True, the consequences that might so far be attributed to his agency can be placed on the darkest end of a spectrum of malignity. They include, in no particular order, helping facilitate the triumph of a murderous tyrant over the people of a free nation; the likely accelerated slaughter of thousands of Ukrainian innocents, and possibly more elsewhere; and the putative destruction of the most successful alliance in world history, one that has kept the peace in Europe and enhanced America’s power for 80 years.
But give him this: that’s a lot more in 45 days than the widely ridiculed Kamala Harris managed in four years.
Whether insulting nations whose men and women have fought and died in wars at America’s behest, visiting allies in the middle of election campaigns to denounce them for being undemocratic, publicly haranguing the leader of a country fighting for its survival for expressing insufficient gratitude to a president who has repeatedly sought to cut off all assistance to that country, Vance has been a ubiquitous agent provocateur, a kind of Mephistophelean Zelig, popping up at every critical moment in Donald Trump’s young second term to nourish and fertilise the president’s worst instincts.
But here’s the most impressive thing: Vance is a rare Renaissance man of protean versatility. When he’s not helping to engineer the transformation of the world’s greatest defender of freedom into a predator nation, the celebrated marine, author and hedge funder-turned-politician finds time to engage in lively debates on social media.
He has discoursed on the meaning of St Thomas Aquinas’s ordo amoris (Vance is that most dangerous thing in any walk of life: a fervid Catholic convert from equally fervid evangelical christianity), in the process tangling with a failed British politician-turned-podcaster; opined on the relative merits of dogs in a television show; and electronically brawled with an obscure X user by the name of “Jeff Computers” over a recent skiing trip, when Vance took his family to Vermont and was forced to find secure accommodation after having been hectored by protesters on the slopes.
It’s clear that Vance well understands the perils and opportunities of his post. The 49 men and one woman who have served as vice-president encompass perhaps the widest range of individual talent and significance of any category of humans anywhere.
It includes men of such obscurity that you will think I’m making them up: Hannibal Hamlin, Schuyler Colfax, Garret Hobart. It includes men who became famous only for their infamy - the crooked Spiro Agnew; the verbally artless Dan Quayle. But it also includes men of profound importance who changed history: Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon; Lyndon Johnson.
Vance knows where he wants to be on that roll call and thinks, with his undoubted brainpower, that establishing himself early on as a phosphorescent advocate of the new political order is the way to do it.
For one with such a complex intellectual past - as young as he is - this requires a colossal amount of artifice and dissimulation. He served alongside British soldiers in Iraq, so he knew exactly what he was doing and who his (domestic) audience was when this week he derided “random countries who haven’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. (With a keen appreciation for the differential public impact of a controversial statement and its subsequent retraction, he later insisted this was not directed at Britain or France. But since everyone knows they are the only countries to have even talked about deploying to Ukraine in numbers, the denial was about as credible as Vladimir Putin’s signature on a peace treaty.)
Once a fierce Trump critic and thoughtful chronicler of America’s social dystopia, Vance has become the president’s most vivid champion, pouring an intellectual cast over the base structure of Trumpism. It all amounts to the most opportunistic repositioning since Archbishop Thomas Cranmer tried to convince Queen Mary that he was a devout Catholic after all.
But in an age when tribalism trumps consistency, it works.
John McCain once said that the vice-president has only two jobs: to inquire daily as to the health of the president and to attend the funerals of third world dictators. This is not for Vance. He is too smart to risk the suspicions that might be aroused by asking after his boss’s health; and he seems keener to praise dictators while they’re alive than shed diplomatic crocodile tears for them when they’re gone. But he too has a dual mandate.
First, he must demonstrate absolute loyalty to the president with displays of sycophancy that might make even Trump blanch. That lay behind his verbal assault on Volodymyr Zelensky last week in front of the master. It also includes things such as this, from a recent X post: “The reason the failed establishment hates President Donald J Trump is because he chooses his words carefully,” he said of the man who has said wind turbines cause cancer and gave the world “Covfefe”.
His other task is to build his own case for the presidency. He is by no means assured of the Republican nomination in 2028. If things go well, Donald Trump Jr, his current friend, could easily swat him aside with dynastic appeal. If things go badly, Republicans might decide they want to distance themselves from Maga.
Vance surely thinks his advocacy of a revolutionary new world order will place him on an historic par with a predecessor like Teddy Roosevelt. Most of the rest of the world is praying that he will live in the collective memory as long as Schuyler Colfax.
The Times
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Say what you will about JD Vance but, six weeks into a job renowned, lampooned and even celebrated for its pointlessness, he is shaping up to be one of the most consequential vice-presidents in US history.