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It was inevitable that memes about JD Vance would surface the moment Pope Francis passed away. “It’s good to see you in better health,” the US vice-president told the pope on Sunday. The pontiff died on Monday.
As Donald Trump’s chief attack dog — though not yet his heir apparent — Vance is a prime target of ridicule on liberal social media. But he is also a master troller himself. Vance knows that the surest path to Maga hearts and Trump’s approval is to enrage liberals. The question is whether he means anything by it.
The answer is unclear. Vance has gone from being a never-Trumper who saw Trump as “America’s Hitler” to an arch-Trumper who sees his boss as part of God’s plan. That is as dramatic a political conversion as can happen. Rather than search for an intellectual key, Vance’s shift can be put down to ambition. The better question is whether there are any limits to his ambition. Judging by his performance so far, the answer is not really.
To say that Vance is disliked by liberals — European and American alike — would be an understatement. Of all the dates and venues, the vice-president set out his loathing for European liberal democracy on Valentine’s Day in Munich. His message was that multiculturalism and censorship were a bigger danger to Europe than Russia or China were. Since then, he has needled Europe on a weekly basis.
Whether it is deriding the continent’s defence capacity — a point with merit — or visiting Greenland uninvited and mocking Denmark, Vance has found his foreign foil of choice. Europeans play the same role in Maga’s worldview as virtue-signalling globalists do at home. What most enrages people is that Vance is quite good at it. He cannot be dismissed as stupid, like Pete Hegseth, Trump’s cartoonishly incompetent secretary of defence. Nor, like Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, can he be viewed as a prisoner of decisions he does not like. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Vance was the most articulate explainer of Trumpism — tariffs and all.
Unlike Elon Musk, who allows neo-Nazis to surface regularly on his X platform, Vance observes some rules of hygiene. His weakness with the Republican base is that he cannot escape the trappings of being an intellectual — the self-confessed frequenter of “a lot of weird rightwing subcultures”. His justification for xenophobia is to cite the Catholic ordo amoris (order of loves). It holds that you should first love God, then yourself, your family and neighbours. People from far away, especially immigrants, come last. An ailing Pope Francis felt strongly enough to implicitly rebuke Vance by citing the parable of the Good Samaritan, who helped a stranger in need.
A clear sign of a rightwing intellectual in the US is a conversion to Catholicism, which Vance did in 2019. But it offers little guidance to his thinking. Vance is the Trump administration’s main cheerleader for breaking up Big Tech companies like Meta. Yet he owes much of his wealth and political rise to Peter Thiel, one of the original “PayPal mafia” and the Silicon Valley right’s self-appointed thinker. Presumably Vance’s trustbusting does not extend to companies owned by Thiel or Musk.
The vice-president is married to a second-generation immigrant from India, Usha. Yet he stands for blood-and-soil nationalism. He is Trump’s chief scourge of supposed liberal virtue-signalling over the deportation battle and has falsely claimed that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the 29-year-old man who is contesting his banishment to an El Salvadoran jail, was “convicted” of being a gang member. Likewise, Vance is a champion of anti-elitism who graduated from Yale and worked in private equity. Few of these contradictions are easily resolved. But they are a distraction from his most salient quality. Vance will say and do what it takes to be Trump’s successor.
It is also misleading to compare him to Dick Cheney, as many are doing. Cheney was de facto co-president during George W Bush’s first term. He set the agenda. Trump, on the other hand, makes policy alone and on the fly. Vance then rationalises it. Yet he clearly relishes playing his worst self. The moment European dislike turned into loathing was when Vance tore into Volodymyr Zelenskyy in their Oval Office encounter in late February. “Have you said thank you once?” Vance asked Ukraine’s leader. There was a zeal to Vance’s manner that triggered a lot of people. As trolling, Vance’s tactics work. In terms of governing, they are pure vandalism.
edward.luce@ft.com
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