When Vice-President J. D. Vance skipped this year’s 9/11 commemoration ceremony, in New York, and instead spent the day escorting Charlie Kirk’s casket from Utah to Arizona on Air Force Two, the decision seemed to make sense, both in terms of substance and in terms of spectacle. Kirk, of course, had just been murdered—a horrific act of political violence that set the country on edge. President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessor, has never shown much aptitude for serving as Mourner-in-Chief. “My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk,” a reporter said to Trump, on the White House lawn. “How are you holding up?” The President responded, “I think very good. And, by the way, you see all the trucks? They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.” So it fell to Vance, who actually was Kirk’s friend and appeared genuinely shaken by his death, to be the Administration’s chief eulogist.
Last year, when Trump selected Vance as his running mate—a long-shot pick engineered by a small circle of Republican Party insiders, including Kirk—it was in part because Vance was supposed to represent a break from the bygone bipartisan consensus often associated with 9/11 memorials: Bush-era neoconservatism, Clintonian neoliberalism, the forever wars. (In October, 2024, during an onstage interview with Kirk in North Carolina, Vance told the crowd, “Don’t reward the party of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris,” and also called Harris an “empty vessel” for “the prevailing ideas that are governing in Washington, D.C.,” including “that we should use our young people as cannon fodder for foreign military misadventures.”) Besides, any politician can show up at a September 11th ceremony, a ritual that members of both parties have observed for twenty-four years. Kirk’s death was a much fresher outrage, not yet twenty-four hours old. If Vance wanted to soothe the nation’s nerves, perhaps this seemed like a better way.
It soon became apparent that soothing the nation was not Vance’s top priority. “Unity, real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth,” Vance said on Monday, speaking into an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone mounted on a polished wooden desk. “There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination.” Kirk had idolized Rush Limbaugh, and one of his many jobs was hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show,” on the Salem Radio Network, every weekday afternoon. Now, five days after Kirk’s death, the show was going out live on radio stations around the country, and on YouTube. Guest host: J. D. Vance, broadcasting from the Vice-President’s Ceremonial Office.
On the accompanying video feed, Vance sat in a high-backed armchair in front of a gilded mirror. A chyron identified him as a “Longtime Friend of Charlie Kirk.” In the tradition of Limbaugh—and of all red-meat talk-show hosts since the demise of the monoculture—Vance seemed less interested in pastoring the nation than in preaching to the choir. He was also, presumably, thinking of his own political future. Kirk, a successful activist who was quickly turning into a martyr, commanded an audience that will be crucial to whoever wants to inherit the Trumpist movement in 2028. “I am desperate for our country to be united,” Vance said, with grim determination, planting two open palms on his desk. But “we can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.” “AMEN,” a YouTuber called American Dreamer commented in the live chat. “Yes!” YourLatexSpouse added. A user named stainofm1nd made the stakes more concrete: “JD VANCE 2028 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸.”
It’s hardly a novel observation that everything is mass media now, including politics. Anyone who didn’t understand this fact a decade ago was forced to grapple with it when Donald Trump, known for dishing about his sex life to the New York tabloids and playing himself in walk-on appearances on sitcoms such as “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” became the President of the United States. But the phenomenon has always been broader than Trump. Everyone in national politics—that is, everyone who wants to win—must be able to perform a version of authority and authenticity onscreen. This was true in the fifties and sixties, when the telegenic Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy beat the eggheaded Adlai Stevenson and the shifty-eyed Richard Nixon, respectively; it has become only more true with every passing year, as the time politicians spend mugging for the cameras has expanded to fill every minute they spend outside, and sometimes starts before they leave the house. Earlier in his career, Vance took what was once considered a more prestigious path to fame, by way of the best-seller list and the Aspen Ideas Festival. But he ended up more or less where Trump did—appearing on Fox News to discuss the great-replacement theory; telling a fringe podcaster that America was “in a late republican period,” and that, “if we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty, pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
A few weeks after Vance joined the Presidential ticket, the base briefly lost faith in him, not because of his inconsistent policy views, or his well-documented history of disloyalty to Trump, but because of his shakiness as a political performer—his apparent inability to get a laugh from a friendly crowd at a rally, or to conduct a normal human interaction in a donut shop. Vance outlasted his doubters, therefore, not by changing the substance of his views but by continuing to show up on camera and portray himself, more and more convincingly, as a relatable person. He hung out with the pro-Trump influencers the Nelk Boys, venting to them about the downsides of his son’s Pokémon phase. He spent the requisite three hours on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” praising a movie that he considered “extremely influential to my entire political world view.” (For those who weren’t watching the interview the moment it dropped, as I was: he meant “Boyz n the Hood,” the John Singleton classic from 1991.) In June, he sat with Theo Von, perhaps the least predictable interviewer this country has yet produced, who threw curveball after curveball—raising the possibility that Donald Trump was in the Epstein files, that the assault on Gaza was a genocide, and, in an inscrutable recurring riff, that Frederick Douglass was gay—and Vance hit them all, or at least fouled them off consistently enough to stay alive. On Monday afternoon, as he anchored “The Charlie Kirk Show” from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Vance completed the politics-as-talk-show singularity.
A billowing American flag filled the screen, and bagpipes played “Amazing Grace.” “Fear not,” a voice-over announcer said, as some slogans (“Big Gov Sucks”; “Warning: Does Not Play Well with Liberals”) flashed across the screen. “You’ve found the place for truth.” Vance’s first guest was Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and arguably the Administration’s chief ideologist. “The last message that Charlie sent me was—I think it was just the day before we lost him—was just that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “Blind rage is not a productive emotion. But focussed anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history.”
“Amen,” Vance said.