Trump’s His Own Attack Dog, So Vance Has to Bite Even Harder

J.D. Vance, a self-imprisoned man.
Photo: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Typically, vice-presidents of the United States protect the boss’s flanks and cater to the boss’s base. Veeps let the president be presidential, the calm and resolute leader of the nation, while taking on the “attack dog” role themselves, tending to the dirtier, more emotional work of pure partisan politics. Vice-presidents spend a lot of time at foreign funerals, of course, but also a lot of time at party fundraisers and second-tier campaign events around the country. When somebody needs to defend the boss against the other party or represent him to the party faithful, the veep often steps up. That’s why canine loyalty is essential: The veep is the almighty president’s sidekick, attuned to the master’s voice like the RCA dog.

J.D. Vance has two particular reasons to make loyalty his middle name. First, he has a short career in politics that was preceded by some of the nastiest remarks any Republican has ever uttered about Donald Trump, particularly during the mogul’s rise to power in 2016. Back then, Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler”; a “moral disaster”; a “villainous, doucey celeb”; a “total fraud”; an “idiot”; and “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” These comments have been forgiven but not forgotten. Second, his predecessor as Trump’s running mate and vice-president, Mike Pence, is regarded in MAGA-land as a Judas figure who sold Trump out when he needed him most, on January 6, 2021 (Vance, naturally, says he would have done exactly what the president wanted by refusing to confirm Joe Biden’s state-certified election).

So Vance must prove daily that is he Trump’s most devoted follower while proving to the other devoted followers that he is as fierce an advocate for the GOP and the MAGA movement as can be imagined. What makes this really difficult is that Donald Trump’s idea of being “presidential” is to surround himself with imperial pomp and wield maximum power against his enemies, not to hover above the bloody political fray as the leader of all the people. He’s his own attack dog, which means J.D. Vance must howl and snap and bite with greater ferocity than any of his predecessors. If he wants to survive to inherit Trump’s kingdom in 2028, he cannot allow anyone to outflank him on the MAGA right.

This dynamic became apparent again this week when Vance went out of his way to make excuses for a coterie of Young Republican tough guys who joyously traded racist, misogynist, antisemitic, and Hitler-fanboy chat messages, which were leaked to Politico. Most Republicans who addressed it deplored the messages and the chat group; the New York GOP went so far as to dissolve its YR chapter entirely over the fiasco. But J.D. Vance defended the vile comments as boyish folly, as The Hill reported:

“[T]he reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do…. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives.”

The “kids” were generally in their late 20s and 30s, with significant responsibilities in national, state, and local GOP politics. But it’s possible that Vance, who is extremely online and probably in closer touch with far-right discourse than anyone in his very conservative administration, saw the “vile group chat” (as the pro-Trump New York Post put it) as innocent fun.

Indeed, aside from his attack-dog role, Vance is notoriously involved with every extremist strain of MAGA activism. That was true even before he became veep, as Politico reported in March of last year:

Vance has emerged as the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young, edgy and elite conservatives trying to take the ideological revolution that began under Trump — including his overt embrace of nationalism, his hard-line stance on immigration, his vocal opposition of U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts like Ukraine and his overt skepticism toward certain liberal democratic principles — in an even more radical direction.

He has links to right-wing Christian activists via his espousal of a very traditionalist form of Catholicism that brought him into open conflict with the late Pope Francis. But his close friendship with the late Charlie Kirk (whose body he accompanied back home to Arizona after his assassination) showed his equally strong links to right-wing Evangelicals. Indeed, Vance’s immediate call for the exposure and firing of people who said uncharitable things about Kirk’s death online provides a pretty clear contrast with his benevolent attitude toward the Young Republican hate-texters.

Vance is especially tight with the Tech Bro faction that has played so prominent a role recently in Republican politics as donors. Before Trump became his political boss, he was the protégé of the eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who has lately taken to predicting that opponents of unregulated AI may represent the biblical Antichrist.

And the veep’s mission as an edgy ideological warrior was on display in February when he was dispatched to Munich to warn Europeans not to mess with the “free speech” rights of far-right groups like Germany’s AfD party. Vance’s own penchant for blood-and-soil nationalism has actually made him a natural if distant ally of European’s authoritarians.

Above all, it’s Vance’s very close personal friendship with Donald Trump Jr. that has solidified his position in MAGA-land and made him the obvious heir to Junior’s dad in what very much remains a cult of personality. So even the slightest relaxation of his pose as the Trumpiest of them all would be a double insult to father and son. Thus, there is nothing the 47th president can say or do that he won’t defend, often eagerly and profanely, up to and including Trump’s more notorious lies, ranging from the stolen election of 2020 to the pet-eating migrants of the 2024 campaign.

While it’s clear Vance has imprisoned himself in this role, it’s less clear whether there is some inner, hidden J.D. Vance that could spring to life if he does become president and is free of his bondage to his political creator. Not that many years ago, he was this sophisticated self-made man whose Hillbilly Elegy memoir was devoured by urban liberals eager to learn about Trump Country. He was married to a dazzling young Indian American lawyer and was enriching himself on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. To all appearances, he has successfully transformed himself into an angry apostle of red-against-blue America offering the pure Trump gospel in complete sentences. He may have passed the point of no return. But he can’t relax now; he must ride the tiger like the rest of us until at least 2029.

See All