JD Vance's political views and how they have shifted in recent years

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is a one-time critic of former President Trump who has turned into a fierce defender. Geoff Bennett discussed Vance’s views and how they’ve shifted with David Weigel, a national political reporter for Semafor who’s covered JD Vance for years.

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Amna Nawaz: In the meantime, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is a one-time critic of former President Trump who’s turned into a fierce defender.

Geoff Bennett: Earlier today, I spoke with David Weigel.

He’s a national political reporter for Semafor who’s covered J.D. Vance for years.

No vice presidential nominee has had a more meteoric rise since Richard Nixon. Help us understand J.D. Vance’s political ascent.

David Weigel, Semafor: Yes.

Well, Vance literally wrote himself into history. He was a working-class kid from Ohio. Nobody disputes that, had a rough upbringing. He went to military, then to Ohio State, graduated in two years, went to Yale Law School, and while there was mentored into writing “Hillbilly Elegy,” which has sold, I think, at this point, selling more now, two million copies.

So a lot of Americans got to know him in 2016 as a Rust Belt working-class conservative who thought Donald Trump had the wrong prescriptions to save people like the ones he grew up with, that they were being misled by Donald Trump.

And he did evolve. And during the Trump presidency, the way he tells it is that the scales fell from his eyes. He started to see that what he was told about Trump were lies. At various points, he’s talked about breaks he had with the liberal consensus. So, the Kavanaugh nomination, he thought he was being railroaded. He thought attacks on Trump were unfair.

He ran for Senate in 2022 as an America first candidate, completely in line with Trump’s policies, successfully getting his endorsement and telling that conversion story, telling Republican voters who saw lots of ads of him bashing Trump on TV from 2016 that they could be like him. He was wrong. And he, on the road to Damascus, saw the light and supported Trump.

Geoff Bennett: So based on your reporting, is that conversion sincere? Because his critics point out that to go from comparing Donald Trump to Hitler to serving it — as his running mate, that that evolution is really craven and calculated.

David Weigel: Well, lucky for him, it’s a very common story and it’s one of the themes of the RNC this week.

He will be one of several speakers who say they were told lies about Donald Trump, then they saw him act in office, then they were converted to him. And even outside this convention, a refrain you hear from a lot of people and you have heard from Vance is that the media focuses on his tweets, focuses on the way he speaks, doesn’t focus on the results.

So, within the Republican Party, that’s a very safe place to be. Talking to Democrats about how they want to run against Vance, a lot of them think that’s a dead end. Saying that he is — is it helpful, is it going to be helpful in a debate maybe that he can be made to defend that and flip-flops?

Potentially. They’re more focused on the conservative record he had once he started running for office, including some disagreements with Donald Trump, some static with other members of the party, who didn’t want him as the nominee.

Geoff Bennett: His opposition to Ukraine aid has been a real feature of his time in the Senate. How rooted is his noninterventionist view, how rooted is that in his military experience?

David Weigel: It’s very rooted in his own military experience.

He enlists before he goes to college, serves in Iraq, and he comes away with a critique that Donald Trump adopts eventually too, which is that there are forever wars around the country — around world. There are nation-building exercises that George W. Bush and a lot of Democrats engaged in, and they made America weaker. They took resources away from the heartland.

You saw when he came to the floor yesterday, when he was joining the rest of the evening’s program, he comes on stage to Merle Haggard’s “America First,” which is an anti-Iraq War song. It’s about spending resources here and not over there.

And he has been consistent on that in a very short political career. He has anti-interventionist. He is a — has a different stance on Iran, like a lot of Republicans, but that is the biggest point of disagreement between him and a lot of Republicans.

And it was litigated in the primary in 2022, when the Ukraine war had just begun. Russia had just invaded. His position was he didn’t care. He didn’t care about Ukraine’s interests. It wasn’t worth spending American money there.

And that is a disagreement between him and a lot of Republicans who worry that, if Trump gets back in office — and I talked to a few yesterday — with this ticket, people around the world, Vladimir Putin will say, yes, we know what to expect from these guys. America’s going to pull out of its responsibilities around the world.

Geoff Bennett: Is the expectation that he would have more policy influence in the West Wing if they win, because Donald Trump is not as invested in policy as past presidents have been?

David Weigel: Well, a lot of people want to be writing policy for the Trump administration. That’s been one of the biggest arguments inside the party and from Democrats pushing outside.

So, Vance, for example, wrote the forward to the president of The Heritage Foundation’s upcoming book. The Heritage Foundation developed Project 2025. Vance is much more aligned with national conservatives, again, anti-interventionist, in favor of family formation, in favor of limiting abortion, basically getting back to sort of 1950s American norms and immigration norms even.

Those policies are pretty — now, he’s only been in politics for a little while, but those policies have a real pedigree. And he came up reading people, reading conservative writers who’ve already thought this stuff out who do want a policy role in the administration’s.

So the sort of people who were hoping that they could push a Trump administration to the right compared to what was in 2016, when he didn’t have — apart from his close circle, he didn’t — he was relying on the Paul Ryan Republican Party.

They do view this as a victory. The Paul Ryan Republican Party, the George Bush Republican Party, they’re not going to be in the room, they’re not going to be at the table. Who is going to be at the table? It is the anti-war national conservatives who have a completely different view of how you should spend money and where you should send troops.

Geoff Bennett: Those views extend to abortion. Vance opposes abortion rights even in the case of rape or incest, a position that differs from Donald Trump’s public stance.

He says abortion rights should be left to the states after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe.

David Weigel: On policy, they’d have a disagreement from how Vance ran for Senate. He said he was 100 percent pro-life. He has ameliorated that position a little bit in interviews since then and talked about, what’s realistic?

He’s supported Lindsey Graham’s 15-week national ban, but that’s probably not going to happen. What’s important, I think, is his intellectual framework for this. He’s called himself a natalist. He’s called himself — he has three kids. He talks about a lot. He’s criticized the left for what he calls the childless nature of the left.

He has argued in speeches and writing that the problem — one problem with the left in America — and that’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who are running the country right now, is that they’re prioritizing family planning, they’re prioritizing alternative lifestyles that are not traditional marriage with children, and that has been bad for America, same reason that you should limit abortion, that we should be encouraging, in his view, stricter policies that make it tougher to get divorced, to get an abortion, because look at his life.

He did not have a lot of advantages growing up, and look where he is now. He tells that story and sort of it universalizes it to the rest of the country. And that is something Democrats think they can argue against, because, in Ohio, where Vance won, there was a ballot initiative that enshrined abortion rights that Vance was against that won by I think 18 points.

Most people do not agree with that framework of how you need to bring the country back to kind of 1950s mores.

Geoff Bennett: This week, the country will be introduced to Vance’s family.

His wife, Usha, is an accomplished litigator. She clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a federal judge. The daughter of Indian immigrants, she grew up in a suburb of San Diego.

David Weigel: Vance met his wife, Usha, at Yale Law School. They have three kids and that’s been part of his story.

In his Senate campaign, if you look at even his advertising, it started out by talking about immigration, much more hard-edge, MAGA, America first stuff. It ended by emphasizing his family life. It ended by emphasizing look what he built in Ohio. Look what he was able to build himself.

It even comes up in “Hillbilly Elegy” before he would run for office. It was very central to him. His success meant that he was able to have a stable family, dogs running around the house, kids running around the House. And that has been — that is important to his story. That is also — keep in mind, if there’s — if he’s contrasted with Kamala Harris, it’s a story that they don’t mind telling.

Because some of Harris got married late in life. She’s the stepmother to Doug Emhoff’s kids from a previous marriage. Not so subtly, this is part — this is some of the argument about the choice facing America, that this is somebody who formed a traditional family, somebody with a different religion, different background. They came together and they have — they have had the American dream unfold for them.

That’s part of the Vance story. And this is a family that people, if they’re watching FOX News, they’re watching some of the family interviews he did or those TV ads, they know a little bit about them, but they will be the people most introduced to the country tonight, because a lot of people have read the book, but don’t know the family.

Geoff Bennett: David Weigel, thanks so much.

David Weigel: Yes.

Geoff Bennett: Appreciate it.