How many faces does JD Vance have? For one thing, he looks a lot different these days. Around the time the election denier first ran for Senate in Ohio, in 2022, he grew a beard, perhaps to cover up his decidedly childlike countenance. As rumors swirled this summer that Donald Trump would choose Vance as his running mate – replacing Mike Pence, who left the vice-presidency after a mob of angry Trump supporters tried to hang him – some wondered if maybe Vance would shave. Trump, it seems, doesn’t like beards, and prefers his underlings clean-shaven. And JD Vance is – has always been – willing to do just about anything to secure the approval of the powerful.
According to historian Gabriel Winant, Vance has spent much of his life clinging to a series of mentors, whom he has used for professional advancement before moving on from – and, ultimately, betraying. There was his grandmother, or “Meemaw”, the hardscrabble woman who raised him in rural Ohio – but whom he depicted as ignorant and ultimately culturally pathological in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There was his Yale Law School mentor Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and wife of Jed Rubenfeld, who was suspended from Yale Law after an investigation found that he sexually harassed his students. (Chua also mentored Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, whom she helped secure a clerkship with Brett Kavanaugh.) But Vance left this center-right Yale Law milieu for Silicon Valley, where he made his fortune as a venture capitalist under the tutelage (and with the funding) of the far-right techo-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who would later go on to bankroll Vance’s Senate campaign. Thiel seems to have introduced Vance to his other mentor, the reactionary “neo-monarchist” and favorite intellectual of the Silicon Valley right, Curtis Yarvin.
But he pushed aside these old mentors for Donald Trump, whose endorsement he sought with near-slavish sycophancy in his 2022 race. He did this despite having once characterized Trump as “cultural heroin”, “a total fraud”, “reprehensible”, “a moral disaster” and “America’s Hitler”. Vance made those statements back when it suited his ambitions to be critical of Trump: after the release of his book, just before the election in 2016, Vance had been hailed as a “Trump whisperer”, translating the then candidate’s supporters in terms that were palatable for coastal liberal elites. But it does not suit him to be anti-Trump anymore. Now it suits him to be the running mate for “America’s Hitler”.
Is there anything JD Vance really believes? He is not a consistent man, but he has embraced a virulent, creepy and inventive sexism that appears too irrepressible to be insincere. Vance is a prolific demeaner of women. He supports a national abortion ban and has opposed rape and incest exceptions, calling rape “an inconvenience” and insisting that abortions should not be allowed in such circumstances because “two wrongs don’t make a right”. In a bizarre episode, he characterized a national abortion ban as necessary to prevent “George Soros” from flying “Black women” to California for abortions.
The VP pick of the twice-divorced Trump also opposes no-fault divorce, which allows women to leave unhappy marriages without having to prove abuse in court. Though to be clear, he doesn’t think women should leave abusive men, either. He characterized the ending of marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish frivolity: “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” Vance said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”
An adamant “pro-natalist”, Vance has an abiding and obsessive contempt for childless adults, especially women. Blaming the “childless left” for a host of political and cultural problems, Vance has proposed extending extra votes to people with children, so as to dilute the political representation of those without them. He has demeaned non-breeding women as “childless cat ladies”.
For those women who do have children, Vance seems to think that they should be confined to the home: he has characterized childcare subsidies – which allow mothers of young children to earn money, obtain professional experience or education, and preserve their independence – as “class war against normal people”.
Normal, I guess, is relative. Who counts? Certainly not everyone. Vance’s droolingly misogynist pro-natalism has shaded, as such positions always do, into an endorsement of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that the “elites” Vance so often rails against are trying to replace white “real” Americans with a compliant underclass of immigrants. “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves,” Vance told the 2019 National Conservatism Conference. “That should bother us.” He did not define “us” or “our people”, and he did not elaborate on what he meant by “replacement”. But Vance, though he is craven and dishonest, is not a dumb guy. He did not use those words by accident.
Does Vance really believe in the passionately, obsessively sexist things he says? I think he probably does. But it might not matter: what will matter – what has always mattered to Vance – is not what he believes, but what he finds expedient. Vance has already tried to distance himself from his extreme position on abortion, wiping his call to “End Abortion” from his website and delivering mealy-mouthed statements to reporters about his desire for a “national standard” – a phrase that is meant to confuse, since he doesn’t specify what he wants a national standard of. To ask what JD Vance really believes is a bit like staring into a black hole: there is an unknowable blankness behind his tiny, tight blue eyes. What it is certain that Vance has is ambition – ruthless, insatiable and unburdened by principle. Other people believe in ideals, moral principles, right and wrong. The only thing we can say for sure that JD Vance believes is that he, personally, should have as much power as possible.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
