Trump anoints his heir in a bid to extend his influence for decades to come

A shooter tried to end Donald Trump’s life on Saturday. On Monday, by
elevating J.D. Vance as his running mate, Trump has sought to extend his political influence for decades beyond his natural lifespan.

Vance is now Trump’s anointed political son and heir. He’s every bit as
iconoclastic and disruptive as Trump, and he mounts a more articulate case for Trump’s policies than the former president himself. And, at 39, Vance is only about half his age.

Many never-Trumpers have consoled themselves with the thought that even if Trump wins the November 5 election, he’s a four-year phenomenon that can be endured, an aberration before America returns to something like normal.

But by adopting Vance, Trump entrenches his own worldview, his politics, his policies and his loyalists at the top of the Republican Party for as long as Vance survives to carry them forward.

“His selection as the VP nominee consolidates the complete MAGA-fication of the Republican Party,” says a former chair of the Republican National Convention, Michael Steele, a traditional Republican who also served as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland.

“J.D. Vance is the younger, full-throated MAGA acolyte that Trump wanted to help him lead his movement,” Steele tells me. “More importantly, Vance will do what he is told, and he’s perfectly happy about that. After all, it got him the VP nomination.”

Illustration: Matt Golding

Vance famously wrote Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, a memoir that starkly illuminated the plight of the white working class in fly-over America.

It was a 2016 guidebook that introduced America’s uncomprehending urban elites to the despairing left-behinds who were in the process of turning to Trump. Not because they necessarily believed he’d fix the system but because they were confident he’d smash it.

Vance saw Trump’s allure and warned America against it. Trump, said Vance,
was “America’s Hitler”. In 2016, he said of Trump: “I think that he’s noxious
and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

The people of the abandoned American rust belt were in the grip of an opioid
crisis. Vance saw Trump not as a treatment but as an addiction just as destructive: “Cultural heroin” was what he called Trump.

But by 2020, Vance had changed his position and voted for Trump. Rather than warning Americans off Trump, he decided to lead them towards him. He’d decided to run for the Senate and wanted Trump’s endorsement. Trump was “the best president of my lifetime”.

The then-president ridiculed his newfound devotion: “J.D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad,” said Trump.

Steele’s interpretation: “J.D. is no hillbilly. We have watched since those highbrow days when he said Donald Trump ‘might be America’s Hitler’ his complete moral and political collapse. That perhaps is the most endearing quality for Trump: complete debasement of oneself for his benefit.”

Vance explained his conversion as being “red-pilled”, a reference to the perception-altering chemical in the plot of The Matrix movie, the revealer of painful reality. He’s said that Trump is the best hope for America’s working class.

Until now, Trump has been cohabiting with the Republican Party’s traditional
constituents. In his first term, he shared the White House with vice president Mike Pence, for example, an actual believer in quaintly old-fashioned Republican notions like respect for the US Constitution, the free market and restraint in government spending.

But by choosing Vance, a Trump populist, over a traditional Republican, Trump has slammed the door on the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. The takeover is complete.

Vance changed position to say that if he’d been vice president at the time of the 2020 election, he would not have certified the election result to validate Joe Biden’s victory. He would have done what Trump wanted, not what Pence did.

Vance is an unconventional choice for vice presidential candidate. A president conventionally chooses a running mate who brings an extra political constituency to the ticket. Young, black and untested Barack Obama picked old, white, well-known Joe Biden; old, white, well-known Biden picked a new woman of colour, Kamala Harris, and so on.

But Vance brings more of the same. He appeals to the same MAGA crowd, voters already committed to Trump. In other words, Trump is trusting everything to Trumpism, with a hubristic confidence that he doesn’t need the support of any constituency but his own existing one. If he’s wrong, history will judge Vance as Trump’s elegy.

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