MILWAUKEE—In case you ever wonder when Ohio senator J.D. Vance won the rose as the Republican party’s nominee for vice president in 2024, it was two hours after the former president* got clipped in the ear on Saturday. Vance immediately leaped onto the electric Xwitter machine to express exactly what he knew his new master would love to hear.

“Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Oh, lordy. He’s come a long way from 2016. From Reuters:

“I go 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,” he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016. When his Hitler comment was first reported, in 2022, a spokesperson did not dispute it, but said it no longer represented Vance’s views. By the time Vance ran for Senate in 2022, his demonstrations of loyalty—which included downplaying the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters—were sufficient to score the former president’s coveted endorsement. Trump’s support helped put him over the top in a competitive primary.

Eight years ago, did J.D. Vance contribute to the attempt on his running mate’s life last weekend? Who can say? Someone should check on that.

Meanwhile, in a nice piece of rapid reaction, New York Times critic A.O. Scott pointed out the complicated history of Vance’s opportunism not long after his selection had been leaked on Monday.

This is partly because Vance is, in fact, a senator, and also, as of Monday, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential candidate. Much has been made of his political evolution over the past eight years, from never-Trump conservative to MAGA loyalist, from analyzing right-wing populism to embodying it. While Vance’s critics view this as brazen opportunism, he has explained his ideological shifts (including in a recent interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times) as a result of a twofold intellectual awakening: It turned out that Donald Trump wasn’t as bad as Vance had thought, and that American liberals were much worse.

(How does Ross Douthat go to the grocery store without being sold a bag of magic beans on the way?)

One thing we can say is that since he made his abrupt appearance on the American public stage by selling out his relatives for a meretricious bestseller and then selling his soul to venture vampire Peter Thiel, there have been few politicians in American history who’ve marked themselves as a complete ’ho faster than J.D. Vance. Not that he isn’t awful enough on his own during his brief respites from ass kissing. From The Washington Post:

When asked during a local interview whether abortion laws should include exceptions for rape and incest, Vance, a Republican, said he thinks “two wrong don’t make a right.” “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,” Vance told Spectrum News in Columbus on Wednesday.

That certainly explains why Douthat got all tingly.

Let us look at the choice pragmatically. Vance appears to bring nothing to the ticket that wasn’t there in the first place. Ohio is a safe Republican state in presidential elections for the foreseeable future. A white Ivy Leaguer from a Cincinnati suburb isn’t likely to win over many Independents, and he certainly has no appeal to minority voters. It would be interesting to listen to him defend his running mate’s immigration policies to his wife, who is Asian American. (Sidelight: The couple were introduced by Vance’s mentor at Yale Law, Tiger Mother Amy Chua. A marriage made in the op-eds!) I don’t see any electoral advantage gained by Vance’s selection on the ticket. So we look elsewhere and we notice two things.

1) As demonstrated by his immediate post-gunplay Xweet on Saturday, Vance knows his way below the belt. That’s a traditional target for veep candidates anyway. And his 2022 senatorial campaign was as rancid as they come. From Politico:

Vance, whom Trump ultimately endorsed in the primary, for a solid week in July kept using the term “childless” in an effort to insult his foes on the left. “We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too,” Vance told Tucker Carlson at the time. As examples of childless cat ladies, Vance pointed to Vice President Kamala Harris (who has stepchildren); progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the youngest woman in Congress; and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who announced a month later he and his husband had adopted infant twins.In a speech during his week of bashing Democrats without children, Vance proposed giving people with kids additional votes at the ballot box, arguing they have a greater stake in the future of the country because they’ve reproduced. When American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted that week in support of requiring masks in schools, Vance jumped in to slam her, too, as part of a group of “miserable, childless lefties.”

Easy there, ladies. One orderly line, please.

2) This one gets a bit weedy. It has become plain that one of the major themes of this wingding is that this past Saturday was the former president’s Road to Damascus moment, and that he now will be the unity candidate. This is, of course, absurd. But they’re plainly going to give it a real try. So here he is, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, picking an Ivy League author who once wondered if he was going to be “America’s Hitler.” Unity! Unity!

Or else.

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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

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