‘Scared to Death’: GOP Security Hawks Slam Vance Selection

MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here – he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy.

By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.

Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side. What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.

While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who oversees military spending as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, told one associate, according to a person familiar with the exchange: “The Ukrainians better hurry up and win.”

Another influential congressional Republican simply told me about the Vance selection: “I’m scared to death.”

While he had it on before Trump announced his running mate, the Ukrainian flag pin on the lapel of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, neatly illustrated without the necessity of words the gulf between so much of the GOP and Vance on the war in Europe.

The Vance pick was a significant victory for the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who pushed in public and private for the Ohioan.

The younger Trump’s allies couldn’t help but gloat in the hours after the announcement. On Monday night, Tommy Hicks, a close friend of Trump’s son and former RNC co-chair, sent an email to Karl Rove, the former George W. Bush strategist, who had praised North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum as a potential running mate. “Karl – you fucked up,” Hicks wrote in the note, which has been forwarded to others who showed me, in the day since. “We will remember.”

With President Joe Biden still under pressure from his own party to withdraw from the race and Trump lifted after surviving an assassination attempt, high-ranking Republicans have never felt so optimistic this year about their prospects. That confidence, along with the selection of Vance, accelerated conversations here about who should fill Trump’s cabinet, the sort of discussions that usually begin taking place in the fall.

In a series of interviews, Republicans from the Reaganite wing openly urged Trump to counter Vance’s influence by appointing more hawkish national security officials.

After praising the former Marine’s political talent and up-from-poverty story — trumpeting the value he brings to the campaign — the lawmakers turned to governing.

“I would love to see more like-minded people in cabinet positions,” Sen Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told me, citing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), both hawks, as “Ernst-esque” picks.

After insisting that Trump believes in “peace through strength,” the Reagan credo, I asked Ernst if Vance does.

“He does because Trump does,” she shot back.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the second-ranking Senate Republican, extolled Vance’s talents as a political messenger and predicted his colleague would “wipe the floor” with Vice President Kamala Harris in their debate, while also turning from July to January.

“It would be good, as they think about populating their cabinet and these key agencies and positions, to make sure that all those voices within the Republican heritage when it comes to national security policy are heard,” Thune told me, citing the same names as Ernst.

When I wondered how ferocious the internal debates would be between Vance, Cotton and Pompeo, Thune, who’s running for Senate Republican Leader, acknowledged they’d be “very robust,” adding that Trump would surely delight in presiding over the Situation Room scrum. “He thrives on that,” he said of the former president.

The hawks are eager to install Pompeo at the Defense Department, see Cotton at the CIA or inside the White House and are supportive of Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) or Robert O’Brien, Trump’s first-term national security adviser, as Secretary of State. The fiercest clash may be over Ric Grenell, the troll-happy ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term who is widely thought to covet the State Department or National Security Adviser.

The loudest voice for maintaining the party’s traditional posture on national security also happens to be a talented Republican in-fighter, but outgoing Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell has little direct influence with Trump.

McConnell (R-Ky.) has been boasting in recent weeks about how his faction was on the march, citing the strong Senate majority for Ukraine aid, Speaker Mike Johnson’s hawkish turn on the issue and how every congressional Republican supporting the package emerged unscathed through the primary season.

Yet he had little to say about the Vance pick, only raising an eyebrow when I asked him about it immediately after it became public and declining to speak any further. For all his dedication to the Reaganite cause, McConnell is a party man first and was unwilling to distract from the unity of the week.

In a private session Tuesday with the International Republican Institute, an internationalist group founded in the Reagan era, McConnell walked attendees through history, reminding them that the party has long had brushes with isolationism. He cited one of Vance’s Ohio Senate predecessors, Robert A. Taft, as an illustration of how powerful the currents had been in the World War II era.

The ascension of Dwight Eisenhower, of course, steered Republicans away from Taftism but the party also changed because of another Midwesterner who went from isolationist to fervent internationalist: former Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg.

It was surely unintended, but what an irony of history that the Trump campaign announced the new ticket’s first campaign stop together would be this weekend in Vandenberg’s hometown: Grand Rapids.

Politicians, however, can turn both ways on foreign policy and the hawks should be sobered by the comments of another Trump vice presidential runner-up.

“We need to prioritize our national security with our national interest in how we make those decisions as opposed to pretend we can be everywhere doing everything,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told me.

I asked Rubio, who ran for president in 2016 as the beau ideal for so many Reaganites, if he still considered himself in that realist camp.

“I think the world has no doubt changed and I recognize that as I see it evolve,” he told me. “What’s happening in Europe is important, what could happen in the Pacific is even scarier.”

As for those Republicans calling for internal balance, or competition, with Vance, well, Rubio all but said pipe down.

Advisers, he said, exist to implement Trump’s decisions and Republicans aren’t “voting to surround the president with a bunch of people that are there to undermine the work.”

It was a reminder of Trump’s first term, when his more traditional cabinet and staff sought to limit his isolationist instincts.

Those internal battles will likely return should Trump reclaim the White House.

No less a dedicated Vance supporter than Donald Trump Jr. said the selection of the Ohioan represented a win but not the end of the internecine war.

“I don’t know if it ever ends, right?” Trump told me when I asked if he was ready to declare victory.

This time, though, the vice president won’t be a Reaganite like Mike Pence.