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Federalist Radio Hour
‘The Kylee Cast’ feat. Frank DeVito, Ep. 26: What Does A Vance GOP Look Like?
01:06:19
On this episode of "The Kylee Cast," Frank DeVito, author of the brand new book “J.D. Vance and the Future of the Republican Party,” joins Federalist Managing Editor Kylee Griswold to discuss what the GOP is shaping up to look like post-Trump. Frank...
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Hi everybody and welcome to the Kylie cast. I'm Kylie Griswold, Managing Editor at the Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We have a channel that is devoted specifically to the Kylie cast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. So if you are only subscribed to the Federalist Radio Hour or you are wrong with Molly Hemingway and David Harsanyi, be sure to also subscribe to the Kylie cast so you never miss an episode and then leave us a five star review. It is one of the easiest and best ways that you can help promote promote the show. And even better yet, if you're just listening to the show, go check out the full video version on my personal YouTube channel or the Federalists channel on Rumble, and then of course like and subscribe there too. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so@radioheederalist.com I would love to hear from you today. I am so happy to welcome to the show Frank DeVito. Frank is Senior Counsel and Director of Content at the Napa Institute, but today he joins me in his personal capacity as the author of the brand new book JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party. Frank and I dive into J.D. vance's faith, his views on abortion and what that will look like in a future Republican Party, as well as all of the ways that libertarianism and fusionism have failed the Republican Party and conservatism generally. So without further ado, please welcome to the show Frank DeVito. Frank DeVito, thank you so much for coming on the Kylie cast.
- [02:10]
A
Oh, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
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B
It was a pleasure to read your book, so I'm so excited to get the chance to talk about it and to talk about J.D. vance. This is a little bit topically different from some of the things we've covered on this show before, but certainly something that's on the minds of a lot of people. As we head into the midterms and then, I mean, 2028 is going to come at us quickly. So I think a lot of people are wondering kind of what a post Trump America looks like, and will it look a lot like Trump or will it look very different from that? And you, you approach some of these themes in your book, JD Vance and the future of the Republican Party. So let's just start from the very beginning. Why don't you tell the listeners kind of what led you to write this book?
- [02:50]
A
Yeah, sure. Thank you. So I think the main reason is probably what you identify like this is coming, right. J.D. vance's. I mean, I started, I think I thought of the idea right after the election in 2024, and my thinking was kind of this. So the importance of J.D. vance to me is obvious. Right. When Trump was picking his vp, he could have picked somebody who checked a demographic box, right? He could have picked a woman. He could have picked a black man or a Latino, somebody who would kind of try to garner votes from a certain demographic. He could have picked a vice president from an important swing state. But the. But instead, he picks this young white Christian guy from a safe red state in Ohio. To me, there's no other good reason that I can see, except you're picking a potential successor to your presidency and to the MAGA movement, or else why would you pick him? There are better choices if you're trying to bring in new demographics or to win the election. So to me, it was just instantly, it's Vance's race to lose for 2028. I think he's the heir apparent, if you want to use that term. And I think since I started writing the book and finished the book and now published the book, I think that's confirmed. I won't say that it's a sure thing, but he is certainly the front runner and by huge margins. And so the first reason was simply I think Vance is probably going to be the presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2028 and therefore should write a book about him. Right. But I think it was also particularly interesting to me as like a kind of conservative nerd. You know, I write in the this space of conservative culture and religion and policy and legal issues and things like that. And so normally when you're profiling or studying a political figure right on the American scene who's like a potential presidential candidate, I don't want to say it's kind of boring, but you don't have a lot of, like, really deep intellectual stuff. You're going off campaign speeches and the Typical stuff that politicians do. But Vance kind of came up as like one of my people, right? Like the conservative intellectual nerds. Right. He, like, he wrote the hillbilly elegy memoir that made him famous, of course, but then right after that, when he became a household name, he's, he's writing op EDS on really interesting matters of politics and policy. He writes a long form essay at the Lamp about his conversion to Catholicism. He's really high level, engaging with matters of political philosophy at places like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the American Conservative. So he's just a much more interesting politician from my perspective to write about. If you really want to dive in and see what does this person say, what does he think? What has been his kind of his consistent priorities through a decade of being a very public figure, even before he was a political candidate. To me, that was really interesting. So you have the personal interest, you have the, obviously he's going to be important, but I think he's important not just because he's a future presidential contender, but he's a presidential contender at a really important time in the history of the Republican Party, right? So what the Republican Party looked like in 2015, the day before Trump came down the escalator to the day to today in 2026, completely different, right? The policy priorities, the tone, the awareness of what time it is in America, if you will, the voters who make up the Republican Party, everything's completely different, right? Trump has realigned and in a way transformed the Republican Party. So there are new alignments of voters, of policy, issues, of all of this to contend with. But Trump is a unique, like, enigmatic figure, right? It's Trump's person, his charisma, his style. Like, he has been very clearly the head of this movement as it's completely shifted the Republican Party. So as he goes away now he's a lame duck president. He's in his last couple years of his term and therefore of his influence over the Republican Party. What direction the party takes after Trump, it's an open question and those are big shoes to fill. And so I think who that successor is makes more of a difference than your normal presidential primary campaign. So for all those reasons, like somebody's people are going to write books about Vance Hillbilly Elegy is his story, but it's definitely not the last word on who this guy is as potentially our future president and leader of the party. And I just figured I would do it first. I had the idea right after the 2024 election and said, well, let's let's see if I can be first to the party here and write something influential on the topic.
- [07:19]
B
Yeah, well, and it really is a great collection of his essays and ideas and just a place to find kind of where he, where he aligns ideologically in one space. Very helpful. I think a lot of Trump voters breathed a collective sigh of relief when Trump picked Vance as his running mate, partly because I think there was a lot of confidence going into that election that you don't need to do as much coalition building like the coalition is here. We don't need to try to, you know, pick a token candidate to, to appeal to some random demographic. Like, of course, Trump needed a Vice President pence figure in 2016, which I think you also talk about in your book. But, but by 2020 and then 2024, you know, he had already sort of locked down the base of Christian support at least as much as he was ever going to. And so he didn't really need that. And I just think there was this sigh of relief because it's like the Trump MAGA movement is not actually just a Trump movement. It's an America first movement that will hopefully long outlive Trump. And I think that was a big relief to many people. And I think too, like, I actually read your book in tandem with Hillbilly Elegy, because I had never read that book. I was familiar, so familiar with it just because of the work that I do. But, but I was like, I've never actually sat down and read this book. So I'm going to, I'm going to read both of these. And it's just so interesting because I know one critique of Trump is that he has this populist rhetoric and he seems to get, you know, blue collar Middle America workers, but J.D. vance gets, gets them because he actually grew up among them. And it's just a very different, it's a way more relatable, tangible thing. Even if you didn't grow up in, you know, Appalachia as a hillbilly family, there's this sense that here's this guy who grew up even worse than I grew up who can actually get the plight of these people who have seen their towns hollowed out when manufacturing was offshored. And he's just such a unique figure in that way to even, to even maybe supersede Trump in many ways. As we, as we move forward with the new right, I want to dive right into some of the ideas in your book. You talk about this concept that JD Vance actually talks about in Hillbilly elegy, which is brain drain and how people move from their towns, they go get degrees, they get credentialed, they basically become part of the elite class and then they leave. And they essentially contribute to the hollowing out of their communities by taking their talents and their intellect elsewhere. And I would love if you could kind of explain a little bit more about that and the way that J.D. vance thinks about it, but also just whether J.D. vance's ideas about that are sort of a rebuke to the current Ben Shapiro way of thinking of the just move ethos that like that communities don't matter that much, that if you can't afford to live where you want to live, the solution is just to take your talents and yourself elsewhere. What do you think about that?
- [10:10]
A
Yeah, when I was in law school, there were a couple of libertarian speakers who would. The phrase they used was vote with your feet, right? If you're in like a blue state that's taxing you to death and there are no prospects, then, right. Vote with your fee. You make your, your thoughts known by going to a red state that has better prospects. And I think that's just, I've written on this before this book. This is just a grossly inhuman way to live this kind of global take that we, you know, we have cars and airplanes and so you just go wherever. But kind of a central tenet I think of being human is that we are from a place, right. So there are obviously reasons to move, right? Like one of them is being elected vice president, Right. You have to be in D.C. even if you're from Ohio. Yes, sure. Not saying this is an absolute, nobody should ever move, but I think it should be the norm. I think the norm should be you're from a place, these are your people, this is your extended family, this is your community. And it's not good for individuals to uproot and be somewhere where they're not divorced from, not just like their extended family and the community that they grew up around, but the multi generational effect of that, right. To build really deep cultural trust. It's really important when you have these churches, these neighborhoods where generations have been there, right? You know your neighbors, you know, you know them, but also like your parents knew their parents or your grandparents knew their grandparents. This builds a trust that's really important. And I think about it in our own church community here in Pennsylvania, where I live. And it's just created something so powerful when people have the intention of I'm going to be rooted here. This is Where I'm going to raise my kids. This is where I'm going to hopefully raise my kids to stay when they grow up. You have these communities that have known each other for generations. So there are potential marriages, friendships, business. People do business with each other because they, you know, if I need, if I need a plumber, if I need a doctor, if I need an electrician, we pretty much everybody we, we patronize is from our parish. This is a really important cultural fix, right? So it's important for building healthy American communities, but it's all. And it's also healthy and better for individuals. So to go back to Vance, like the brain drain thing, it's, it's a disaster for communities, but also for the individuals who are sucked up into it, right? So just to use like one particular example, if you have somebody from middle, pick a, pick a state in the middle of the country, right, from Arkansas, really smart, really talented, naturally gifted, gets a scholarship and gets to go to Yale, right? And now you're, you're a Yale grad, so the sky's the limit. And every cultural force, right, is going to tell you, everybody you've met at Yale, the professors, the peers, the recruiting companies that are on the campus are going to tell you you're going to go back to your little town in the middle of nowhere county in Arkansas. I mean, you can make, you know, all these millions. You can go whatever, consult for McKinsey, you can go to law school and you can be at one of the big white shoe law firms in Boston or New York or D.C. why would you ever want to go back to Arkansas? And what this does is for one, obviously it's bad for that town in Arkansas who just lost one of their most gifted people who could be, right mayor, or a huge business owner who could help revitalize that town, that county. But it's also bad for the person because, I mean, yeah, it's alluring the white shoe law firms and the big consulting firms, but being a cog in the wheel of one of these mega corporations in a big nameless city where you don't know anybody and the policies are terrible and it's busy and crowded and expensive, like, I think most people would probably actually be happier going back to their town and their family and their community and being, being a force for good in like a normal place. So you can definitely see Vance advocates for this, that this is a huge thing that we need for cultural renewal of the forgotten middle American towns and counties and states. And he's also lived it Pretty vocally himself, right? He did the Marine Corps and then he did Yale Law School, and then he was in Silicon Valley for, I don't know what it was, maybe a year or two. And then he writes this op ed about why he goes back to Ohio and this was well before he announces a Senate run. And he goes and he opens a fund in Cincinnati in Ohio, where he's from. And he makes just this case. He's like, I've seen, you know, Yale and I've seen Silicon Valley, and these people are just living this existence that's just so divorced from all the people that I grew up with. You know, he's talking about families in Silicon Valley and how hopeful and optimistic they are for the future and for their kids and their financial prospects and all of this stuff. He's like, this is nothing like, right. The, the divorced, dysfunctional, messy, drug addicted, unemployed people that, that I grew up around. And there was just such a huge disconnect between the elites that he was living around and the people that he grew up with that he, he chose the people he grew up with and went back to try to do some good in the place where he's from.
- [14:51]
B
And then ended up doing that in many ways by being elected to the Senate to represent the interests of these people that are legitimately his community. They're his people. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about Vance's poisoned garden analogy, what it means, and then also just kind of how that idea is, informs his adoption of a more muscular conservatism. I know there's a lot of debate right now about what conservative, what conservatism should look like. Should we use power? Should we not? Of course, J.D. vance has a very specific take on that. But how does this idea of the poison garden inform that view?
- [15:29]
A
Yeah, so I would say I think even the poison garden gives you a particular, like the time and place in America maybe warrants different government action. But I would just back up and say, at least for myself, and I think Vance shares at least some of these instincts, is that we've been dominated by a fusionist platform in the Republican Party since probably at least the 1960s. Right. The Goldwater era, where basically libertarians who are very skeptical of government power for almost any purpose. Right. And social conservatives, and then like anti communist hawks were all this kind of this alliance and it was assumed that this, this was just kind of a, a cohesive thing. Like this is conservatism, this mix of libertarianism and anti communism and all that. And so what I think we've lost is this kind of classical understanding that man is a political animal, right? Government is a natural thing, right? In civilized society, in a society when men are living in the same place, you're just naturally going to have government. It's not this, this artificial thing, that social contract. You know, we agree to like form these communities. Now, like anywhere there are people, there's going to be some kind of government and that exists to promote the common good, that people can live in peaceful, ordered societies. The idea that libertarianism, like hands off, keep the government out of everything is conservatism, is incorrect. So I just want to make that point. That's my point, not Vance's per se. But what I think that the poison garden analogy is really important to kind of maybe bring those who are libertarian leaning along to realize how inadequate that response is to the current moment, even for people who maintain very strong limited or anti government sentiments, right? So Vance writes this poison garden analogy. It's a little like paragraph or two in his foreword to Kevin Roberts book that came out pretty recently where he, he basically says, okay, imagine a garden, right? You have this garden and you in a healthy garden, right? The soil's healthy, the rain is good, the sun is good, everything is working. The gardener's job is pretty limited, right? You, you pull some weeds, you make sure the sunlight and the rain are, you know, everything's irrigated. But the job of the gardener is not very interventionist, right? There's not much that he has to do for the garden to prosper, right? But then you take the trigger happy gardener, if you will, who's like, all right, well if we add fertilizers and we add, you know, pesticides and all this stuff, then we can, we can make the garden better, right? Less, less vegetation is going to die. So you add and then you add and then you add and pretty soon you've poisoned the garden, right? So you have this soil that's now corrupted, nutrient depleted, literally poisoned. At that point, you can't just remove the intervention, right? It's not enough to say, okay, gardener, you're intervening in too many places. Pull out, right? Stop adding pesticides, stop adding poison. Just go back to your limited role of pull a few weeds and let the sun shine in the rain and. Because now the thing is poisoned, right? So this is the analogy, and I maybe take it a little farther than Vance, but I think what he's doing here is really instructive is that at this point, if the government is the gardener and our institutions and Our whole American culture is, is the garden. It's poisoned. It's poisoned by. By liberalism. Right? So, like, all of our institutions are deeply infected. Right. The administrative state is so filled with career employees who are going to thwart any administration that they don't like. Our media, as you well know, is. Is pretty strongly in the grips of leftists, at least mainstream media, the corporations, the school systems, the universities, everything is so poisoned that it's not enough in this era to say, okay, Gardner, just stop the intervention, stop the big government.
- [19:13]
B
Right.
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A
If we have this world where like Facebook and Google are arguably more powerful than most nation states. Right. And the school systems, the media, there is so much influence by these organizations that are not the federal government that to just say we need to go back to limited principles of government. Right? Let private enterprise reign, let local government solutions reign. Get the government out of all of these things. That's not going to solve our problems. At least that's the argument. There's just. There's too much here that is poison, that simply telling the government don't act is not. It's not going to fix what ails us. It might, it might help in some areas where the federal government is aiding in bad things, but ultimately there are places where I think it's legitimate. And also it's. It's perhaps necessary for the federal government to actually act instead of just removing itself from things if we're going to get anything like a return to sane, healthy institutions.
- [20:09]
B
Right, right. And I think his analogy is very apt. But then you take it one step further and you write about libertarianism a little bit and freedom and what that freedom should be and what it's not freedom to do. And I just want to read a couple quick passages from your book here. Actually, they're not quick, they're a little bit long, but I think they're so good and they really stood out to me. So just against this idea of libertarianism being the solution to our cultural woes, the freedom to choose is not itself the good that society exists to foster. It should be fairly obvious that not all free choices are good choices. Why are we free to own guns? Not because freedom to own guns is good, but because it is good to fulfill one's duty to defend one's family and one's neighbors from evil. We value free speech in order that truth might be spoken. We value religious freedom so that people might worship God in spirit. And in truth, freedom is so important because of the good things it allows us to choose, not because it is good. In itself, so, so important. And then you continue, yes, freedom and individual choice are important, but if freedom is put on a pedestal as a good in itself, we are often choosing to leave people in communities lacking good jobs, ravaged by drugs, and torn apart by these political decisions for so called freedom. That's, of course, exactly what we saw in Vance's book. These are political decisions, not requirements of freedom. Leaving individuals and communities subject to the choices of drug companies and transnational corporations is a political choice. Allowing private actors to make decisions that are bad for many people in the name of freedom does not leave Americans with very good options from which to freely choose. Freedom for its own sake is not conservative. Say it again. Freedom for its own sake is not conservative. It is not necessary or inevitable for conservatives to always choose freedom over government action. Excellent. I think you just took Vance's ideas and just expanded upon them. But I thought that was really good. And yeah, I wasn't expecting to get into such a good exposition of libertarianism in the book. So thank you for writing all of that.
- [22:13]
A
Sure. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's just worth pointing out, and this is one of my greater issues and the other things that I write, certainly in the book, that I think a lot of people are stuck in a libertarian and beyond that, like a kind of neoliberal framework where we look at every political problem, every political issue in a very narrow historical lens, as if like there was no history of political thought before 1800 or pick your time. And I think it's really toxic. I think this idea that freedom from government intrusion is itself a good and is a really problematic thing. I think there are a lot of places where practically it is just good to have more freedom rather than more government intervention, because certain freedoms, we'd rather allow more of them, like a little more speech, a little more religious exercise, even if it's leading people to, to say or worship in false ways. Because when the government puts its hands on the scale, it usually makes things worse. Or a lot of the time it does. So it's a good practical argument. I just think it's really important to keep that in mind that we might want more freedom because we don't trust the government, but that let's not make that into a conservative principle, that freedom from government is an intrinsic good because.
- [23:16]
B
It isn't correct, or that the things that we call free are actually free. For instance, a lot of libertarians will point to free markets. Well, the markets that we have now are really not free at all. So we're not even Working within a free framework. So let's talk about Trump a little bit. I know one of the key criticisms that I've often hurled at, that I've often seen hurled at JD Vance is that he is a Trump flip flopper, that he was never Trump and he only is now pro Trump so that he could get in Trump's good graces. And look, it worked. You know, yada, yada. Can you explain why Vance did evolve from being never Trump to pro Trump and why unlike many of them, the people in Congress or people who were never Trump and then, oh, magically had an epiphany and are now pro Trump? Why Vance is not hypocritical in that same way.
- [24:05]
A
Yeah, well, one thing that I'll start with and then I'll actually, I'll go into the core of the question is first of all, people who throw that advance that he flip flopped on Trump for political expediency. Like, come on now. Because a lot of the people who are saying that and like targeting Vance are also in the wings saying, it shouldn't be Vance, it should be Rubio in 2028. And I like Marco Rubio, so this is not a shot at him. But come on. I mean, Rubio was like, the public fights between Trump and Rubio in the 2016 primary were extraordinary and kind of entertaining. And now Rubio is like one of the most, like, revered, talented Trump acolytes in the administration. Right. So, I mean, this is everybody. The reality is when one person dominates the party and you're part of the party, of course there's going to be some realignment behind Trump going on. But that being said, yeah, there are a lot of people who frankly would like to just pretend that they were never virulently never Trump, anti Trump and that they've always been maga. And like, what are you talking about? Don't, don't bring up my past right before Trump. Vance has acknowledged it.
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B
Yeah.
- [25:07]
A
The interview you're referring to, there was that New York Times interview that he did in late 2024 where he talks about this in some depth. And I thought it was a really insightful answer as to how Vance pivoted on Trump. Not just as a defense of Vance, but I think it's a really good articulation of the, the kind of Trump versus never Trump divide in the Republican Party today. And so what Vance says basically is that what he cares about, like his core policy commitments haven't really changed. How do we make America better for as many common Americans? So that they can get married, have kids, raise kids, and support a family on a meaningful income from meaningful work. How do we make the American Dream accessible for as many people as possible? It's what he wanted in 2016. It's still what he wants in 2026. So what changed? He says, and I think he's being honest here, and I think it's very convincing, is I didn't change on politics, I didn't change on my primary policy commitments. What I changed on is my view of American institutions and how bad they are. Right? That's the crux of the argument. He says, listen, in 2016, Vance was young. He was kind of a new figure on the political conservative intellectual scene, and he was fairly optimistic about America, about its institutions. And the idea is kind of, okay, institutionally, America is maybe not in the best place. Things have swung kind of to the left, but these things happen, and hopefully they'll swing back toward the right. Basically, things aren't great, but they're not decaying. Right. If that's your. Your pretty optimistic view of America, that our institutions are intact, we need to do some work to get better candidates and reform some stuff. But in we're in okay shape, then, then Trump is like a terror, right? He's like dropping bombs for no reason. Right? Like, who is this caustic, bombastic person who's like, firing people up and telling them that, you know, things are terrible and we don't need this, this is toxic. Right? But so that's pretty much where Vance was early on. And then what he says is, as time goes on, as he gets more involved in the political scene and is writing and commenting and thinking through all of these political questions, he actually starts to come around to actually, you know, I'm interacting with the school system and the corporate elite and the Silicon Valley tech elite, right? And the university system. He goes to Yale. He does all these things. He gets a lot more exposure to the institutions then particularly focused on the institutions of government, and starts to realize, actually, maybe it does look more like the 11th hour. Like maybe things are really as bad as Trump said. Like maybe. Maybe a lot of our institutions are actually so bad that they can barely be recaptured. Maybe we need to rebuild things. Maybe we need to blow a lot of stuff up. Figuratively. Yeah, maybe. Maybe this. Maybe Trump was right. Like, if things are as bad as the MAGA folks say they are, then actually Trump's responses are maybe warranted. Right? And so I think, like I said, I think that explains Vance's change. It's like, okay, I think Trump is necessary. I think Trump is right. I didn't. Because I've woken up to how bad things are. I think that's legitimate. But I think it also, if you look at, like, anyone listening to this, or you, Kylie, think about, like, the never Trump Republican conservative folks that, you know, I mean, some are just completely unhinged. But, like, there are people who are in good faith, like, they're. They're smart, honest, conservative people who really just cannot stand Trump and the MAGA movement. They think it's brought us away from principled conservatism. Okay. And then think of the MAGA folks that you know. And I think this is a really big difference. I think this actually is one of the good explaining criteria that can help us understand what's going on here is that if you look at those Never Trump kind of folks who are actually conservatives, they think that he's the wrong solution because they don't see that the problem is that bad. It's like, yeah, I mean, we need to do better. We need more conservative people in government. We need more conservative journalists and professors. But what Trump is, like, what Trump is pitching, that's. This is toxic. But if you think that the institutions really are as bad, then you're a lot more likely to accept Trump and MAGA as the correct medicine for what ails us.
- [29:06]
B
Right, right. Which I think is why, over time, so many people have joined the Trump coalition who were not initially in it. And it's because different things open your eyes to how corrupt these institutions are. You know, many people prior to Covid didn't understand how corrupt government public schools were because they weren't looking over their child's shoulder every day, seeing the type of curriculum that they were being exposed to. And that's just one instance. Or, you know, in the hospital system, you know, if you weren't really going to the doctor, you might not have noticed, like, politicized health care has become where now you can go and you're in a place that should be ruled 100% by science. And instead they're asking you for your pronouns on the first form you fill out, you know, and so once you actually begin to see how broken some of these institutions are, it makes Trump make a lot more sense and therefore. Yeah. Advances political evolution as well.
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A
Yeah, that's a great point. If I can give one more example, because you're right on. Covid opened a lot of minds to.
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B
Right.
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A
How deeply infected the schools were and the health system, certainly the other one, too. I think was in 2020 was the Floyd riots. Right. Where like we're being told there's a pandemic, stay at home, we can't spread this thing. But then all of a sudden there are like riots in the streets and you have Democrat politicians coming out and like marching with them. Right. Who are telling you stay in your home. This is a pandemic and a crisis. But, but burn down the cities in the name of racial justice or something. And, and we're okay with that. And like police forces are standing down. They're like no arrests being made. It's like, yeah, something, something is deeply wrong. I think 2020. And then the trans movement also in the, in the. That peaked probably in 2223. Really woke a lot of people up to how bad things are.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. Screaming in the face of a police officer is an essential thing that needs to happen. But your church choir is a super spreader. So stay home. Yes.
- [30:59]
A
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- [31:34]
B
Since we're still kind of on the Trump train, let's talk Trump versus Vance on abortion. And maybe in light of the March for Life, we're just coming off of that. You know, maybe, maybe that speaks to some of this, but you write a little bit about this in the book. How are Trump and Vance the same on abortion? And do you think, I mean, how are they different? And can conservatives trust Vance more then they can trust a transactional second term Trump on this issue moving forward?
- [32:04]
A
Yeah, So I mean, for one, I would say yes. So I think first of all, what did Trump and Vance have in common? I would say that they're both political realists who are very skeptical of how much can be done to advance the pro life agenda, especially with federal legislation in the current culture. And like, I've done some writing on this, actually you're. The Federalist published my piece on the March for Life that I wrote just depending on when this drops, probably about a week ago. And I think it, well, it woke Vance up when he saw the Ohio referendum just be a disaster. But also you look at the cultural numbers, right? Like there's a Pew study From I think 2024 that shows like barely a majority of Republicans are in favor of restricting abortion in most or all cases. So you combine that with the Democrat numbers, total number of people willing to restrict abortion in most or all circumstances, you're like 30% maybe. And so I think it is not, it's not caving on this issue to say there is very little that can be done here. So I want to make a couple of points on this, if you don't mind, because I think it's a really important issue. So for one, for the non compromising pro life people on this issue who are very critical of the Trump Vance administration, for one, I feel you like I'm a Catholic, I've been spit at and cursed at, praying at abortion clinics, like I'm part of the, part of the movement here. And I would like to see abortion completely gone. The problem is, and I'll credit my friend Ryan Anderson at the Ethics and Public Policy center made this point at an event before the march that I was at last week where he said, listen, if the abolitionists of abortion could get what they want and ban it tomorrow, it's not going to hold in this culture. Like when what we've seen from the polling, what we've seen from referenda, even in deeply read states, is that people have been conditioned by 49 years of roe to take abortion for granted as something that's there if people want it, need it, quote, unquote, nobody needs abortion. But if they have the choice between restrict most or all abortions or make abortion pretty much legal all the time, they're gonna choose make abortion legal all the time. Like people are. You can do some things to make some restrictions possible, but you go too far and the culture is just not there. The appetite for banning abortion even in red states is not good. And what Ryan Anderson and I had a back and forth about this the other day where I said, you know, this has happened before where constitutionally, there was a case where in our history it was said that a certain class of persons is actually entitled to constitutional rights. And so you can't enslave them or in this case kill them without due process of law, right, they're entitled to equal protection under the 14th amendment. So I think that Ryan is right and a lot of the scholars on this are right that actually, I think under the 14th Amendment, unborn children are properly persons that should not be denied life, liberty or property without due process. So I think constitutionally you can make the case that abortion is unconstitutional. It should not be allowed anywhere because it's depriving unborn people of their rights. But this happened in the 1850s, right, where Abraham Lincoln gets on the stage with Stephen Douglas at the debates and says, hold on, if the black man is a man, he's entitled to all the rights that men have under the Constitution. That was constitutionally correct. But it took a four year long war to actually iron that out. So I think we need to understand, and in that case it was even a war could be fought because the north was pretty much aligned behind abolition by the time Lincoln is elected president. So I know I'm being a little roundabout, but I do it for a reason. Then there was actually an appetite for a civil war over that issue. Now I don't even think there is. I think if tomorrow there were five votes on the US Supreme Court. There are not, by the way, there might be two. But if there were five votes to say unborn child is a person under the 14th amendment, abortion is now banned in all circumstances across the board in all 50 states. I think you would see a constitutional amendment to the United States Constitution that would enshrine abortion. I think it is that unpopular to completely restrict abortion that flies in the face of natural law. It's a sin, it's a crime, it's a terrible thing, but it is a political reality. So that's my kind of case. To the pro lifers that we do. I hate having to be a political realist on the murder of unborn children, but I think we do because I don't see what we can do otherwise in this climate. So sorry to take a lot of time on this, but I think it's worth saying no, I think it's super important. Yeah, yeah, please go on.
- [36:51]
B
Oh no, I was just going to say I think there's two things that really frustrate me and one of them is, I mean like, except the obvious of the murder of unborn children. Also not having the right climate to advance something that's much more pro life than what we're seeing now. But it's really frustrating to me how much of an effort there was to overturn Roe. I mean we had 50 years of people fighting tooth and nail to get this overturned. Meanwhile all the useful people who were leaning on Roe because it allowed them to fight against something that they never thought was going to be overturned. And so, you know, once Roe was overturned, it kind of exposed a lot of pro life people as not really pro life. They just, you know, because it was convenient to be pro life because there was nothing you could even do about being pro life because Roe was there. You know, Roe and Casey and then Roe gets overturned. And I think you even say this in the book about the dog catching the car. It's just kind of like, you know, Republicans, conservatives were caught with their pants down because all of our resources, all of our time and energy was put toward, you know, overturning Roe v. Wade. Well, now we have a bunch of Americans who are ticked about that. And no real good messaging or policy framework work or anything. So you see all of these trigger laws go into effect, you know, all kinds of stuff. And like, the states weren't ready for it. You know, it gets thrown back to the states and the states are just kind of like, you know, and now we see, you know, even more abortion than before. So that's frustrating thing, number one. Number two is, and I know you do talk about Vance's comments on mifepristone, which is the abortion pill, which is how the majority of abortions are carried out these days. I think what's frustrating is that there is so much of an opportunity to make not religious arguments, not, you know, not even like, this is a human being arguments, because if people have been conditioned to believe that this is a clump of cells, it's going to take more than somebody saying, no, it's a human being for them to, like, agree and believe that. But you have so many scientific arguments to make right now about the dangers that this poses to women. I mean, you bring up Ryan Anderson, the Ethics and Public Policy center study showing how dangerous, how much worse the abortion pill is than the FDA has ever admitted or will ever admit. I mean, there's an opportunity here to, from a strictly scientific angle, to whack, you know, the way that the vast majority of abortions are performed without even needing to change public opinion or getting into a constitutional question, you know, because you can do it from a scientific way. So, like, why is that not happening? And then you have JD Vance saying things like, you know, that he supports mifepristone. I think that was from an interview at one point. And I'm somebody who generally likes J.D. vance. But this issue is so frustrating to me because it's so important. And I think there is an opportunity and we're missing it.
- [39:41]
A
Yeah, I'll say a couple things. For one, I've become. I used to be much more interested in the, like, natural scientific claims of the personhood of the unborn. Because to me it's obvious, right? There's anything other than at the moment of conception is artificial. Say, oh no, a child becomes a person at heartbeat or at three months or when they can feel pain or when they're born. It's all arbitrary because it's the same set of DNA, same person is in there from the moment of conception. And so those are all completely arbitrary arguments.
- [40:14]
B
And it rings hollow when we even have the Carnegie stages of embryonic development. I mean, this is enshrined in scientific, you know, the standards, you know. So anyway, continue.
- [40:25]
A
I will say I think I'm a little more jaded on the philosophical, theological reality of where people are at today, that I don't know how much those hold. I was just, I'll make a pop, old pop culture reference now, I suppose, but like in the Batman the Dark Knight movie where I forget the scene, but Anne Hathaway's character is, you know, like, oh, you know, we have a, we have this, we have that, and the enemies are surrounding them. And Batman looks at her in his gravelly voice. Christian Bale says, they know, they just don't care. And that's kind of how I feel more and more, and it troubles me greatly. But I think even if you can prove to them like, no, this is a human being, like, nothing changes biologically from day of conception to month one to month six that would justify, you know, killing here, but not here, I don't know how many people care. I'm kind of, I'm increasingly convinced that without some kind of a, a religious, like, serious moral revival, that we're not going to get there on the culture any other way. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that reason will, will start to grip people on this issue. But I've gotten maybe more pessimistic about that in recent years. But that being said, I want to cover two more points to the rest of the question that you asked. So I covered why Trump and Vance, I think are. How they're similar on this issue. How are they different and how can we, can we trust Vance more than Trump? I would say, yes, they are different and yes, we can trust Vance and more than Trump on this issue, frankly, for this reason. So for one, Vance is a committed Catholic convert. He takes the faith seriously. We've seen before the Ohio referendum really jarred him at how unpopular this issue had become. Vance was adamantly pro life. He talked about the consistent ethic being that's an unborn child from the moment of conception, you can't justify any abortions. I think we know what he thinks on a philosophical level on this. So the big difference I think is Trump and Vance both realize how politically fraught and limited the solutions are here. But I think they're different in that, listen, Trump came on the scene with an America first agenda and a couple of very particular issue areas that he cared deeply about. Right. Immigration and the border being overrun, destroying our country, the trade deficit and how we were just getting destroyed by globalism. Right. And the way we've outsourced everything and we're not, we're just getting destroyed on foreign trade. Then he said some things about stupid foreign wars. Right. So these are Trump's core commitments. It was clear from day one he was always going to make deals on pretty much everything else, and that includes social issues like abortion. So I think to the pro lifers who feel betrayed by Trump, I would just say, listen, I think he was fairly consistent. Like he made pro life statements. He was the first president to actually address the march for life in his first term. But this was never like a pro life crusader candidate who was going to be like our hero on abortion. Ironically, he did more for the pro life cause than many of his predecessors in the party, I think.
- [43:17]
B
But yeah, I'll take a transactional pro lifer who actually delivers on the transaction than somebody who just pays lip service to it, you know? Yeah, any day of the week.
- [43:25]
A
And I will say, I'm sorry, but to the commentators who are saying that like the Trump Vance administration is so unpro life and that's such a break from all the pro life Republicans we've had, I'm sorry, spare me. But the pro lifers who are hardline on this issue before Roe was overturned, and you pointed this out a minute ago, like before Roe was overturned, it was a supposed constitutional right. Nobody could ever do anything to restrict abortion. So it's very safe for Republican politicians to say, rah, rah, I'm pro life to campaign and fundraise from the pro lifers and they were never going to have to do anything about it. So I'm sorry, but people who were more pro life than Trump Vance in the pre Dobbs era, not a convincing argument to me at all. But I think contra Trump, right, who was always transactional on this issue, I think Vance cares very personally about this issue. I think he has real Christian convictions that abortion is the taking of a life that's made in the image and likeness of God, whereas he's a realist. But I think we can count on Vance to do what he thinks is politically, politically possible on this issue. Whereas I don't think that's the case for Trump. I think Trump will do as much as he thinks is necessary to keep the base together and. And to compromise on the issue. So I do think they're different on that. And then I do want to touch on the last thing you said on this. I know a lot of time spent on this issue, but it's an important one.
- [44:43]
B
It is.
- [44:43]
A
I think it's the only place in the book where I'm actually critical of Vance in a serious way. So I do want to make that known because I'm not a pure Vance acolyte, though I'm a big fan, obviously. So it's important to be a realist on this issue. I think that you can say as a Christian, as a Catholic, in my advance's case, out of political prudence, you could get up and say, I'm pro life. I would like every abortion to stop in this country. The numbers are not there. We have no political ability. There's no political will at the federal level. If we try to ban abortion in, and especially on those levels, if we try to ban mifepressone through legislation or presidential executive action, if we try to restrict access to IVF through those channels, it's not going to work. The numbers are so bad on this that all that's gonna happen is we're gonna lose elections and we cannot move the needle on this until the culture is pro life. So while I hate abortion, I want it to end. We can't act on this. You can do that. I would say, as a Catholic, as a Christian in public office, because there's nothing you can do. But what happens when you say instead of, there's no political action we can take on this issue, but I support mifeprestone access or I support the, you know, the creation of babies that are going to be discarded through ivf. Like, that's no longer political prudence. That's supporting something that is intrinsically evil. So especially looking at this through the Catholic lens, we cannot do that. And I've talked to people who know Vance and who spoke to him in the pro life movement right after that famous 2024. I don't think he quite. He almost said, we support. He said he supported the Supreme Court's decision to take no action on mifepressone. And it kind of looked like he said, we support abortion pill access, and you can't do that. So I've heard that he Kind of regretted the way that came out. I think he knows the difference between what's politically prudent and what you can't say as a Catholic. But to the extent that people in the MAGA world, especially Catholics, want to say no, no, we support IVF and first trimester because there's no will for it, we can't support these things. And it's really important that we use the bully pulpit that our Catholic and Christian politicians have to not accidentally or inadvertently say that we're supporting things that are evil. So might be prudent not to take action, but we can't support these things.
- [47:05]
B
Right, Right. Yeah. Well, and I would love to see in a potential future Vance administration taking a little more seriously, stripping FDA appro approval from these dangerous drugs, you know, relying on real science like the EPP study and not fake fake science like the fda. You know, maybe enforcing, is it the commerce clause against people who are shipping mifepristone to red states? I mean, there's. There's things that can be done without even, you know, without trying to pass legislation at the federal level that's abolitionist, that bans abortion. You know, it's like, I understand that there are things that are politically not feasible that you genuinely can't do, but there are things that we can do, and I would hope, you know, even in, like, a post Trump Vance administration, that we would be able to take even one more step toward, towards some of these things that are so important, and that would go a long way because it's also important to condition people's consciences, to view human life as human life. And of course, like, you can't force them to. To see something that they can't see. You know, you can't just change public opinion by changing the law, but if you act like human life is human life, then you begin to teach people that human life is human life, if that makes sense. You know, the law does condition our consciences, and so it's important to make whatever moves we can in that direction. Which I think you would agree with as well.
- [48:26]
A
Yes. And to steal one more thing that I've gotten from Ryan Anderson and from Aristotle, obviously, but, you know, so the Aristotelian virtue of courage, right. All the, all the virtues have. There are two corresponding defects or extremes, Right. So courage is needed. It's a virtue. And on one side you have rashness or, you know, and on the. Or. And on the other side, you have cowardice. Right. So on this issue especially, I think we need to be very thoughtful about what we're doing. Because on one side, as I've said, you don't want to be rash and just charge in and do things that are politically impossible and that are just going to make the pro life movement go backwards. But we also don't want to, in the name of prudence, become cowards and not do what we can do. Right. So let's, let's try to find the virtue and avoid the extremes. Not easy, but very important not to be a coward in the name of prudence.
- [49:15]
B
Yes, that's exactly right. Since we're already kind of talking about this, can you speak to ways beside abortion that J.D. vance's Catholic faith have, that, that has shaped his governance.
- [49:28]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, he got a lot of flack for this. But the, when, when the, the new administration came in, right. And we had the, the immigration crackdown began to close the border to deport people here illegally. Right. Vance, in the face of people basically saying this is uncharitable, it flies in the face of Christianity or what have you, he invokes the Catholic understanding of the Ordo Amores. Right. The order of love. Right. This became like big. He tweeted something and like every commentator in the world was writing about whether Vance was interpreting the Ordo Amores correctly. And I'm not a theologian, but he's going back to St. Augustine and then especially St. Thomas Aquinas. And they're talking about, you know, love, like the, the willing of the good of the other. Right. Not me, but the other person. It doesn't require the same thing of us toward every person. Right. My, the, the love that I owe my, my wife and then my children is not the same as what I owe my next door neighborhood or my co workers is not the same that as what I owe, you know, people that I've never met before in foreign countries. That's just, that's just obviously true. I can't love everybody the way that I love my wife. Right. And so, so Vance, nor should you. Right, right. That would be disordered. And I think it's a real. By the way, I think this is a real problem among, especially on the left, but of abstracting charity, abstracting love and duty to get out of actual commitment. That's hard. If I could just give you one example. The, the, the green movement, the environmental movement. Right. Like it's so much easier to do what a lot of folks on the left do. And it drives me nuts. I have some of them in my extended family, like people who will vote on like climate change, we need to restrict carbon emissions. We need to restrict all of these things that are like, out there and arguably are doing nothing for the actual climate crisis. But meanwhile, like those same people are going through like rolls of paper towel and like wasting all like plastic everywhere. There are plastic bags and we're throwing out garbage. And like, meanwhile, I'm not really on board with any of the, the climate like carbon emissions kind of legislation because I think it's kind of like ineffective in doing anything. But I do care about things like the degradation of our soil and air quality. So we plant trees, we compost, we.
- [51:44]
B
Right.
- [51:45]
A
We do things in our lives that are like, on the ground and actually do something. And I think generally it's much easier for people to look for issues out there that they can vote on and be crusaders for because it doesn't involve actually the hard sacrificial love that it takes to do something tangible in your own life. And so I think that's a big thing. On the immigration issue is like, there are all these people who, you know, God bless them, these poor people are so isolated and let down by our current culture that they're like, they're brainwashed by their schools and by the media. And they have, they're not married, they don't have kids, they probably don't have parents they have good relationships with, they don't have siblings because we've like contracepted big families out of existence. And so we, like you have these poor, lonely, isolated people and they're looking for meaning. And the meaning is I'm going to fight for some cause that's not like so far removed from your real life. Like we're going to defend, you know, illegal immigrants from ice. You don't know any illegal immigrants. This is so like far from your actual lived experience. But people are searching for meaning there.
- [52:43]
B
Anyway, this has been making me crazy because all over, like mommy Instagram, it's all the same people who posted the black square, you know, in the wake of the George Floyd death and the BLM riots and all of that. But it's the same people who are not only regurgitating completely fake headlines from the corporate media about, you know, a five year old being used as bait by ICE, or, you know, Renee Goode being, you know, mercilessly hunted down in her vehicle or whatever, but it's also just a complete disordered way of loving as well. Like, I've seen, I've seen multiple people now who talk in this kind of way of like, my, my Children want me to play with them, but I can't stop seeing videos of, you know, this person being murdered in the street. And it's like, if you care more about the person that you've never met, never would have met, is not actually your, you know, literal neighbor in any sense of the word. You've never met them. You don't know any about them. If they are occupying your mind and your love and your affections more than your own child, like, you have a problem. And that kind of stuff is happening all over. And the way that J.D. vance just spoke to that so plainly with that interview about the Order of Morris, it's like that was. That was remarkable clarity from a politician that we hadn't seen in quite some time.
- [53:58]
A
Yeah. And I think it's. I like that example because I think it shows a couple of things that he's. He takes Catholic social doctrine seriously, clearly, because he's trying to take it and say, okay, what are my duties as a Catholic? How do I apply those to my job as vice president to try to help to promote the common good? Which is great. It's a breath of fresh air after decades of a lot of especially Catholic politicians who have tried their best to separate. Well, my personal faith says this, but I have to do the opposite because of my role as governor or president or whatever. That's. That's not the way that anybody's supposed to function if you take your faith seriously. But I think the other thing that's worth saying is that there are not easy answers to this, because the way that you apply, like, Christian social doctrine to concrete examples of a particular issue in a particular country at a particular time, there's some. Some prudence. You need to figure out how it applies. And so I think what we can say is that Vance is trying to do this. Like he's going to take the faith seriously and see, well, how do I apply my faith to principles of political and governing philosophy that will actually work? And he said. He was at the Catholic Prayer breakfast last year, and he said something I thought was really beautiful and humble. He's like, listen, I'm a baby Catholic. I'm kind of relying on you guys, my Catholic brothers and sisters, to tell me what I'm doing wrong, which is why I wrote the abortion chapter. I think that it needs to be reminded that we can't say we support abortion in any form. Right, Right. But he says they said, listen, I'm gonna get this stuff wrong, but I'm trying to grapple with what my faith requires of me as a public figure. And so I think we can count on that and maybe a way that we have not been able to for any Catholic politician in a very long time that they're going to take their faith seriously and try to apply it to their role in public life.
- [55:49]
B
Yeah. One of the things you bring up in the book, in reference in some places to Vance's Catholic faith, but also just in kind of his biograph, his. His relationship with Peter Thiel and how Peter Thiel even influenced, you know, some of his thinking on matters of Christianity and such. I know one thing that I've heard some people criticize Vance for or, or be concerned about, I guess, as it relates to his political future, is a potential influence of Peter Thiel over J.D. vance. Because whether you agree with Thiel's, you know, interpretation of the Christian faith or not, he has a lot of transhumanist ideas. So can you kind of speak to those concerns and what. What you would foresee any influence or if any Peter Thiel would have over a J.D. vance presidency?
- [56:35]
A
Yeah. So I think it's worth kind of qualifying what that influence of Peter Thiel over J.D. vance really is. So I'll point out two things. One, right. I do say in the book, during Vance's conversion, he says that the first person that he met, and he was in Yale Law School, who was ever publicly claiming to be a Christian and spoke intelligently was Peter Thiel. And so that had an effect on him. It doesn't mean he became a Christian in the image of Peter Thiel. And he's certainly not. I mean, Vance's Catholicism is clearly not anything like Peter Thiel's. Kind of interesting and I think heterodox Protestantism. So there's that.
- [57:10]
B
Because that was during Vance's sort of experimentation with atheism, correct?
- [57:15]
A
Yeah. He was a self proclaimed, like, agnostic atheist. He was still in law school. This was before Vance was a Christian at all. It was just one of his first encounters with Christianity as an adult in like, the elite world. Right. So I don't think that his, that Thiel's Christianity really has anything to do with Vance's. It was just kind of a step along the way. Like, Thiel was the first person who introduced him to like, hey, people can be both intelligent and Christian. And I think that's about as far as that goes. But then you also have the very real thing that, like Peter Thiel donated quite a lot of money to the PAC that helped Vance win the primary in Ohio when he was running for Senate, which was his entrance into public life. And so to say, well, no political life. Sorry. He was already a public figure. But there are people rightly concerned to ask that question, like, Thiel has given Vance a lot of money. Aren't you worried that. Exactly what you said. Thiel is a futurist, transhumanist, orthodox Christians. We don't really like this guy. And I understand that for sure. There was an interview, and I can't remember where it is or even if it's in the book, but somebody asked Vance, basically, what do you feel you owe to the donors, to the people who have given you the money that has supported your runs for office? And. And Vance said, you know, I appreciate them. I appreciate the people who believe in me. Peter Thiel clearly believed in me as somebody who would be good for the political world in America. But what do I owe them in terms of implementing their preferred policies or vision for the country? Nothing. I owe them nothing. And I think that's really important that for one, you said this off camera. It's like, it's one thing when Vance was in a competitive primary, somebody in his circle needed to seed that campaign to help him stand out from a wide field. And Vance was not the front runner in that Senate race, but now he's the vice president. He's in no way beholden to the money or the influence of Peter Thiel. And also I do kind of question how close he really is to Thiel. I mean, that was a long time ago when Vance was in Silicon Valley. You look at the staffers in Vance's vice presidential office who are on his campaign, and I'm not seeing a bunch of like transhumanist, Silicon Valley tech libertarian types. I'm seeing a lot of rather based Christians being like the people that Vance is talking to and is being influenced by. So I get it. Like in my far right church circles, that's the biggest thing I get too when it comes up that I wrote this book on Vance. Oh, connection to Peter Thiel. I'm kind of worried about this guy, but I just don't see it. I don't see much influence there. I don't personally see it as a cause for concern.
- [59:45]
B
You. So your book lays out the case. I'm going to end on this unless we have anything that this leads to. But your book lays out the case pretty convincingly for why J.D. vance is the right man to lead the party after and most likely will be as the New Right has kind of taken root within the gop but obviously there are plenty of factions within Congress, within the establishment GOP who will do anything to ensure that we do not have another Trump, that we can go back to neoconservatism, that we can kind of pull back to a useless, feckless GOP that, you know, is, is more of the fusionist mindset that you talked about earlier. What do you think right now is the biggest threat to the new right continuing apace after we lose Trump? Because. Right. Like, like 2028 is, is, is not far away, but it's far enough away that a lot can happen in the next three years before, you know, J.D. vance actually does become the heir to, to the Trump MAGA movement. So. Yeah. So I'm sure, you know, there's going to be a lot that happens in the next few years. What do you think is the biggest threat?
- [60:54]
A
Yeah. So right now you look at the numbers, right? And J.D. vance is immensely popular among the base that's going to elect the next presidential candidate in 2028. The only other person who polls close and who. So you have this thing, right, where you have like the people who are the pre Trump Republicans who are still part of the party, right. They may have disagreements, but they've come along. And then you have the MAGA base and who can keep those together? Who can keep this demographic together? I think it's Vance. I think he can be. There's a lot of chatter, right. People who would like to displace him for a lot of reasons, but I think he can hold it together. The one question, the one alternative that even a lot of good people on our side have pointed to is Marco Rubio. He's very popular. He's showing himself very capable. There is kind of, I think the question lurking in some of the MAGA bases, minds like Rubio was kind of one of the neocons ten years ago. Is he just going along? But he seems to be on the whole, very popular and very effective and part of the movement. So what could change that, would actually change this and make it so that Vance is not the contender? I think it's. You would need some slip, right, where Vance does something and public opinion shifts among the voting base of the Republicans. That undermines trust in Vance enough to make Marco Rubio consider a run for president. I can't see anything else that would displace him. I think if Vance doesn't commit any political acts of suicide, which is unlikely, he's very talented at handling the media, balancing what he has to do politically. So if he doesn't make a great mistake. That opens the door for Rubio. I mean, Rubio's pretty much endorsed Vance. So I think if Rubio endorses Vance and runs as his vp, which I think is fairly likely, I think that's the end. I think there's pretty much nothing that can be done. You'll get a run, right? The people who want to displace Vance and MAGA from the Republican Party, they'll. I mean, Nikki Haley would get like a half a percent of the primary vote. Like, Ted Cruz is angling for a run, but he'll get like 1% of the vote. Like, these are not. Josh Hawley, I think, wants to run. I'm just kind of throwing out what I've heard from DC Murmurings, but I don't. I don't see anyone other than Rubio that's really viable to capture the, the base. Like, there are a lot of people who could capture the. The donor dollars of disaffected, you know, pre Trump Republicans, but that doesn't translate into votes. So I think if Rubio stays behind Vance, I think. I think it's pretty much wrapped up. If I had to guess.
- [63:23]
B
Yeah. Do you think Vance would ever pick Rubio as a running mate? I mean, way too early to tell.
- [63:28]
A
But, yeah, I think it's. I know Trump has said, I'd like Rocco Rubio to just be Secretary of State forever. He's so good at it. I don't think that was a knock. I think that was. He's really good at managing these jobs. And then he's, you know, the national archivist and the head of national security and J.D. vance's new nanny, depending on which memes you're following. But I do think it's possible. It would be fascinating to see two men from very safely Republican states who are both Catholics as the Republican Party ticket. That would definitely be a historical first. But they're by far the two most popular figures in the Republican Party. I think that's. I don't think that's out of the question. I think it's. It's perhaps likely. If I could just say one more thing about electability, because this is something people ask is like, you know, the media is already shifting and again, spare me. They've been doing this for decades. Like, oh, well, now they're starting to moderate. Right. They've been calling Trump Hitler for a decade, but now it's like Trump's actually been fairly moderate to work with on some of these issues. Vance. That's the real Extremist. He's basically Hitler. I'm sorry. They said that George W. Bush was like this far right monster, and then when Trump started to run, they were like longing for the days of W. Bush. Like, the media has this really cynical thing where the worst Republican that we've ever seen in all of history is the one who's running right now. So I think that's exaggerated. I think most of the base will get behind Vance. I don't think there are just tons of people who will say he's too extreme and I'm defecting. But the other thing I'll say that I think gets overlooked is remember, it's not a popularity contest. It's an electoral college vote for the next president. So when people talk about the electability of Vance, where does the victory run through? It runs through my home state of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan. Vance plays really well in the Rust Belt. You said this at the beginning. He's one of them. He grew up in middle America. He's experienced what they do. He knows their struggles. So you can try to make him out as this out of touch, like elite, far right Republican. He is. Not that. I think he will do very well among the base in the states that matter especially.
- [65:31]
B
Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Well, everyone should pick up a copy of Frank DeVito's new book, JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party. I'm getting the title of that right, aren't I?
- [65:41]
A
J.D. vance and the Future of the Republican Party. Yes, it's both the title and the thesis.
- [65:45]
B
Great, great. I was second guessing myself, but yes, it's definitely worth a read. It puts all of this information into one place. Very easy to read. A great resource. You will not regret picking up a copy. Frank, thank you so much for your time today. I had a great time talking.
- [65:59]
A
Yeah, this was awesome. Thanks so much, Kylie.
- [66:00]
B
Yeah, you bet. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of the Kylie Cast. If you haven't done so already, please like and subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review. We would really, really appreciate it. It's such a good way for you to help out the show. And be sure to also pick up a copy of Frank DeVito's new book, JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party. I will be right back here next week with more. So until then, just remember, the truth hurts, but it won't kill you.