WASHINGTON – Amid the buzz of a recent 12-hour work day, Sen. J.D. Vance stepped up to a microphone on the Senate floor to mount a losing argument.
The moment came just over 20 years after Vance had graduated from high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps to join the War in Iraq – a fight he was eager to take on as a young conservative and a believer in President George W. Bush’s call “to defend the world from grave danger,”
Now Vance was telling his colleagues that he considers Republican support for U.S. military engagement in Iraq “the most shameful period” of the last 40 years. He argued his party’s leadership was making the same mistake again, by committing billions in U.S. resources to help Ukraine fight against Russia.
“Have we learned nothing?” Vance asked.
In the end, only 14 other Republican senators voted with Vance that day against the $95 billion package that President Joe Biden later signed into law. But there was one important observer who shared his skepticism: Donald Trump, for whom Vance has become an ideological standard bearer and a leading contender to be his 2024 vice-presidential running mate.
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Despite being an early and vocal Trump critic, Vance has spent the last several years proving he has transformed into an effective advocate for Trump and his policies. Political observers and conservative activists close to Vance told USA TODAY that the senator’s intellectual approach to defending Trump’s vision, plus his fundraising ability and his ease on mainstream media platforms are among the attributes that most appeal to the former president as he considers picking a new No. 2.
Both Vance and Trump share a commitment to loyalty above all else – a quality that would be crucial for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee as he seeks to transform the federal government amid what is sure to be fierce opposition from Democrats and moderate Republicans.
But there may be a longer term play for Vance here, too. At 39, he is the vice-presidential contender who most embodies the young Republicans who are in line to inherit the conservative movement Trump elevated.
It’s known loosely as the New Right: One that’s critical of the international free trade and foreign policy approach that defined the previous generation of Republicans, is staunchly nationalist and populist, and skeptical of the institutions that have served as the scaffolding of society, from universities and the media to elections and the court system.
“He's super smart, very sincere, a true believer,” said Charlie Kirk, founder and executive director of Turning Point USA, a prominent conservative activist who is close to Trump and has been publicly advocating for Vance’s selection as VP. “He represents the younger wing of the party.”
Vance declined to be interviewed for this story. But he has publicly outlined his belief system at length, including in a recent op-ed with the New York Times’ conservative columnist Ross Douthat.
The Ohio senator’s vision for the future of the Republican Party would mark a fundamental change to modern conservatism and to the country that goes well beyond what he’s doing in his Capitol Hill office. Regardless of whether Trump chooses him to be a running mate, Vance’s allies expect he will remain instrumental in shaping that future, either in the Senate, in Trump’s cabinet, or as a future presidential candidate himself.
Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, said he considers Vance a friend. There’s plenty that pulls them together: Difficult childhoods and a commitment to Roman Catholicism, which Vance converted to a few years ago, to name a few.
“We also both believe that there needs to be a new conservative movement that is largely based on longstanding policy objectives, but also incorporates some newer ideas and some new constituencies into the movement,” Roberts said.
“I think that Sen. Vance is the leader of that effort, at least among elected officials in DC,” he added.
From decrying ‘America’s Hitler’ to the inside circle
Vance grew up in the Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio, where he was raised in poverty and weathered a tumultuous family life marked by addiction and abuse. When he graduated high school, he did one tour in Iraq before returning home for college at Ohio State and later ascending into the well-heeled worlds of Yale Law School and Silicon Valley venture capital, where he worked with conservative activist and investor Peter Thiel.
His experiences became the basis of “Hillbilly Elegy,” the best-selling memoir published in the summer of 2016 that would paint a loving but unsparing portrait of the community he grew up in, blame the plight of the working poor on both structural and individual problems, and anger some locals in the process.
The book catapulted him to national fame, where he became a translator for liberal and centrist Americans who sought to understand the white working-class grievances that would help Trump notch an upset win of the presidency that fall. It also gave Vance a celebrity platform that would enable him to successfully run for Senate six years later.
In his memoir, the roots of Vance’s politics were there – in his criticism of foreign intervention, free trade policies and betrayal by America’s elites. He also insisted at the time that Trump was not the answer. Vance privately mulled whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” and publicly called him “noxious,” “reprehensible” and “an idiot.”
Vance did a 180 degree turn on Trump when he decided to run for the Senate in 2022. He became an avid supporter of the former president and espoused a platform that dovetailed with Trump’s own criticism of immigration, tech companies and traditional Republicans that they both said failed to deliver for the American people. He said he had been convinced over time that Trump would be an effective person to enact the policies he cared about.
In his interview with Douthat, Vance said in the years between writing "Hillbilly Elegy" and running for Senate, he didn’t like what he saw in the respectable circles of “bipartisan consensus” he found himself in.
“I was confronted with the reality that part of the reason the anti-Trump conservatives hated Donald Trump was that he represented a threat to a way of doing things in this country that has been very good for them,” Vance said.
“Like a lot of other elite conservatives and elite liberals,” he continued, “I allowed myself to focus so much on the stylistic element of Trump that I completely ignored the way in which he substantively was offering something very different on foreign policy, on trade, on immigration.“
Tucker, Thiel and Trumps
As he prepared for a Senate run, Vance started showing Trump he’d changed by enlisting a couple of key allies who had the former president’s ear.
Thiel had employed Vance at Mithril Capital and later invested in his venture capital firm. Now the Silicon Valley titan was putting $10 million into a Super PAC supporting Vance, immediately making him competitive in a crowded Ohio GOP Senate primary race.
Kirk had met Vance years before and came to like him. The conservative activist began making calls to strategists in Trump’s inner circle in early 2021 that Vance would be worth paying attention to – and that he was a true convert, despite his previous comments.
At the same time, Vance was flooding the airwaves on popular conservative TV programs like Tucker Carlson’s then-primetime slot on Fox News. According to a GOP consultant familiar with the relationship between Vance and Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. liked what he saw – including one key moment in which Vance slammed his primary opponents for endorsing a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Thiel got Vance a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, where he first met both the former president and his son. Donald Trump Jr. would go on to be a close friend, advocating for Vance to his father in his Senate primary and, now, is a clear fan of Vance for vice president.
The former president “was won over by J.D.’s authenticity, his sincerity, his skill set,” said Kirk. “He represented a younger voice.”
The flip became a central point of the heated primary race in which Vance eventually triumphed. Trump’s endorsem*nt helped; the former president declared to Ohio voters that Vance “gets it now, and I have seen that in spades.”
Within weeks of his inauguration to Congress, Vance became one of the first senators to endorse Trump’s presidential reelection bid. His decision to return the endorsem*nt favor was notable given the Republicans’ lackluster 2022 midterm showing cast doubt on Trump’s efficacy as a political kingmaker and when chatter about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s White House campaign still had plenty of promise.
Since then, Vance has been one of the most vocal Trump allies in the Senate. He led the charge against a Trump-condemned bipartisan border agreement and slammed the Manhattan judge that oversaw Trump’s trial on hush money charges.
“I think that it actually makes him more relatable and even a better VP pick than others because he was a little Trump-skeptical early on,” Kirk told USA TODAY. “He became a believer as he saw that President Trump implemented policies and decisions that were consistent with what he believes in. I think it’s more genuine and real.”
It also became a fundamental part of his story as he entered Washington, often cited by both Democrats and moderate Republicans as a shrewd power play that’s evidence of a willingness to debase himself in pursuit of power.
“I do wonder, how do you make that decision? How can you go over a line so stark as that – and for what?” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said of Vance in a biography written by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins.
“It’s not like you’re going to be famous and powerful because you became a United States senator. It’s like, really? You sell yourself so cheap?”
The end of ‘neoconservatives’
If Vance is chosen as vice president, he would bring a radically different philosophy to the office than former Vice President Mike Pence, who during Trump’s first term was guided by his evangelical Christianity but eschewed the rising populism in his party.Pence instead hued more closely to a traditional Reagan-style conservative in his domestic and foreign policy stances.
Earlier this month, Vance got on stage at Turning Point Action’s “People’s Convention” in Detroit and spoke about what he says conservatives want out of the 2024 elections.
“We are for an American nation that is built by American people that employs American workers,” he said. “We’ve got to be self-sufficient. Make our stuff and do it for our own people.”
That’s the succinct version of an ideology Vance has outlined in the years since he re-emerged as a leader of the new conservative movement: That the so-called “rules-based international order” – marked by international cooperation, mutual defense and open markets – has been designed to benefit global elites and hurt working people, resulting in an America in decline.
That puts him at odds with most of the Senate’s old guard, both liberal and conservative, that had their own fierce debates over foreign policy during the post-9/11 era while maintaining that the United States plays a crucial role in defending democracy around the world.
In February, after the Senate passed the foreign aid bill for the first time, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told USA TODAY that he knows “the majority of Republicans these days are in an isolationist place” and raised concerns that those members of the party “need to not just wet their finger and put it in the air and see which way the wind's blowing.”
“There are issues that come along where the views of the public at a given time may be inconsistent with what the right thing to do for the country is,” McConnell added.
McConnell has continued to indirectly skewer Vance and his Senate allies, who he says are suffering from “the delusion that regional conflicts have no consequences” for the U.S.
Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation who had a similar ideological transformation in recent years, said his and Vance’s ideas aren’t new – they last wielded significant power in the U.S. in the years between the two World Wars – but they’ve been stifled by the “neoconservatives” that have been dominant in Washington for the last several decades.
“What’s happening is that their ascendancy is over,” Roberts said. “So we get the opportunity – President Trump, Sen. Vance, Heritage, many aligned organizations and elected officials – to integrate all of those ideas into a new movement.”
One of the things that separates that movement from neoconservatives, Roberts said, is that it is “less wary of government power” in certain instances – for example, taxing university endowments “because of their wokeness.”
The senator often says “the culture war is class warfare,” and that’s similarly reflected in his policies, from proposals that would prohibit mask mandates on transportation, criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, or ban all federal “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.
That philosophy also extends to immigration. Vance told that same crowd in Detroit that taxes, the job market, the healthcare system and housing costs would all be improved if they “deport every single illegal alien that came to this country under Joe Biden’s regime.” He contrasted that, in the interview with Douthat, with a CEO complaining about having to pay American workers more when immigrant workers are scarce.
Vance has also defended Trump’s more illiberal tendencies: He claims that the “the basic democratic will of America was obstructed” in the 2020 presidential election; that he would have pushed for alternate slates of electors to be considered on Jan. 6, 2021; and that Trump should replace mid-level bureaucrats in the federal government with “our people” and ignore the courts if they try to stop it.
Unlike the most prominent right-wing provocateurs in the House, Vance has pursued some bipartisan legislation that aligns with his populist worldview, such as a rail safety bill with Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, in the wake of the East Palestine train derailment in their home state; a bill with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to claw back executive salaries if their banks fail; and a bill with Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., to expand low-cost internet access.
Still, the rise of the new right is a prospect that has surprised and concerned their political opponents.
“I don’t even think it’s called the right wing. It’s more like the reactionary nationalist wing, because there’s nothing conservative about J.D. Vance,” said Chris Redfern, former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. “Politics doesn’t drive or define J.D. Vance. Opportunity does, sheer power.”
Mabel Berezin, a professor of sociology at Cornell University, says Vance and his ilk have clearly tapped into something that resonates with conservative voters who feel alienated from the changing world around them.
People like Vance have identified a constituency and “they will be able to play that constituency long after Trump,” she said. “They don’t come out of the blue. There is an audience for what they have to say.”
Vance may have been in the minority among Republicans that day in April as he argued against further funding for Ukraine. But support for his viewpoint had been slowly growing – it took months for Congress to approve the aid, due in part to a coordinated effort led by Vance to rally GOP opposition.
In one instance, he spoke to the House’s Republican Study Committee headed by Rep. Kevin Hern, R-Okla. and populated, in part, by the conservative bomb-throwers that have upended business in the lower chamber.
“His thoughts he shared with us were very spot on,” Hern told USA TODAY. “He has a great grasp on what the base really wants to see.”
Vance’s allies say it’s an indicator that his philosophies may not be in the GOP’s minority for long.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., another one of the Senate’s most conservative members, said Vance’s perspective is “a little different, but it’s always expressed clearly and with solid support.”
“When he speaks in conference, behind closed doors,” she said, “everybody listens.”
