Forget About It

People laughed when J. D. Vance blurted out his most memorable line in this month’s televised vice-presidential debate with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. It came when Walz turned to Vance and asked whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” said Vance.

It was a comical dodge, but it was also a prepared talking point. He’d made the same comment earlier in the evening when CBS moderator Norah O’Donnell asked him whether he would challenge this year’s election results. “Well, Norah, first of all, I think that we’re focused on the future,” he said, nonsensically, since the question was about the future.

It was also, like so much of what Vance has uttered on the campaign trail, not true. The man has focused selectively but relentlessly on the past—making sure his audiences understand all the ways Kamala Harris has failed over the last four years to use the vast, magisterial powers of the vice-presidency to transform the nation. Any graduate of high school civics could see the fallacy in his attack, but the ideological critique was weak, too, since his complaint is that she has not advocated for the dark, fear-driven politics of Trump and Vance. She’s failed to shut down immigration at the southern border, to whip inflation now (as Gerald Ford put it back in 1974, when the inflation rate was five times higher than it is today), and to smite America’s enemies. His very first mention of Harris in the debate was to complain that Iran “has received over $100 billion in unfrozen assets thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.”

And yet, watching the J. D. Vance Show, in which a Yale-educated lawyer combines his trained sophistry with new skills in demagoguery, certainly does focus my mind on the future. There’s going to come a time when Donald Trump stumbles off the stage and takes up permanent residence in a Trump mausoleum. Vance is getting in position to be the new leader of the Republican Party. If he’s elected vice president in November, he will almost surely be the presidential candidate in 2028. If he loses, he can spend the next four years carping away at the Harris administration from his seat in the U.S. Senate. Then he’ll be able to run for president next time without the drag of Donald Trump on the ticket.

In the latter scenario, you could imagine a few other ambitious Republicans who might think they can do what Vance is doing now, only better. The Senate will be a showroom not just for Vance but for Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might want to prove that his fizzle in the 2024 GOP primary could be turned into sizzle next time. It’s funny how these next-generation Republicans are all cut from the same cloth. Vance was born in 1984; the other four were born in the 1970s. They all have law degrees, a training that seems to have made them, as H. L. Mencken once described lawyers, “men specifically educated to discover legal excuses for dishonest, dishonorable and anti-social acts.”

And they all wear the mark of Trump, not Reagan. They appear to have exactly the same idea about the future of the Republican Party. It is to develop a dressed-up pseudo-populism that makes promises to the white working class while remaining cozy with the wealthy, especially tech tycoons. That means you offer the workers an aggressive politics that names the domestic enemies: immigrants, transgender Americans, childless women, those who supposedly hate god and guns, and the “woke left,” which is often code for black people. But at the same time, you need that part of the upper crust that will pour untold millions into the Republican cause, as Elon Musk, Timothy Mellon, Kenneth Griffin, Miriam Adelson, et al., are doing in the current election cycle.

Vance is the new centurion of this kind of phony populism. He serves as the immigrant-slandering mini-Trump on the stump. Then he tries to sound like a reasonable and civil Yale-educated lawyer in front of the wider TV audience. In neither role does it benefit him to discuss his ties to the billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel, who bankrolled his Senate campaign in Ohio. Or the way he admires the deep thoughts of the “neo-reactionary” wack job Curtis Yarvin and others on the so-called New Right. What you so often find in Silicon Valley-grown conservatism is an attitude about democratic politics that is either buffoonishly uncomprehending or actively hostile. Yarvin imagines the need for a “national CEO” with near-dictatorial powers—someone who can take charge of the federal government in more or less the way Musk took charge of Twitter, opening it up to the racists and conspiracists while driving it into the ground.

What is it with these Ivy League lawyers who pretend to be populists? Vance (Yale Law), Cotton (Harvard Law), Hawley (Yale Law), and DeSantis (Harvard Law) are trying to develop a Republican rhetoric that sets them apart from “the elites.” Perhaps Marco Rubio could emerge as the true man of the people by ridiculing their fancy degrees. After all, he is merely a product of the University of Florida and Miami Law School. But be careful: when Walz took a gentle jibe at Vance in his August speech before the Democratic National Convention—“I had twenty-four kids in my high school class, and none of them went to Yale”—Vance responded, “What a nasty personal attack.” A few weeks later, Vance was out on the campaign trail accusing Haitian immigrants of stealing pets, and consuming them, in Springfield, Ohio. Of Kamala Harris, he said: “Thanks to her open border, murders are up 81 percent in Springfield.” Did he learn anything at Yale Law School about not using slipshod evidence? Vance would have you believe that it was because of the Kamala Harris administration that reported murders increased in Springfield from five in 2021 to nine in 2023. As fact-checkers pointed out, the number was thirteen in 2018, at the mid-point of the Trump administration. So, in truth, murders dropped by 31 percent from the glory days of the Trump era. The murder rate was higher before the influx of Haitian immigrants.

But the goal of the Vance campaign is to prove that the apprentice can ape the dishonesty and meanness of the party’s current boss. A few years ago, as Vance began his ideological transitioning, he said in an interview with The Federalist: “I think the thing that we have to take away from the last ten years is that we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.” The transformation of the nation, he said, “will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class.” (This is what so much of the right’s fake populism boils down to.)

In associating with far-right extremists and adopting the language of Trump and his worst acolytes—Steve Miller, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr.—Vance is leaving his earlier persona far behind. It wasn’t so many years ago he wrote in his best-selling memoir that his fellow conservatives should reject misinformation and conspiracy thinking. “There is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy,” he wrote, specifically citing Alex Jones and other internet trolls. “You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society,” said Vance.

But that was a long time ago, and—like the Trump riot of January 6—what’s the point of even bringing it up? Sure, there was a time when he looked at Trump as one of those fringe figures, like Jones, polluting the political arena. But that was before his ambition for power kicked into overdrive. Now whenever he’s confronted with the worst of Trump’s record—or the best of his—the past is chucked right down the memory hole. He’s focused on the future.