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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Noel King: Donald Trump opened the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last night. He is here tonight to show his courage, his defiance against somebody who tried to kill him. He appeared left ear wrapped in gauze alongside his newly chosen running mate. J.D. Vance, the 39-year-old senator from Ohio who is as famous for his critiques of Trump. I'm a never-Trump guy. I never liked him. As he is for having a movie made about his life and his mama. You want to be somebody or not? But these two guys have warmed to each other because Vance, we're told, has vision. What's that vision look like? It's coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
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--:-- Noel King: Explained. 2024 Explained. All right. So minutes after Donald Trump announced his running mate yesterday, Politico published 55 Things to Know About J.D. Vance by Ian Ward. Ian is a reporter who spent hours interviewing Vance for a profile that came to be titled, Is There Something More Radical Than MAGA? J.D. Vance is Dreaming It.
--:-- Ian Ward: Yeah, he was a Yale Law School graduate, a Marine veteran. He served briefly in Iraq as a public affairs officer. He was encouraged to write that memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, by his law school mentor. The book came out in 2016 and immediately became a sensation that hit the New York Times bestseller list. And it got taken up as a sort of Rosetta Stone for liberals who were trying to understand the disaffection of middle American blue-collar workers.
--:-- Ian Ward: Donald Trump, if nothing else, is relatable to the average working-class American because he speaks off the cuff. He's clearly unfiltered and unrehearsed. And there is something relatable about that, even if half of the things that he says don't make any sense or a quarter of the things that he says are offensive. And he became a sort of national celebrity very quickly for this book. You know, went on all the talk shows.
--:-- Ian Ward: I'm sitting here talking to Megyn Kelly. It was a memoir, so it told his life story. The political kernel of the book was basically that Appalachian Americans and a certain type of blue-collar worker suffered from a set of social pathologies. You know, typical tropes, sort of laziness, a lack of personal initiative that was the real root cause of a lot of their suffering, and that the responsibility for rectifying the situation of middle American workers rested with the workers themselves and the people in Appalachia.
--:-- Ian Ward: That government programs and social safety nets were not the way to lift these people out of poverty and deprivation, that they had to sort of bootstraps themselves up. So a very sort of typical old school conservative message. You've got to take care of business. You've got to go to school. You've got to get good grades to even have a chance. Mom was the best in her class. What's the point? I'm talking about a chance. You might not make it, but you sure as hell won't if you don't try.
--:-- Ian Ward: Why do you even care what I do? And so the news reporters are calling this guy and they're saying, we want to understand why white people voted for Donald Trump. And J.D. Vance is there to explain at the time, what does he think about Donald Trump? Yeah, he did not like Donald Trump. He famously in an essay for The Atlantic called Donald Trump, cultural heroin. This was in the middle of the opioid epidemic. And he said Trump offered the sort of blissful ignorance and short term gratification that heroin was providing to these middle American communities.
--:-- Ian Ward: He also famously in a text message, speculated that Trump could become quote, America's Hitler. That was not a public message. That was a message to a friend that later became public. But he expressed some really sincere concerns about Trump and what Trump was offering the type of people he had written about in his book.
--:-- Ian Ward: Vance reemerged on the national political scene in 2021 when he ran for United States Senate in Ohio. Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump's wall. They censor us. By that point, he had become a Trump acolyte and a Trump supporter. Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. And I asked folks not to judge me by based on what I said in 2016, because I've been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things and I regret them and I regret being wrong about the guy.
--:-- Ian Ward: I think that his explanation for this transformation is twofold. One, he says he came to see over Trump's first term that Trump was actually right on some of the policy positions that he cared about, most notably trade, immigration, economics, and cultural issues. The flip side is that he says he was sort of radicalized by the liberal reaction to Trump. You know, he had fallen in in these very elite liberal circles at that point. And he says, as he watched his liberal friends react to Trump and sort of go a little bit crazy as he sees it over what Trump was doing it radicalized him against the sort of vision of progressive liberalism that was dominant in those circles.
--:-- Ian Ward: There a term in right online discourse called red which is a meme sort of taken from the Matrix movie actually You take the blue pill. The story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. And this is a term that a lot of right-wingers use to describe their own radicalization, and Vance has described his own political journey in those terms, that somewhere between 2016 and 2021, he kind of took the red pill and came to this sort of more radical vision of American politics.
--:-- Ian Ward: I saw and realized something about the American elite and about my role in the American elite that took me just a while to figure out. Right. And I, you know, I was red pilled and frankly, there are a lot of people. So people might say like J.D. Vance is a flip flopper, but J.D. Vance is going to say, no, I just I just woke up.
--:-- Ian Ward: Yeah. And, you know, there's a compelling argument to be made that there's a pretty strong degree of continuity between the political vision that he laid out in Hillbilly Elegy and the political vision he continues to espouse. I mean, it's changed in substantive ways. Most notably, he's taken up what could be called sort of systemic critiques of American political economy, you know, whereas his book relied very heavily on sort of individual critiques and personal moral critiques.
--:-- Ian Ward: He's taken up structural ones. So he says, you know, the way the American economy disadvantages these people at a sort of global and national level, it doesn't just boil down to individual responsibility, but there is a sort of conservative core to that vision that has remained unchanged.
--:-- Ian Ward: Several people campaigned very publicly to be Trump's vice president. Tim Scott, North Dakota's Governor Doug Burgum, Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem, RIP Cricket, Marco Rubio in Florida. Why did Donald Trump pick J.D. Vance out of all of these people? I think what we do know is that J.D. Vance is very, very close with Donald Trump Jr. Donald Trump Jr. is a close personal friend of his. When I talked to Vance a couple of months ago, he said they text on a daily basis.
--:-- Ian Ward: And we do know that Donald Trump Jr. was lobbying very, very hard for his father to pick J.D. Vance. Explain to those watching why you think J.D. Vance is the best man to run with your father. Listen, I think he's lived the epitome of the American dream story. I think he's the guy that's capable of bringing that same success that he was able to have coming from nothing, coming from Appalachia and succeeding at a level that no one could possibly fathom.
--:-- Ian Ward: Also back in 2021 and 2022, when Vance was running for Senate, Donald Trump Jr. lobbied very hard to create the rapprochement between the two men. Their relationship had fallen out over some of Vance's critical comments, and Donald Trump Jr. brought them back together with the help of Peter Thiel, of course, who's J.D. Vance's former boss and mentor.
--:-- Ian Ward: This is a great person who I've really gotten to know. Yeah, he said some bad things about me, but that was before he knew me and then he fell in love. But that seems to have been one major factor. Another seems to be the political calculation, you know, picking Vance signals that Trump is taking this sort of new right, populist nationalist agenda very, very seriously.
--:-- Ian Ward: In his second term, you know, he received a lot of criticism from some circles for not going far enough in terms of implementing that agenda in his first term, and he seems to be signaling now that he's taking that seriously and that Vance will play a big part in enacting some of those policies.
--:-- Ian Ward: Unlike a lot of people who are talking about J.D. Vance right now, today, you actually spent considerable time with him for a big profile you did for Politico magazine. What can you tell us definitively about who J.D. Vance is and what he wants? There are a lot of Republican politicians in Washington who've taken up the Trumpian talking points and adopted the Trumpian rhetoric without thinking through a sort of comprehensive ideological or philosophical vision of what nationalist populist conservatism would look like.
--:-- Ian Ward: And J.D. Vance is not one of those people. This dude is an intellectual of a sort, and he thinks of politics in intellectual terms. He has a pretty coherent worldview and political philosophy that justify and reinforce a lot of Trump's policies, but also, you know, at times go even further than Trump on some things.
--:-- Ian Ward: So, you know, he's flip-flopped, but the vision he has now is pretty coherent and pretty sweeping, not always adhered to in political practice. But when you talk to him and have him explain why he's doing what he's doing, he can marshal a whole host of arguments to explain the nationalist populist project.
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--:-- Ian Ward: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork. If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time. I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there. I would love to know. Please email me, noelleatking.com.
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--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King. And we're back with Ian Ward, who chronicled J.D. Vance for Politico magazine. Ward and others identify Vance as a leading figure of the so-called new right. And Ian says the senator has some new right plans for America.
--:-- Ian Ward: J.D. Vance's vision has not always been articulated all that well publicly. But the vision he laid out to me and to other reporters begins with a critique. It's a critique of what he calls sort of liberal progressivism. The new right calls this sort of the regime or the cathedral at various points. But it's a vision fundamentally of progress.
--:-- Ian Ward: You know, the way that liberals think of progress in many respects is economic liberalization, technological innovation, and the relaxing of, you know, what appear to be oppressive social norms. That's a vision of progress. J.D. Vance thinks that's exactly wrong. He thinks that those things have led to a kind of regression in American life.
--:-- Ian Ward: He's grounded in a vision of populism that's very local, right? He says it's the vision of the country that he wants to see is a vision that would support the type of people he grew up with in Middletown, Ohio. He says he's seen that community hollowed out over the past 50 years by trade liberalization, which took jobs and manufacturing jobs overseas, the financialization of the economy, which benefited economic elites who own things like stocks and bonds and not working class people who have a financial stake in the older industrial economies.
--:-- Ian Ward: And also the liberalization of social norms, which he thinks, rightly or wrongly, have negatively impacted working-class people. And I worry a little bit that when people hear that word, the American dream, that phrase, their eyes sort of glaze over. Because the way that it's been taught to by so many establishment Republican politicians is that the American dream is the dream of Mitt Romney. It's private jets, it's fancy businesses, it's a lot of money, but that's not the American dream that most Americans actually occupy.
--:-- Ian Ward: They just want to live a good life in their own country. So what he wants to see is a return to the political economy and social economy that he believes will support those types of people. You know, that means protective trade measures to support American manufacturing jobs. That means a type of social welfare policy to support traditional families. That means a more aggressive posture towards China.
--:-- Ian Ward: You know, that's the vision of he wouldn't call it progress, I don't think, because I think he's skeptical of the whole idea of progress. But that's the vision of the country he has laid out.
--:-- Noel King: Let me ask you for some clarification on two things. The first thing is you mentioned social norms. J.D. Vance's belief that the liberalization of social norms has sent us down the wrong path. What are you talking about? What are we talking about when we talk about these these so-called liberal social norms?
--:-- Ian Ward: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty conventional Republican culture war issues. He has taken up the issue of increased acceptance of transgender people, abortion, of course. U.S. Senator J.D. Vance has introduced legislation that would federally ban gender-affirming care for minors. He is a recent Catholic convert. In fact, he converted to Catholicism in 2019 and has come out in favor of a 16-week abortion ban, much like Trump.
--:-- Ian Ward: He's moderated a bit on this issue in response to Trump's own moderation, but does believe in a 16-week federal ban. Another big hobby horse of his is the decline of the nuclear family. He thinks that American economic policy has not been conducive to the formation of traditional nuclear families, mother, father, three to four kids.
--:-- Ian Ward: The fact that we're not having enough babies, the fact that we're not having enough children is a crisis in this country. It's a crisis because it makes our media more miserable. It's a crisis because it doesn't give our leaders enough of an investment in the future of their country. And it's a crisis because we know that babies are good.
--:-- Ian Ward: He has advocated for what he calls family policy, which is a set of economic policies and social policies to promote family formation. Why can't we give resources to parents who tell us the only reason they're not having kids is because they can't afford it? Those are the kind of pillars of his social crusade.
--:-- Ian Ward: But he's also taken up things like mask mandates. He wants to ban mask mandates, DEI initiatives. He's introduced legislation to ban federal DEI initiatives. So traditional Republican culture war issues, where he diverges a bit from traditional Republicans on cultural issues, is that he sees them as the flip side of economic issues often.
--:-- Ian Ward: So he has this slogan he uses often. The culture war in this country is a class war. What he means by that is that he thinks that elite liberals have basically weaponized their own social norms as a means to reinforce their economic interests. One example he gives is hormones for transgender care.
--:-- Ian Ward: You know, he believes those are bad not only because they gender transition medicine, but because he believes big pharmaceutical corporations are in effect preying on vulnerable young people to pad their bottom lines by selling them expensive hormones right So he frames some of these economic issues in cultural terms and he frames cultural issues in economic terms.
--:-- Ian Ward: So that's where he's a bit different. Let me ask you to pull out one more thing. You mentioned social welfare for traditional families. I think people are going to hear that and they're going to be like, what does that look like? What does that look like?
--:-- Ian Ward: Yeah, that is a good question. We don't know a ton about what that would look like. Many conservatives have actually been looking towards Viktor Orban's government in Hungary, as an example of pro-family policy. You know, it's tax subsidies for having children. It's making primary education and daycare less expensive and more affordable. It's a sort of vaguely articulated vision at this point, but it's basically welfare programs to promote having families, getting married, settling down, having the sort of white picket fence traditional American life.
--:-- Noel King: Hmm. So you've mentioned this term a couple of times now, the new right. Today Explained did some reporting on the new right movement two years ago. Coming up on Today Explained, is the new right the future of conservatism, or are they the other F word? Fascists.
--:-- Ian Ward: How popular with ordinary Americans are these new right ideas? Like paying parents for each additional child they have, or giving them tax breaks for each additional child they have. Do people like this? I don't think we know yet. I mean, there's been some polling on discrete issues when they're presented as a coherent vision. I'm not sure how popular they will prove to be.
--:-- Ian Ward: That is what I personally am very curious about. By selecting Vance, Trump has put the new right on the ballot for the first time in a meaningful way. And I don't think we know yet how Americans are going to respond to that.
--:-- Ian Ward: I mean, I think as people dig into Vance's intellectual influences, his political background, his associations with the new right will come to the fore, and the vision that the new right has put forward will come to the fore.
--:-- Ian Ward: I think there's a certain new right aesthetic and the new right way of talking about American politics, which is not your grandfather's conservatism, right? They adopt a rhetoric of sort of almost a revolutionary rhetoric. They think that the project of post-war American conservatism grounded in sort of free market capitalism and foreign policy hawkishness has not only failed, but really harmed the people that Vance and others want to help.
--:-- Ian Ward: And he doesn't think just going backwards in time is going to be enough. They have a sort of revolutionary insurgency mentality where they're forging forward, right? They're not trying to go back. and traditionally political candidates who've adopted a sort of insurgent attitude have not done particularly well in american electoral politics so i think that is a potential liability um you know parties that do well generally emphasize stability uh and things like that and and vance's vision is not promised uh primarily on stability i mean he would say in the long term it has been the short term it is promised on a pretty radical upheaval to american life
--:-- Ian Ward: So I think it's a big question how voters will respond to that.
--:-- Noel King: All right. So J.D. Vance is an intellectual with vision, which makes him a very interesting character in Washington, D.C. If Donald Trump should win, J.D. Vance will be vice president. Donald Trump doesn't particularly like sharing anything, including the spotlight. So J.D. Vance may have a vision here, but as vice president, will he be able to deliver on any of this?
--:-- Ian Ward: Yeah, vice presidents famously get shunted to the side. Hey, Sue, did the president call? No. It's not a particularly coveted role in Washington. It tends to be highly ceremonial. You know, but different vice presidents have been able to exert different amounts of influence. I mean, think of Dick Cheney in the Bush White House.
--:-- Ian Ward: I think what we saw from the Trump term is that Trump's decision making depends in large part on who he's surrounded with and who he's listening to at any given time, right? He is a malleable political figure, to put it diplomatically. And having a figure like Vance in the room means that you have a committed advocate of the new right agenda in the room whenever Trump is making decisions.
--:-- Ian Ward: That is not a guarantee by any means the new right agenda will be enacted into law, but it at least means they will have a seat at the table and the person filling that seat will be one of their strongest advocates and most committed members.
--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Miles Bryan. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy and Matthew Collette. And it was fact-checked by Hadi Muagdi and Peter Balanon-Rosen. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's daughter are our engineers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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