Vice President Vance Would Be the Worst of All Worlds

AP Photo/Jeff Dean.

It would at the very least be fitting if Donald Trump tapped Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate.

After all, if we are, as many have supposed, living in the worst timeline imaginable, it would follow that Vice President Vance would be on deck.

His ascension would be the worst of all worlds: Bad for conservatives on policy, bad for the country, and, even if none of that matters to the Republican standard bearer, bad for Trump politically.

On the first point: There is ample reason to question if Vance is a conservative in any traditional sense of the word.

In an interview only just preceding his entrance into the 2022 Ohio Senate race, Vance explained that he has always tended to be more conservative on cultural issues and less conservative on economic ones.

This summary holds in some ways, though not in others. It’s true that in 2019, Vance identified far-left Senators Bernie Sanders (D-VT) — a self-proclaimed socialist — and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) as two of his favorite candidates in the Democratic presidential primary, bizarrely asserting that they were less “crazy” on cultural issues and less “likely to start a stupid war.” It’s true that he criticized the GOP’s 2017 tax cut signed into law by Trump. And it’s true that he is opposed to right-to-work laws and a free market of labor.

But has he always been a cultural conservative? In 2016, Vance contrasted the “cynical flavor” of the Republican National Convention with the Democrats’ “celebration of America’s promise” and was among the chorus of critics myopically focused on picking apart Trump’s promise to build a wall along the United States’ southern border with Mexico.

Now, Vance calls securing that same border his number-one priority, but he was dismissive of the issue eight years ago. “I don’t think if you build a great Mexican wall, all of a sudden all of these steel mill jobs are going to come back to southern Ohio,” he argued in one interview in which he charged Trump with selling fool’s gold. “It at least gives people something to latch on to. They’re looking for an explanation for why their communities are struggling in a lot of ways, and Trump gives them a reason, even if it’s not the right reason.”

In fact, there are reasons to doubt even now that he is the social conservative he says he is. Vance recently came out in favor of open access to the abortion pill mifepristone and has pulled himself in line with Trump’s own positioning on national abortion restrictions.

Worse yet, on foreign policy, Vance sounds more like a Code Pink protester than a Reaganite Republican intent on achieving peace through strength. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he declared just days before the Russians invaded it. And in an embarrassing moment at the National Conservatism Conference this week, Vance wondered aloud what “the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon” would be. “Maybe Pakistan?” he offered, apparently unaware that it has had nuclear weapons since 1998.

Those with the burden of being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office don’t have the luxury of being so proudly careless and ignorant.

If you’re a conservative, then you necessarily believe that Vance would serve the country poorly as both an influence on a second Trump administration and as an heir apparent. He’s a tax-and-spend fiscal liberal with an inconsistent record on social issues, and an extremely limited conception of the United States’ role in the world. If he were running with a “D” next to his name, Republicans would rightly excoriate him.

It’s a matter of character as well as policy. Vance basked in progressive praise during Trump’s first campaign and in the early days of his presidency, repeatedly calling Trump’s own character into question.

The Ohioan compared Trump to Adolf Hitler , made accusations of serial sexual assault, and threw around adjectives like “reprehensible.”

“What percentage of the American population has @RealDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” asked Vance in one striking tweet.

And yet once he decided that he was going to run for office, Vance began showering Trump with praise and running a campaign explicitly designed to appeal to Trump rather than Ohio’s voters.

“The reason Trump’s endorsement matters so much is that it signals to our voters who is on the right team,” he explained after securing it.

Politics is a dirty game that requires compromise, but there’s a line between prudence and selling your soul for power. Vance crossed it and never looked back.

Moreover, even though Vance would make for a particularly submissive right-hand man, Trump would be making a massive mistake by putting him on the ticket.

For one thing, there is zero evidence to suggest that Vance possesses any political talent attributable to his own individual skills. Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate primary two years ago on the basis of Trump’s endorsement alone. Just a couple of weeks prior to election day, before Trump lent Vance his support, he was languishing in a distant third behind Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel , neither of whom boasts an excess of charisma. If Vance didn’t have the chops to beat them on his own merit, what can he possibly hope to add to Trump’s campaign?

For another, does Trump really want to deal with ads featuring his own running mate comparing him to Hitler or accusing him of being a sexual criminal? What is there to gain from such a choice?

From every possible angle, Vance would be the worst plausible choice to be the Republican vice presidential nominee.

If we’re lucky, the old J.D. Vance might have done just enough to stop the new one.