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A
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B
Do you see the inflation numbers?
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C
They're over 3%.
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B
Not good.
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D
I'm surprised it's just over 3%. It feels a lot more. I mean, it feels bad to go shopping just to get the groceries.
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C
I think I've been cooking a lot more at home. At home?
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D
Yeah.
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B
Let's just say we're eating a stewed meats because you can go a little more down.
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D
Well, did you see the. I think it was RFK juniors who said that you ought to try liver. You know, organ meats are cheap. And I thought, wow, boy, that is really a good platform to run on. Eat your liver.
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C
Organ meats are cheap.
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B
Enjoy your two pencils, your one doll and your liver.
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C
And that has sort of Hoover esque implications.
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B
It has a certain classic quality, a liver in every pot. Welcome to the political scene from the New a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane and Hi, Susan.
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D
Hey, Evan.
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C
Hey there. Great to be with you guys.
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B
Vice President JD Vance is a figure who, let's face it, is a bit hard to pin down to some, he's an American story of Reinvention grew up in the Rust Belt, served in Iraq, went on to Yale Law School, and then wrote the very successful memoir Hillbilly Elegy. But to others, he's something very different. He's the embodiment of Washington ambition, a kind of constantly adaptable person, opportunistic, slippery, as his critics would put it. This week he was in the headlines. He stumped in Hungary for the autocrat Viktor Orban, who's aligned with the Kremlin and celebrated by the global far right. And this weekend he's heading to Pakistan for negotiations with Iran, even as it's being reported that he privately voiced opposition to the war before it started. So in this episode, we want to ask, who is JD Vance really? How does somebody actually go from critiquing Donald Trump as reprehensible, as Vance put it in the run up to the 2016 election, to serving as his vice president? And what does he want now as he looks toward 2028? So, guys, before we get into Hungary and Iran, all of which is very interesting, I wanna just step back briefly at the outset here. J.D. vance is a kind of fascinating protean presence in our politics. And I'm curious how you think he is interpreted right now in Washington.
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C
Well, let's be real. The job has never been the best job in Washington. Most people think, in fact, it's the worst job in Washington. The John Nance Garner bucket of warm spit.
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B
Memorial SE Spit being the family friendly version.
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C
Exactly. And in particular, let's just say being number two to Donald Trump, who on Donald Trump's list of priorities. Right. Donald Trump is numbers one through one million. You can't be number two.
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B
Mentorship is not high on his list.
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C
You can't be number two to Donald Trump and you can't really, I think, be an heir apparent, at least one who sits easily in the seat. And so what's been fascinating to watch over this first year of J.D. vance's vice presidency is him actually casting about in the way that we've seen other vice presidents for a lane that works for him, for a role that worked for him. And interestingly, not only has he not found one, but this war that has unfolded, which has enormous geopolitical implications, enormous political implications here in the US with spiking prices. But it also, it has the fate of J.D. vance on the line. The guy who wanted to own kind of the most MAGA wing of the MAGA party, finds himself at odds with the president over a war that according to his ideology, never should have happened.
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D
I mean, first of all, how do people regard JD Vance in Washington being what it is? People think constantly about ambition and the next step and the next race. And so they're looking at him to see is this horse going to be the winner in the next presidential race. So that's how people assess this and look at him. In many ways, it seems to me he helped himself by being the one person in the Situation Room who said, I think this is a bad idea about this war before it started. And I imagine, I think probably all the rest of the reporter world took a look at the account in the New York Times and thought, well, he leaked it. Yeah, or someone with him leaked it. But it's a dangerous place for a vice president to be in. He's separated himself from the president. We know this president values loyalty and you now have a voice in the room that somehow leaked, which drives him crazy and positions J.D. vance in a separate place from the president as a critic, really, which is
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B
a really interesting thing because this very much in the spirit of trying to get beyond what is on the page, on the front page of the newspaper, we all know here doing this kind of work in Washington, a story like the kind in the New York Times the other day, which was this kind of detailed, intricate TikTok of everybody who was involved in these negotiations in the Situation Room on a couple of key occasions. This is their first chance to try to stake out their position publicly. And we saw to any, I'd say, sort of close reader of the text that clearly Team Vance wants it to be known that he was against this. But it seems, Susan, like a pretty delicate line to walk for the reasons you described about Trump. Is this a sustainable position?
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C
No. The short answer is no. And yet, interestingly, Donald Trump has gotten rid of two cabinet secretaries in recent weeks. The person he can't fire is the vice president. And I think it, it's really interesting that politically speaking, JD Vance has stuck to the more maga than thou lane, the kind of Tucker Carlson America first in its OG version. And actually this account by the reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who are coming out with a book in June called Regime Change that this was an excerpt from. It's actually consistent with J.D. vance's position. If you go back to the signal gate controversy of the first year of Trump's return to power, this was a debate among his top advisers that was leaked to the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg about some airstrikes in Yemen. And Even in that, J.D. vance was the guy who said he didn't think that was a good idea. It was basically cut off. And the reason I bring it up is because I think, Jane, certainly that was the Washington conversation this week was look at the positioning by the vice president's people thinking ahead to 2028. There's a lot of time, though, between now and 2028. And I think it's going to become harder over time for JD Vance to represent a kind of an ideological theory of maga, because Donald Trump put out this amazing kind of like primal scream rant of a true social post on Thursday in which he absolutely very Trumpy going off on Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Alex Jones, these sort of MAGA media world figures who have strongly criticized him for abandoning his pledge not to start any new wars and to go to war in Iran. And he said this very revealing Trump thing, which is, you're not maga, your ideas are not maga, essentially confirming what many of us have believed for a long period of time, which is that at its base, MAGA isn't so much an ideology as a cult of personality. And for J.D. vance, how can he be the candidate of MAGA if really MAGA is just about the cult of Donald Trump?
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D
Well, I'd point out that there was a part two of what was leaked to the New York Times about that meeting, which was that Vance said, I think it's a bad idea, but I will support you, which is the part that says, I'll be loyal to you. Of course, it's kind of disloyal if he leaked it, but just the same, which is, I think, important to explain the position he's in, the complicated position, because going back to whether he will run for president and what it would mean to be the vice president to Trump running for president. Vice presidents who run are essentially a third term of the president. And he may try to distance himself in some way, but on this issue in particular, but you can't really. I mean, he's stuck in the same tar that is the Trump presidency, and he has to be serving in it. And he can't really distance himself from it. So it's a complicated mess.
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B
Well, you know, the word that we've heard a couple times already is the word positioning or position. It's, you know, how many Americans get up every morning and say, God, I really want to put my hopes and dreams in somebody who positions himself? Well, it's a this is the puzzle of authenticity which seems to be at the moment. And we've talked about this in recent episodes of the show the coin of the realm. If you can project authenticity, then that is a political superpower right now, whether or not people agree with you on every political position.
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C
Evan, can I just say, can I point out that projecting authenticity suggests perhaps what is not authentic?
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B
How about if you position yourself to project authenticity? But hold on here. This is actually like we're at an important moment here. Because what you've staked out, guys, is the peril, to use another P word, that confronts J.D. vance in his positioning himself at some distance from the President. And we already have begun to see, just last week during the Easter brunch of all places, when better to humiliate your political partner. There was this moment and Dana Milbank wrote a column in the New York Times this week that drew attention to it. It was a closed door Easter event. Trump had asked Vance how the Iran negotiations are going. And then Trump said this.
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D
So if it doesn't Happen, I'm blaming J.D. vance.
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C
If it does happen, I'm taking full credit.
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B
So I wanna say that may be the last happy day that J.D. vance has for a long time. What do you think, Susan? Is this the signs of the unraveling of their partnership?
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C
Well, look, two quick points. First of all, look at how things ended between Donald Trump and Mike Pence. That's one data point to consider. Another is to Jane's point about this sort of trap of a vice president who can't really separate from him or her president. There's a reason that George H.W. bush was the only sitting vice president to win election as president and become in effect, a third term of the Reagan era. The last guy before George H.W. bush who did that was in the early 19th century. It's just, it's a very, very hard political position. And so that's why I've always been a little bit skeptical when people said J.D. vance is the heir apparent or he's definitely gonna win in 2028. I think he has a tough climb to this thing of Donald Trump already essentially mocking him. You can see the assignment that Vance has drawn of going to Islamabad this weekend to sit in talks with the Iranians. If the meeting happens, it would be the highest level American meeting with Iranian negotiators since 1979. But I think this is really, frankly a kind of a poison pill of an assignment for J.D. vance, because what Trump is asking him to do is in effect, to take even more ownership of something it's clear that he's not comfortable with, unless of
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D
course, he pulls it off. I mean, and Every single commentator I've seen on this subject says it's absurd to think you could settle something this difficult in this two week period that they have. I mean, it just almost out of the question that this is not possible. But if he came out of this somehow with something that was a path forward and something that avoided a larger war, he will have really helped himself. I don't know that it's possible, but I'm just saying that is the ultimate challenge for him.
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B
All right, well, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna look at a couple of key moments from Vance's early career and his rather accelerated rise to power. The political scene will be back in just a moment. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us. A rating and a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening.
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E
Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny. Silicon Valley Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American health care? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decision. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
Guys, I want to turn to Vance's background to help us understand more of what shapes him. I think everybody has some sense, but he grew up in Middletown, Ohio. He was raised mostly by his grandparents because his mother was struggling with addiction. After high school, he enlisted in the Marines, goes off, serves in Iraq as a combat correspondent. He then used the GI Bill to go to Ohio State and then later to Yale Law School. And of course, along the way, he met some of the key people that have made his life what it is today. His wife, Usha, who he met at Yale. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder and investor and conservative financial patron. And then also a couple of other figures like the Yale professor Amy Chua, who you may know as the tiger mom, who was one of the key people that persuaded him to write his story, which became Hillbilly Elegy, a book let's remind ourselves that was blurbed by Peter Thiel. So all of these cross cutting influences that he has in his life, guys. Susan, what do you consider now to be most significant about that origin story?
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C
Well, I mean, it tells us for sure that whatever J.D. vance's views are today, he'll be more than willing to shed them if they're not useful to him tomorrow. So that of course, is something that is not an uncommon trait in our politicians, whether it's Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich or whomever. We have a long tradition in this country of politicians in both parties who have made some astonishing shape shifting changes over the years. J.D. vance's I think, mirrors of course, the Republican Party's. Right. That's the thing that's fascinating because the ambitious young politician, Young Republican In 2015 and 2016, it was more than reasonable to make a bet that Donald Trump was gonna end up on the ash heap of history. That he was a sort of a regrettable error. And I know another ambitious young guy back in 2015 and 2016 who thought Donald Trump was the death of American democracy. His name was Marco Rubio. Maybe you guys are familiar with him.
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B
Yeah, the former chief archivist of the United States.
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C
Yes, exactly. So now the main adversary, we haven't talked about him, but he's positioned as sort of the opposite pole of J.D. vance in this kind of future of the Republican Party. Bake off in the Trump cabinet. But. So both of them essentially took a very similar view. JD Vance was even reported to have said in a private message to, I think, a former roommate that he considered Donald Trump to be something like America's Hitler. How do you go from Hitler to I'll do anything for this man? He's the greatest thing in the world? I think that's the journey of today's Republican Party. And we're all puzzling over J.D. vance and his biography because we're all puzzling over how did this happen to one of America's two great political parties.
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D
I think that's a great way to look at it, that he reflects that journey that the party has taken. And we're all just dumbfounded because one of the things that sticks out to me about Vance, if you read his early emails and notes to friends and interviews with his friends, is this is not an unintelligent person. This is someone who's been quite. First of all, he's a good writer. He's perceptive about many things. And so you're dealing with somebody who you sort of feel he knows better yet that he's made these particular deals. I see him, in a way, if you're trying to sort of understand his place in politics as also the product of a paradigm shift in American politics, which happened after, believe it or not, the Citizens United decision in 2010, which is the parties no longer were the power. The power shifted where the money shifted, which was to individual billionaires. And he is the product of that system that his backer was Peter Thiel. It means that he doesn't have much of a track record himself in politics. He was plucked out as someone who looked like a rising star to a billionaire, and that's how he landed on the national political stage. He had one guy behind him who was incredibly rich, and that was Peter thiel, who put $15 million into his race in Ohi. He had no track record politically. He had a bestselling book. That was it.
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B
So here's the thing. This is the part that I find mystifying about his story, is this is a guy who staked out a very public position against Donald Trump. I mean, there was an article that he wrote called Opioid of the Masses. Yeah. What we know about Trump is that he is obviously seeks vengeance. He's, you know, blah, blah, blah. But we know all that. So how did he find it advantageous to himself? What did Vance have to do to get himself back into the possibility?
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D
Well, I mean, again, Peter Thiel was the mentor who. And his patron who talked him up to Trump, and he became friends with Donald Trump Jr. And that opened the door and got him in there. But I don't know, Evan, I'm curious. You've looked closely at his development as a person growing up. Does it seem to you that he keeps finding sort of father substitutes?
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B
I mean, I don't think this is a psychoanalytical reach here. He's kind of talked about it himself, that he, as a child, his parents split up, as he says, even before he could walk. And so his life has been kind of careening between one powerful person, one influential person to another. I mean, his grandmother became his center of gravity. Then in law school, Amy Chua is actually the person who persuaded him to write about himself. He really wasn't even inclined to do it initially. He apparently wrote some kind of fairly bland essay about the Rust Belt, so. And then eventually she said, all right, I'm gonna introduce you to my agent, as the story goes, and the rest is history. And then eventually, there's Peter Thiel. He's described hearing Peter Thiel speak at Yale as the single most important moment of his time at law school. Then you fast forward and you get him circulating Donald Trump like a kind of tiny planetary object. So look, we're not kind of armchair psychoanalyzing to say, as he wrote himself in Hillbilly, he says of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. So, Susan, is this a sustainable family dynamic?
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C
Well, look at Donald Trump's up and down relationship with his own children and make your own conclusions. I think the other part of his biography that really leaps out here because again, I think it helps us to understand both Vance, but also the Republican Party today, is that he has been an extraordinary beneficiary of these elite institutions in our society and our government itself. It's programs that he's now turned upon. He was a beneficiary of the GI Bill as a veteran, probably one of the most successful government programs of all times. Now he's a member of a party that's basically spent the last 40 years telling us that government is literally evil, turning on the Ivy League, you know, the idea that this populist party that he and Donald Trump represent, again, it
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D
was at Yale that he attached himself to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Peter Thiel, and that it took a while.
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C
That's the point I would make.
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D
Yeah. What's so authentic about their populism when it is the exact opposite of their real experience they've had? It's such fakery. But I suppose to be fair, on some level, if you look at what Bants felt when he was at Yale, he felt he was the poorest kid there. And some people feel that they're not really accepted. They realize it's not just about a diploma, it's about a kind of a social class and they're not really going to be part of it. I guess that's partly Vance's story, you know, and that if he can connect that which he's really tried to do with American voters, there are a lot of people who feel enraged on the outs that the inside have it rigged, that, you know, that they're not. That they feel disrespected and unseen.
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B
Well, there is another piece of his terrain that I think we need to talk about, and that's religion. This is an important piece of it because it's not something that I think was fully illuminated in his early rise, but it's really now at the core of his politics. In 2019, Vance, you'll remember, converted to Catholicism and Almost immediately, he started using it as a piece of his policy talk. He invoked the ancient Latin phrase on the order of love to justify the administration's deportation policies. He also now has a book coming out about his conversion to Catholicism. It's called Communion Finding My Way Back to Faith. Susan, what do you make of this? And is this something that actually helps him establish his political, to use a phrase, positioning?
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C
We don't know to the extent that he personally is possible. But it's certainly a metaphor, if nothing else, that this book, which is gonna be coming out soon, has a photograph on the COVID of almost the sort of iconic small American rural church.
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B
A Methodist church.
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C
Yes. The problem is that it's a Methodist church in Virginia, not a Catholic church. And the people there, of course, were very amazed to be contacted by reporters this week. They said, no, actually, Jay Devance has never been here. I think this book. A lot of politicians, a couple years before a presidential election, they put out their campaign memoir or biography or something like this, their manifesto. You have Gavin Newsom publishing a book. You have, I think, Josh Shapiro publishing a book. This is a very common thing. It's fascinating to me that instead of a campaign manifesto, JD Vance is putting out, in effect, as his opening salvo of 2028, this book on finding my way Back to faith. Remember that evangelical Christians have become essentially the absolute core of. Of the Republican Party today.
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B
So then maybe this is a campaign manifesto.
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D
That's my point and beyond. It's true that the evangelical voting bloc is the most devoted maga bloc, but there is a swing bloc that has gone, if you can carry it, it's carried most of the presidential elections over the top, and that's Catholic voters. And I remember talking to Karl Rove about this. He sort of figured it out back in the George W. Bush era, and they made a huge play for Catholic vot at that point. And if you look back, Obama won the Catholic vote, amazingly, because you think of it as going usually with the conservatives. It tends to be white, working class, to some extent voters. And if you can bring them along, it's a really important swing block of American voters. I'm not saying that's why J.D. vance converted to Catholicism. It's such a personal commitment. I'm sure that it's heartfelt in its own way. But it's an interesting time for Catholics in America because there is something of a schism within the Catholic Church right now between the far right American Catholics and the Pope. It happened with Pope Francis, and it's happening now. With Pope Leo. And there's a difference of opinion about this Order of Love, specifically where JD Vance came out and said Thomas Aquinas had the Order of Love when where the reason that you shouldn't care so much about foreign aid and immigrants is that the first Order of Love is to your family. And then there's circles that go out from that to your community and then your country. And Pope Francis came out and literally said, you're wrong. And in fact, the most important teaching of the Church is the story of the Good Samaritan. And that means there is no order. You help all.
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B
Amazing. I have to say, Jane, that's such an important piece of this and a timely bit of information. Just this morning, actually, Pope Leo posted on X, I guess this is, you know, the OG father figure here sort of subtweeting Vance and everybody else. But here's what the Pope posted, quote, God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. So, Susan, is it possible to position yourself as the Catholic candidate while also being at odds with the Pope?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think Jane is right that the American right has sort of broken with liberal popes over the last several decades. So there's a tradition of this at this point. And so I think it's a very profound debate that is playing out. And remember, we began the show talking about J.D. vance in Hungary. As we look towards what is the future of our vice president, I think it's worth people listening to the words that he says on the campaign trail where he is intervening in an election on behalf of not only an autocrat, someone who is supported by Vladimir Putin. So you have the United States and, and Putin's Russia on the same side in election with the rest of Europe, in fact, on the other side. But Jaydevants, he's talking about Viktor Orban as in effect, the tribune of Western Christian civilization.
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B
There is so much that unites the United States and Hungary, and unfortunately, there have been too few people who have been willing to stand up for the values of Western civilization. Viktor Orban is the rare exception that has unfortunately proved the rule. That's one of the reasons why I'm here.
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C
If the polls are correct, he's lagging very strongly behind after, I believe, 16 years in power. But I do think if Orban does go down to defeat, there will certainly be people in Washington who say that J.D. vance helped that out.
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D
The Vance effect, the Vance effect. I mean, but even if he does go down to defeat, what a terrible signal to send that he's there backing up an autocrat who is allied with Putin after having gone to Germany and allied himself with the far right faction in German politics after trashing NATO. He is part of this whole movement of far right Christian nationalists that is trying to create an alliance and rise.
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B
All right, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, we're going to look ahead, especially to 2028. The political scene from the New Yorker will be right back.
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E
Back.
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B
All right, guys. Vance and Marco Rubio are right now, I'd say, the front runners for the 2028 presidential race. Does Vance have a realistic past to being the nominee, given the things that we've laid out? Susan, what do you think?
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C
I mean, sure, he starts out certainly, I think not only with a path but with a lead. What's interesting is if you see the recent straw poll at the CPAC convention as a kind of a barometer where the Zeitgeist is heading, at least among the party hardcore activists. Rubio got 35%, which was a pretty notable jump from just 3% last year. Again, Vance still ahead. Name ID alone gives him an advantage. The perception that he was chosen by Trump. And if this is the party that's defined by Donald Trump, as long as he's Trump's guy, he might end up being their guy. But I will say two years, a long time. I have the sense that this is one of those kinds of fights we've all seen, whether in politics or in any kind of succession race. You can imagine a scenario where J.D. vance and Marco Rubio are bashing the heck out of each other to win the mantle of Donald Trump's successor. And then someone else emerges. Because the real question for 2028, of course, and Republicans is is that finally going to be the moment when Donald Trump is repudiated, when they believe that he has become, rather than a strength of the party, a political liability? We don't know. What we can say is that Trump's popularity has sagged and along with it, so has JD Vances, who right now I believe is probably close to the most unpopular vice president we've ever had, but reflecting an administration that is essentially the most unpopular administration since public polling began.
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D
I just don't know. I mean, you can't see things change so quickly in politics right now. I can't say that he's dazzled people on the stump so far. I'm not sure he's got incredible charisma, but obviously he's intelligent and ready to shape shift in any direction necessary.
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B
I'm reminded of something we talked recently with Morris Katz, who's a strategist who helped Mamdani get elected in New York. And one of the things that Katz has been saying is that if you as a political candidate have wanted to be president since you were five years old, he says it may be hard for people in Washington to imagine this, but most of the country thinks you're lame. They think you're a loser. And in some ways, Vance is a kind of hard figure to define in this particular way, because some of his life, clearly he was not on the presidential track. He wasn't like Al Gore, who always wanted to be president. Nothing against Al Gore, but it was kind of always pretty apparent to anybody. Vance is something else. But now he reads in so many ways as the ultimate Washington figure. So how does that break, do you think, Sue?
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C
Yeah, the insider curse is really a real curse. And I think again, it comes back to why being vice president, unless you're going to inherit the post in some way, is a tough position for a campaigner. I will note that when JD Vance debuted on the national ticket at that convention in 2024 in Milwaukee, I was really struck, sitting in the room for his acceptance speech, that it was not his room. These were not his people. They were not wildly enthusiastic about Vance, even though their guy, Donald Trump, had chosen him. It was a polite response rather than a rapturous response that they gave to J.D. vance. And I think, again, that reflects the fact that anyone who comes after Trump is going to have a really hard time inheriting a cult of personality and turning that back into a party. He certainly does have the attributes that we would associate with Donald Trump or the other famous demagogues of the past. He's not this kind of charismatic movement leader. And I think that would be a huge challenge for anyone, nevermind someone with some of J.D. vance's liabilities.
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D
I was just going to say another thing that Morris Katz, the consultant to Mamdani, said to us was no matter how good your consultants are and the backers you have have money and everything else, you have to have this thing that he said is it. I'm not sure that J.D. vance has the it.
- [35:17]
B
What I was thinking about as we were getting ready for this episode is that we talked just last week about how Donald Trump has no real personal understanding of the consequences of war. This is something that Bob Woodward said long before the start of the war. In Iran and just recently, fascinating little detail in the New York Times report about the run up to this war in which Donald Trump spoke to Tucker Carlson. And Carlson of course was saying, I don't think this is a good idea. And according to this reporting, he says, I know you're worried about it, but it's going to be okay. That's what Trump said. Carlson asked how he knew and Trump replied, because it always is. And that idea, the fact that everything always somehow works out, which is in its way a strange and accurate reading of Trump's own life, in which he's been insulated from the consequences of his own disasters over and over and over again, is a very different life story than Vance's life story in which consequences are a real thing. Whatever you think of the guy politically, the experience of his parents and his grandparents generation is all about the consequences of action and about how your life really can take all these negative turns after bad choices, bad decisions, bad things outside of your control control. So here we now see Vance at this clearly the most high stakes moment of his political life. And he seems to have some idea of consequences. Does that lead him to the right choices?
- [36:53]
C
It's led him to lie again and again and again and to change his views on matters that we would consider to be sort of profound matters of conscience. And, and I think he's also kind of uniquely protected from consequences. I mean, for me, what's so remarkable is that this man has risen in this way, turned on the institutions that gave him a chance, shed the identities and ideologies that helped him to rise. And Donald Trump has actually just forced this guy to get rid of, of probably the most defining remaining thing that we could say about his identity as a politician, which was that he took his experience from war and from serving on the ground in Iraq and said I'm committed to not betraying the young men of our forgotten rural areas and our forgotten middle of the country anymore. And he's sending him right into the middle of one of the most conflict and one war ridden parts of the world. And it seems to me that this is Donald Trump doing what Donald Trump always does, making a mess and forcing somebody else, in this case, J.D. vance, to live with the consequences.
- [38:10]
D
Honestly, if the Times account is accurate, which is always an if, cuz everybody's positioning themselves as we've said, but if it is, it's no small thing to be the one person in the room who said I think this is a bad idea. If he spoke, that is something that may help him and may show something of some kind of, you know, ideology or character. Now, we'll see where that leaves him as he's stuck in the middle of it. But that's not something to dismiss.
- [38:40]
C
I think what's really interesting is that it sort of underlines, as you pointed out earlier in the episode. What it underlines is that JD Vance is the classic guy, the ambitious guy who's willing to say, on the one hand, I'm opposed to this on principle, and on the other hand, sir, you are the greatest leader in the history of the world and anything you decide to do would be absolutely fantastic.
- [39:04]
B
I think we've concluded pretty clearly that he is, shall we say, the man of the moment in that sense.
- [39:10]
D
Exactly.
- [39:11]
B
Great to be with you guys.
- [39:13]
D
You too.
- [39:14]
C
Here we go. I feel like this is not our last conversation about Mr. Vance.
- [39:18]
B
Probably true. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Allison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Like.
- [39:56]
D
From prx.