The “race to the bottom” in Republican politics in recent months has been difficult to watch. One GOP official after another, desperate to impress Donald Trump and ingratiate themselves to the former president’s team, went to cringeworthy lengths in the hopes of improving their odds of becoming the former president’s new running mate.
One candidate, however, was especially brazen in abandoning any sense of shame or self-respect.
In February, for example, Sen. JD Vance publicly suggested that presidents should be willing to disregard Supreme Court rulings they deem “illegitimate,” adding that he would’ve rejected the 2020 election results on Jan. 6 if he’d been vice president at the time.
Soon after, the Ohio Republican said, in reference to the Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol, “I’m truly skeptical that Mike Pence’s life was ever in danger.” In a separate interview around the same time, Vance also said that he planned to accept the 2024 election results, but only if they met the Ohio Republican’s undefined standards. The senator then tried to defend Trump’s Jan. 6 efforts in a way that was widely panned as “ridiculous.”
Remarking on the intraparty competition last month, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote: “To date, Vance has arguably demeaned himself the most. … If sycophancy is the measure, Vance is clearly the leading contestant.”
The party’s presumptive presidential nominee apparently came to the same conclusion. My MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim reported:
Donald Trump has picked Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate, a decision that would potentially elevate a novice lawmaker to the position of the second-most powerful person in the United States.
There’s no great mystery as to how Vance excelled as a vice presidential contender: The Ohioan is a partisan attack dog with deep ties to deep pockets. Indeed, the senator’s career included a stint in the venture capital sector, and it’s likely that Trump is eager to exploit those ties to boost his fundraising. As the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance might also be positioned to help the Republican ticket target voters in key Midwestern battleground states.
There are plenty of downsides for Vance — after just a year and a half in elected office, he has no accomplishments to speak of, and he’s the least experienced vice presidential nominee for either party in nearly nine decades — but those aren’t the kind of concerns that bother the former president.
What Trump does care about is sycophantic support, and on that front, Vance is a recent convert.
As a Washington Post report noted last week, during Trump’s 2016 candidacy, Vance called himself “a Never Trump guy” and said he didn’t vote for him in 2016. The same year, Vance wrote, “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” The Post’s article added:
Vance also sent a message that year to his law school roommate, Josh McLaurin, that McLaurin has recounted publicly. In it, Vance said he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” according to a screenshot McLaurin shared on social media in 2022 when Vance was running for Senate in Ohio.
In 2016, Vance also wrote a piece for The Atlantic, which argued, “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
The future senator added at the time, “What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. … He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”
We’ll never know for sure whether Vance underwent an ideological metamorphosis for the sake of political convenience, or because of a sincere conversion to MAGAism. Either way, one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics from eight years ago is now his 2024 running mate.
