JD Vance is Still a Beta
Revisiting a 2024 take
I’m in Ottawa tomorrow at Octopus Books doing a reading for my novel Colossus. If you’re in the area, come out! And I’ll be at Unnameable Books on Friday, June 19th in Brooklyn, reading from Colossus as well. I’ll be joined by several other excellent writers. The extravaganza kicks off at 7 p.m.
Not everything I write, naturally, ages well. In the summer of 2024, I became briefly bullish about the prospect of Tim Walz on the Democratic ticket. I thought Walz, the governor of Minnesota, would be a tough left-populist in the mold of Paul Wellstone, the liberal conscience of the Senate who died, tragically, in a plane crash. Wellstone was, in addition to being a genuine progressive and successful a political organizer, a jock; he won a wrestling scholarship to the University of North Carolina and went undefeated in the ACC. In an era when Democrats seem to be bleeding the support of working-class men, the Wellstone spirit is one worth recapturing. And Walz, progressive Minnesotan and veteran and former football coach, seemed to offer Kamala Harris a real political weapon in the home stretch against Donald Trump. Instead, he came under fire for exaggerating his military experience and appeared passive, even overwhelmed, in his televised debate against JD Vance. The Coach Walz persona was shtick that never quite landed. The failure of 2024, ultimately, lay with Harris and the senile Joe Biden, but I can admit I was wrong about Walz: he wasn’t much of an asset after all.
With Vance, I’ll stick to my guns. In 2024, I questioned the wisdom of Trump adding him to the ticket. He was a political underperformer in his 2022 Senate race and I was not impressed when I sae him speak at the 2024 Republican National Convention. I even called him a beta, comparing him unfavorably to Trump who remains, for all his catastrophic failures, an alpha to his supporters. Vance, to me, seemed like a squishy, warmed-over keyboard warrior trying far too hard to be a MAGA brawler. Vance sounded and acted like what he was: a formerly liberal pundit who wrote a middling memoir and pivoted rightward as it became obvious he was never going to have a political career in his native Ohio if he ran as a Democrat. The JD Vance of 2002 or even 2012 might have campaigned as a Democrat for Senate, but he understood, by the 2020s, the only path to power was seizing the Republican nomination. To do that, he’d have to grovel to Trump, his family, and the ultra-rich. Donald Jr. and Peter Thiel, together, made the quondam idol of the coastal liberal set—the earnest young man who could explain MAGA to Manhattan and Marin County—the potential successor to Trump himself. Vance, to his credit, played the inside game very well.
But one wonders, in 2026, whether becoming the Republican vice president was really the booby prize. Trump is deeply unpopular, and he’ll never again near the highs of 2024 and early 2025. His power to inflict damage remains; his actual grip on the country, however, loosens by the day. As I wrote, to much backlash, in 2024, the United States is too big for fascism, and if it ever Happens Here in this byzantine federalist republic, it won’t be because we elected an incompetent reality TV star with a child’s attention span. The real fascist will know what he’s doing. In the meantime, Trump will confront a Democratic House next year and maybe, just maybe, a Democratic Senate. At that point, he’ll have nothing left but executive orders, the sort that can be wiped away by the next president. He can always start another war. Trump promises, if nothing else, more chaos in his final years.
Vance is still the favorite to be the Republican nominee in 2028. That doesn’t mean, however, many other Republicans would trade places with him right now. That doesn’t mean the road ahead isn’t imperiled.
