motives don’t seem especially noble here (“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”). But he has at least been a critic of neoconservatism and endless wars. Still, is J.D. Vance actually antiwar? Well, no. Like most “antiwar” Republicans, his main problem with the war in Ukraine is that it’s a distraction from the country’s greatest international “threat,” China. What about the horrendous war in Gaza? Well, he accused the Biden administration of funding the October 7 attacks and has opposed any conditions on aid to Israel. As bad as Biden’s support for Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians has been, it’s likely that the Trump administration would be even closer with the Netanyahu government. So much for Vance’s “unorthodox” views on foreign policy.

Trumpism has always been a giant con on the public. J.D. Vance knew it and said it. He probably still knows it, although I tend to think people come to believe their own bullshit after saying it enough times. Now Vance’s job is to persuade the public to elect someone he once thought was an idiot and rightly compared to a kind of political heroin, making his supporters feel good while actually destroying their lives. If Elegy was Vance’s first “con job,” this is his new one.