The next four years in American politics can be characterized by both the vice president and his boss.
As Trump’s second administration takes office, much of the public’s attention remains focused on the president-elect’s cabinet picks — a large cast of billionaires, Fox News personalities, conspiracy theorists, sex-assault accusers, cronies, and hoodlums. Yet during the eventful and unprecedented transition period of Donald Trump’s recovery term, one key player has been notably quiet: Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. As speculation about the fate of various cabinet candidates has waned, Vance has largely confined himself to his favorite hobby of posting on social media, claiming, for example, that Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin weighed in on the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria or greeted Daniel Penney’s acquittal in the killing of New York subway passenger Jordan Neely with a suffocating reception.
While such talk on the radio seems odd for the incoming vice president, it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a troll without a portfolio in Trump’s second White House. Vance is poised to become the ultimate arbiter of politics and political discipline as his running mate seeks to avoid the mistakes of his first term and wreak vengeance on his distant political, legal and bureaucratic enemies. The choice of Vance was not a concession in the spirit of Mike Pence or Joe Biden, a strategic ally chosen as the tray of an important wing in the governing coalition that helped win the presidency. Rather, he is a Dick Cheney figure: a partner in government tasked with defining and implementing much of the executive branch’s agenda and ensuring ideological conformity throughout the administration.
It’s true that, unlike Cheney, Vance isn’t a veteran Beltway insider—at 40, he’s the first millennial on the presidential ticket, and he’s spent most of his adult experience as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not the politics of warriors in the burrows of the deep state. But his outsider credentials are something he shares with many senior figures in this Trump White House, from Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Ohio finance brother Vivek Ramaswamy. What Vance brings to his work is a deep commitment to the ideological side of the MAGA movement and a deft sense of effective popular messaging that was forged both during his time at Yale Law School and his tour as a war journalist in the US Marine Corps. . No less an authority than Donald Trump Jr., who aggressively lobbied his father to include Vance on the list, has marked him as the successor to the MAGA movement. “He’s a fighter,” the younger Trump announced at a late-campaign rally in Las Vegas. “And more importantly, what we have at JD is that we now have an America First bench — we now have people who can carry that torch, people who are not afraid to stand up to the tyranny of our government and to fight.”
Vance himself gave a clearer description of his intellectual character when he admitted in 2024 that he was “involved in a lot of weird right-wing subcultures,” a gamut that runs from the “neo-reactionary” former software engineer Curtis Yarvin to the rousing theocan Rod Dreher at the Claremont Institute. which preys on the deep state, where Michael Anton, is now nominated to run for Trump deputy secretary of state for policy — published the infamous Flight 93 manifesto, in which he promoted Trump’s 2016 candidacy among the faithful. The through line connecting this motley set of beliefs is exactly what Trump Jr. has labeled the MAGA faithful: an “America First” ideology that combines a protectionist trade agenda with an oligarch-friendly foreign policy non-alignment stance.
Vance brings to this set of intuitive political reflexes the rigor of a drive-intellectual and a passion for the defense of orthodoxy, and perhaps because he began his pundit career as a principled Never October, he now takes every opportunity to emphasize his credentials MAGA with zeal to convert. He led his side of the war in Syria against Rogin with the disclaimer that, “as President Trump said, this is not our fight and we should stay out of it.” On the campaign trail, he also floated a plan to end the Russia-Ukraine war — after famously telling Steve Bannon during the Senate race that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other” — that would consolidate Russia’s territorial gains by preventing Ukraine from NATO membership. Like his fellow neo-reactionaries, Vance has a condescending admiration for Hungary’s authoritarian President Viktor Orbán, which translates into a foreign policy driven by deference to the powerful abroad and a domestic agenda steeped in ethno-nationalist privilege and patriarchy. Much of Vance’s obsessed natalist worldview — including his endorsement of the Great Replacement Theory and his support for a national abortion ban — is pure Orbánism, as is his praise of Orbán’s ideological takeover of public universities as a brand of taxpayer empowerment.
Vance also telegraphed his Orbanist view in his speech at the Republican convention; Presenting himself to a national audience, he challenged the traditional liberal appreciation of America as an idea. Instead, he insisted, the United States is first and foremost “a nation. . . . But when we admit newcomers into our American family, we admit them on our terms. . . . Now, that’s not just an idea. It’s not just a set of principles … This is the homeland, this is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, they will fight for their home.” This call to arms belies the lazy notion that the revival of dogma MAGA-branded “America First” is somehow a pacifist creed; what JD Vance is fighting for above all is the power to exclude Americans of dubious parentage and breeding habits from their new Orbanist homeland to maximum government power, this agenda will also serve as the refrain of Donald Trump’s revenge in office.
