JOHN MATISONN: JD Vance, the skilful apprentice, is everything Trump pretends to be

In the long run we may look on the nomination of JD Vance, Donald Trump’s candidate for vice-president, as even more consequential than another Trump term in fundamentally changing US politics. 

If the Trump-Vance ticket wins in November, which seems increasingly likely given the Democrats’ unresolved panic about President Joe Biden’s age, Vance at age 39 becomes the face of the Republican Party of the future. Trump can serve only one more presidential term. Second-term presidents usually get only two or three years before being considered a “lame duck”.

With such an impressive biography, some have already dubbed Vance the Republican Party’s Barack Obama. His credentials are everything Trump pretends to be. The son of an impoverished mother addicted to heroin, Vance is a self-made millionaire investor, while some biographers have argued Trump would be richer today if he had passively invested his large inheritance. 

From tax returns that are public, Trump’s biggest earned income came not from entrepreneurial ventures but from his starring role in the reality TV show The Apprentice. In that show he played the part of a brilliant entrepreneur, but the audience is left unaware of how much of the footage is reshot to burnish his air of authority. 

Trump boasts about the high sales of his books but they were ghost written, and some of his biographers even question whether he read them. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, catapulted him to national attention. It was described as the book that explained the uncanny success of Trump’s brand of politics. Those politics include rejecting international trade agreements and foreign wars, which have left communities such as his impoverished cesspools of drug addiction, poverty and domestic violence after factories closed in the face of outsourcing to Asia.

Though Trump in office referred to “my generals”, he never served in the military; Vance is a bemedalled military veteran who served in Iraq, though his main job was as a combat reporter. He was a cum laude student at Ohio State University before Yale; Trump was an average student at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, at a time when the school was not as highly regarded as it became. 

To pick Vance, Trump had to see past some of the harshest comments ever made about him. Only seven years ago Vance called himself “a never-Trump guy” and said Trump was “a moral disaster”, a “total fraud” and “reprehensible”. Also, “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America.  

In 2016 he wrote to a friend: “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.” Vance also liked tweets that said Trump committed “serial sexual assault” and called him “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs”. In 2016, refusing to vote for Trump; he contemplated voting for Hillary Clinton before choosing an independent.

Yet Vance’s best seller, Hillbilly Elegy, is widely regarded as one of the best books to explain the surprising success of “Trumpism”, a set of views that conflicts with traditional Republican ideology and has overwhelmed the party establishment.  

Trump’s choice of Vance has sealed the demise of the party of Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. Hillbilly Elegy highlights the consequences of the free trade agreements Trump abhors. Vance describes a childhood of grinding poverty and decay, saved only by the fervent resolve of his grandmother to push him forward. 

Under Trump the Republican Party has shifted from the party of the conservative, wealthier establishment, losing suburbia while winning over the working class. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has come to identify ever more strongly with a professional suburban elite as it lost support among the white working class. Old-style Republicans would have been shocked at this week’s Republican convention to hear the Teamster Union president on stage attacking the bosses and backing unions that support minimum wages. 

As a senator, Vance was consistent in supporting moves to revive America’s industries. He called Biden’s 2022 Chips & Science Act, aimed at boosting domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing so the US can better compete with China and other countries, a “great piece of legislation”. 

Vance held elected office for only two years before being tapped for vice-president. His age gives him plenty of time to shadow Trump. His appeal among blue-collar workers could be an important asset to Trump in the rust belt swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where fewer than 100,000 votes could decide the election.

A Trump-Vance administration would change US policy on the Ukraine war quickly. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance has said. Trump is likely to push for an early peace agreement in which Ukraine concedes most of the territory it has lost on the battlefield. 

For SA, the Trump-Vance ticket is unlikely to be good. Vance is likely to be all-in with Trump on neglecting Africa, a sharp change from Biden, who retains a fond hope for the democratic SA of Nelson Mandela as well as a global vision that sees Southern Africa as important strategically to at least counterbalance the influence of China and Russia where it can. 

Biden favours the African Growth & Opportunity Act as long as the political price is manageable. In a Trump-Vance administration, with congressional Republicans angry at SA’s Russian-Chinese military exercises and Russian friendship, the White House is likely to be less tolerant of SA’s actions against Israel. 

Vance is a critic of the financial sector, corporate monopolies, free trade, global intervention and illegal immigration. He has kind words for organised labour and for industrial policy, and joined progressive icons such as senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, in efforts to rein in Wall Street.  

Reagan and Bush’s party stood for religious conservatism, free market capitalism and hawkish internationalism. Trump and Vance have kept only the religious conservatism. They have reversed course on free trade, adopted protectionism to sustain local manufacture and oppose US support for Ukraine. 

Vance’s debate against vice-president Kamala Harris will be must-watch television. She is an experienced debater. As a former prosecutor she has a style that pulls no punches, but Vance will be formidable on his feet. One thing they have in common is Indian blood in their families. Harris’ father was Indian, and Vance’s wife, Usha, is a successful Yale-educated attorney and daughter of Indian immigrant parents. 

Vance has assured the public he would not have done as vice-president Mike Pence did in 2020 and accepted the certification of the presidential election in his role as president of the Senate. He is Trump’s latest, more loyal apprentice. 

• Matisonn was a foreign correspondent in Washington DC for six years. He is author of ‘Cyril’s Choices, An Agenda for Reform’.