This article by David Frum sums him up perfectly. Apparently, Vance used to write for Frum a decade or so ago and was part of his inner circle who said he was modeling his career on Barack Obama. Frum thought he was a thoughtful “reforminst conservative” who “scorned culture-warring, valued expertise, endorsed social inclusion, rejected partisan rancor, and supported America’s important role in world security.” He thought he was sincere. And he wasn’t the only one:
Before the 2016 election, Vance’s future political path looked straightforward. He would await the expected Trump defeat, then emerge as a next-generation Republican savior: a candidate who could speak from his origins in Appalachia to the suburbs of Columbus, all while preserving his connections to his donors in Silicon Valley.
Trump’s Electoral College victory complicated the calculation. Some Democrats wooed Vance to change parties. Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod had Vance as a guest on his popular podcast the month after Vance’s Times article was published.
It turned out, as we know, that Vance was actually a very ambitious con man, as are so many who see the Republican party as nothing more than a collection of marks — which is correct. Frum watched as Vance morphed into a hard core wingnut whose “writing and speaking have edged angrier and uglier as he has gained success and prominence.” Yep.
In July 2021, Vance inveighed against the “childless left” who have made no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In November, he attacked fellow Ohioan LeBron James for criticizing Kyle Rittenhouse’s demeanor at his homicide trial: “Lebron is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Total coward.”
In a September podcast, he urged that Trump, upon his hypothetical restoration to office in 2024, purge the government of federal employees who aren’t loyal to him and defy the courts if the purge was held illegal.
When he got the endorsement recently of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who notoriously floated a conspiracy theory about California’s wildfires being started by space lasers associated with “Rothschild Inc.,” he tweeted: “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.”
The former supporter of the Iraq War has turned into one of the nation’s preeminent scorners of Ukraine’s fight for independence, declaring: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” At the end of last month, Vance even suggested that President Joe Biden was plotting intentionally to flood the U.S. with deadly fentanyl: “It does look intentional. It’s like Biden wants to punish people who didn’t vote for him.”
In April of this year, Vance tweeted: “Barack Obama is articulate but has never made a memorable speech. The reason is that his views are utterly conventional. He’s unable of saying anything outside of the elite consensus. He’s a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.” What prompted that highly personal outburst against Vance’s former role model and the magazine to which he himself had contributed his sharpest anti-Trump criticisms? A video clip of Obama speaking negatively of Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin.
I dunno. I read “Hillbilly Elegy” and could smell the smarmy phoniness a mile away. Why so many liberals were taken in I could never understand.
The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one…
So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?
He’s going to be Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee and if they win in November, Trump could easily expire on the golf course and Vance would end up as president of the United States.
It’s a terrifying prospect. This man has all the fascist instincts of Donald Trump but a much better brain. He clearly has no heart. And there is a great void where his soul should be.
Here’s JD before his current shape shift: