Photo by Drew Hallowell/Getty Images
Last week, in the palatial Andrew Mellon Auditorium on the National Mall, Washington DC, you could see our political age in miniature. A once-fringe right-wing website, Breitbart, was hosting a conference with the vice-president of the United States, JD Vance. Few institutions attract more contempt within the Maga world than the “fake news” of mainstream media. Trump’s lieutenants have spent a decade nurturing more supportive voices outside the traditional press. Now, the “alternative media” is usurping the mainstream.
Then there was the confluence of Maga and Big Tech. Onstage, Vance was flanked by screens bearing Meta’s logo. Other tech brands were splashed across the brochure. Republican suits fidgeted around a stall showcasing Meta’s AI-enabled smart glasses. A tech lobbyist told me that the administration was “extremely receptive” to their requests. You wonder why the oligarchs would pay for sponsorship when they can get into the Oval Office with a flattering enough gift. But money follows all forms of power. The “alternative” media, tech right and Maga movement now hungrily orbit each other. The age of Nick Clegg’s rosy-cheeked stewardship of Facebook is long gone.
But the most intriguing thing was what Vance said. He always sounds more like an adult than the man he serves. Vance told the American people they need “a little bit of patience” as they await more money in their pockets. That is rarely the tone you’ll hear in the Oval Office. Trump’s go-to line is that Americans are better off than they think, even as inflation persists and the effects of tariffs are only now becoming apparent.
At the same time, the courts are swatting away cases brought to break up tech monopolies such as those held by Meta and Google. Electricity prices are already rising to fuel data centres – a potential new anvil for populists to hammer the elites on. Trump has little sway over these court decisions, much as he would like to. But they don’t help his claim to stand for the working-class coalition that put him into office.
And here is the problem for the vice-president. The heir apparent is trapped: Vance must show public fealty
to Trump while also striking out on his own in order to win over voters in the primary, and the public at large ahead of the next presidential election. In 2028, Vance might face two opponents: the Democratic candidate and Donald Trump’s legacy.
Received wisdom in Washington has it that Trump will want a Republican successor to “lock in” his legacy – a Bush to his Reagan, a Major to his Thatcher. No doubt he does. But Trump seems to be losing interest in the vicious daily brawl that is inseparable from his political dominance. True, he suggested that the “seditious behaviour” of Democratic members of Congress is “punishable by death”. But where are the mass rallies? The once routine splurges of invective on the most mundane of issues? The irrepressible drive to win and be seen to win?
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Trump’s first meeting in the Oval Office with the socialist New York mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, was hyped by pundits as a volcanic clash between America’s captain of communism and captain of capitalism. What actually happened was a love-in. When asked whether he thought Mamdani was a jihadist – as the Republican candidate for New York governor, Elise Stefanik, claims – Trump demurred. He said the person standing beside him was a “very rational person” who wanted to make the city great again. Stefanik, and all the Republicans hoping to use Mamdani to paint the Democratic Party as unhinged before the midterms, were left holding their political strategy in their hands. Trump is more interested in his new ballroom and spraying the Syrian president with cologne. Vance can afford no such luxury.
Vance’s memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia, 2016’s Hillbilly Elegy, is written with righteous anger. You can feel it when he describes his drug-addicted mother who couldn’t sober up to raise him. You can feel it again in his unease at the thoughtless tones of his college peers at Yale for whom the Ivy League was simply a rite of passage. His wife, Usha, who coached him on which fork to use at Yale’s plush dinners, would later counsel him on how to deal with his rage. After 2016, Vance became a chief interpreter of Trump’s rise because he embodied the angry Americans who handed Trump the power to become the most consequential president of this century so far.
But the president is a leaky vessel for that populist anger. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal reveals a leader intertwined with the moneyed elites who were the very object of his supporters’ scorn. His base now suspects he’s giving up on his America First foreign policy as he back-slaps the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and meddles in wars from the Dnieper to the Jordan rivers. Vance is the natural tribune within his party for this mood. He has the sympathy of each faction in that auditorium: the new media, the tech right and the Maga movement. But he will be praying this fury is not turned on the White House before he makes his play for the top job.
[Further reading: Andrew Marr: Twilight in Kyiv]