Susan Zakin
First, let's make note: In 2022, the Great Communicator Donald Trump called his new running mate J.D. Mandel - J.D. Vance's opponent in the Ohio Senate Race. Old guys do that. People do that. Nobody busted Trump. Need we say more?
You could make more of the slip. Names have been signifiers for J.C. Vance's shifting identity. It's not just that Vance had a bestseller (see Coastal Elite Elegy) that turned into a movie, a memoir about a "hillbilly" boy who grew up in the Rust Belt and ended up at Yale.
Take another note: Vance was brought up by his grandparents "Mamaw" and "Papaw" from Kentucky but they weren't poor, just drunk (Papaw) and violent (Mamaw). Vance's mother was unstable and a prescription drug addict who eventually turned to heroin. A typical American story, maybe just a bit ahead of its time.
As Mom shuffled through father figures for the cherubic-faced boy, J.D.'s surname changed: James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel, and finally Vance, the surname he and his Yale-educated wife took together.
"Cultural heroin"
This would not be worth noting if Vance had not changed identities as an adult, selling out his own intellect dramatically. Vance was accurate in his assessment of Trump early on. Later, he did a 180-degree turn, currying favor by, essentially, out-Trumping Trump, with vehement stands against aid to Ukraine, immigration, abortion - you know the drill. Yet not that long ago, he had said "My God, what an idiot" about his future running mate, as Politico reported in 2021.
“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, a clip used in both the new ads. “I never liked him.”
Both ads also feature a screenshot of a Vance tweet from October 2016. “My god what an idiot,” he wrote, referring to Trump.
Vance expressed a similar sentiment in other interviews and since-deleted tweets from that time, including publicly mulling the idea of supporting Hillary Clinton, calling Trump “noxious” and “reprehensible.”
Vance may have little in the way of a fixed compass, but he had Trump's number. In a piece for The Atlantic magazine, Vance, in his own words, called Trump "cultural heroin."
This, perhaps, was the most telling comparison, and certainly apt.
Chemistry!
Peter Thiel
What a difference a $15 million donation from proto-fascist tech bro Peter Thiel makes. Vance gained his Senate seat after the billionaire anted up the largest donation in the history of U.S. Senate campaigns. Along the way, he did a 180-degree switch that could only have taken place in our memory-less era.
Donald Trump, it's reported, has "chemistry" with Vance. Trump has compared the sycophantic Vance to Abraham Lincoln - the beard, no doubt, and the faux bootstrap narrative, only slightly less fictitious than Trump's. In reality, Trump, like all insecure arrivistes, is impressed by the movies, and Ron Howard made one of Vance's memoir. The chemistry seems to work both ways. In the photo above, the love seems real. Men fall into line behind alpha males, and, without going too far into armchair psychologizing, Vance, the shape-shifting, symbiotic narcissist seems to have finally found his father. Perhaps Trump will treat him better than he's treated his own dreadful children.
But what's in it for Trump? That's simple: The Donald smells money. And that's what could decide the fate of America. In his kick out the jams Detroit speech a few days ago, President Biden promised to tax billionaires. If Obama had backed Biden as the nominee in 2016, the whole scenario might be different. Donald Trump might still be in his grotesquely vulgar apartment, growing old and ignored.
But now? It might be too late.
Susan Zakin is the Journal's editor.