By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
I’m always interested in a good conversion story.
Whittaker Chambers found God by studying his baby’s ear. My friend Catherine
Bly Cox (AKA much better half of Charles), had a somewhat similar epiphany.
When her first child, Anna, was born, Cathy realized that she “loved her more
than evolution required.” Former communist David Horowitz famously realized
that he was on the wrong team when he became convinced that the Black Panthers
murdered his friend Betty Van Patter. Cat Stevens became a Muslim because God
saved him from drowning.
I’ve been looking for a similar Damascene moment for J.D.
Vance, who once believed that Donald Trump was “cultural
heroin” and possibly “America’s
Hitler,” for his remarkable conversion to Trumpism.
I’m not sure such a moment exists—at least in the public
record. He’s been asked scores of times to explain his conversion, and as far
as I can tell, it’s always the same answer: “I was wrong,” he explained at the
vice presidential debate last year, “... because I believed some of the media stories
that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.” He’s offered
this answer dozens of times in various phrasings. But I haven’t found much more
than this claim. The terrible liberal media was wrong about Trump, so Trump is
good.
It’s fine that he didn’t have an actual Trumpian
epiphany. Indeed, as he says in Hillbilly Elegy: “I don’t believe in epiphanies. I
don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a
moment.”
Then again, he did
say that he had an epiphany of sorts when he talked to
a CEO of a hotel chain in 2018. The fact that the CEO (allegedly) wanted to
hire immigrants at a lower wage and thought Vance would sympathize caused Vance
to abandon his views on politics and economics. “The fact that this guy saw me
as sympathetic to his problem, and not the problem of the workers, made me
realize that I'm on a train that has its own momentum, and I have to get off
this train or I'm going to wake up in 10 years and really hate everything that
I've become,” Vance said.
That has more of a ring of truth to it than his
explanations of why he became a Trump evangelist. But I still find it lame. If
you have anything like an informed economic philosophy or worldview—whatever it
may be—discovering that a hotel chain CEO wants to keep labor costs down
shouldn’t do much violence to it. I mean, this is not a shocking revelation.
What’s more shocking is that anyone would buy his
conversion narrative vis-à-vis Trump. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the
right, with a father for whom complaining about the New York Times was a
cherished pastime, but the idea that a self-described conservative uncritically
accepted what the “mainstream media” told him seems like a pretty damning
confession: “Hey, everybody, I was too naïve and media-illiterate to get an
internship at The American Spectator!”
But that’s the thing, I don’t actually know anybody who
believes Vance’s conversion tale. Attacking the media isn’t an answer to the
question, “Why did you change your mind about Trump?” It’s a response, a
talking point, and nothing more.
The people who like Vance don’t really care that it’s a
dodge. Heck, they like that it’s a dodge, in the same way that fans of Zohran
Mamdani like his polished but vacuous responses to questions.
To some extent, this has always been how politics works,
particularly for partisans. If your guy successfully evades a problem or
pitfall, that’s good enough, because you want your guy to win. But these days,
it’s the essence of politics. Saying what you need to say for political
advantage is all you need to say. If the answer is honest or persuasive, that’s
better—maybe—but honesty and persuasiveness are not anything like a
requirement.
When Vance repeatedly spread lies about Haitian
immigrants eating dogs and cats (even after his own aides were told they were baseless), he defended the dishonesty in classically leftist terms. “If I have to
create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the
suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” That’s the
same logic Al Sharpton used to justify his lies about Tawana Brawley being raped: “The story do sound
like bulls–t, but it don’t matter. We’re building a movement.”
This is one of the key differences between Trump and
Vance. As Eli Lake has brilliantly explicated, Trump is a
consummate bullsh-tter. Lake quotes the late philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s
fascinating essay, On
Bullshit:
The liar is limited by his
commitment to saying something that conflicts with the truth. So there’s a
constraint upon him that he has to respect. Whereas the bulls–tter, who doesn’t
care about truth, you know, can go anywhere he likes. And there’s a kind of a
panoramic view that he can take that the liar can’t take, because the liar is
limited to inserting in a specific place in the system of beliefs a false
belief or a true one. Whereas the bulls–tter can go anywhere he likes and draw
any kind of picture or any kind of panorama of beliefs that serves his purpose.
Vance isn’t a bulls–tter. He’s just a liar. He’s good at
it, or at the very least he’s very comfortable with it, which is often half the
battle. I don’t think he’s nearly as good at it as Bill Clinton was. But that’s
like saying a good professional baseball player isn’t as good as Babe Ruth or
Shohei Ohtani.
Vance’s specialty is in dissembling, distorting, and
distracting. He frontloads falsehoods, omits inconvenient facts, and changes
the subject to useful irrelevancies and enemies of his base.
For instance, last week Politico reported that the leadership of the Young Republicans routinely texted
all sorts of vile things about Jews, blacks, slavery, the Holocaust, rape, etc.
Vance leapt to their
defense. “Grow up! I’m sorry, focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what
kids say in group chats. ... The
reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys—they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do.” On Twitter, he
called it a “college group chat.”
I’ll confess, I bought Vance’s dishonesty to a certain
extent. Last week on The Remnant when the story was fresh, I repeated
the claim that the participants were “kids.” I still condemned it. But the
truth is the participants weren’t kids. They ranged from their mid-20s
to 35 years old. So they were about the same age Vance was when he wrote Hillbilly
Elegy, and in many cases older than Graham Platner was when the Maine
senatorial candidate got
an S.S. tattoo. Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney
general, was in his early 30s when he sent those
awful text messages. Paul Ingrassia, the grotesque, bigoted goober who just
withdrew from consideration to be the head of ethics
in the Justice Department, is 30.
Vance knew this. He just lied. The purpose of the lie was
to provide cover for the sorts of young, angry, bigoted denizens of the
“manosphere” he and his political patron Tucker Carlson consider to be their
core constituency and to refocus attention on the left. That he used Jones’
texts as the justification for aiming all condemnation leftward when one of the
offending Republicans, Samuel
Douglass, is a young state legislator just like Jones was when he texted
horrible things, was irrelevant. When Republicans say evil things, they’re just
“kids.” When Democrats do it— “Attack!”
President Vance?
It’s not a surprise to me that Vance’s serious fans don’t
care about any of this very much—and he does have a great many serious people
who admire him. For a certain kind of intellectual populist or nationalist in
the Trump era, Vance is a beacon of hope. They know that Trump is a bulls–tter
whose attachment to the kind of politics and policy they want is often
incidental. Trump’s economic philosophy cannot successfully be translated into
a coherent theoretical framework. It’s too chaotic, mercurial, and glandular
for that. But Vance, they believe, is the real deal.
There’s a deep discomfort among many serious-minded
people who want a more serious defender of their ideas than Donald Trump. They
hear amid the noise of Trump’s presidency a signal of actual policy approaches
that could transform America to their liking. It is precisely because Vance is
a fairly conventional liar and not a bulls–tter that makes him attractive.
Again, the bulls–tter doesn’t care what the truth is. The
liar knows the truth and wants to steer you away from it. Vance has a goal, and
he’s willing to defend and apologize for the chaos in order to achieve that
goal.
The goal, of course, is to be president of the United
States and do Trumpism without the embarrassing bits.
The amount of hopeful chatter and wish-casting about
Vance’s prospects of being the next president is remarkable. Now, I don’t think
it’s outlandish. He’s the incumbent constitutional understudy to a 79-year-old
president. On actuarial terms alone, he’s got a plausible shot.
But I’m profoundly skeptical that if he runs in 2028 not
as an incumbent, he’s the shoe-in many see. For starters, do you know how many
vice presidents have been elected straight to the presidency since the
ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804? Two. Martin Van Buren
and George H.W. Bush. Being vice president definitely increases your odds of
becoming president someday, but getting elected straight to the presidency from
the vice presidency is exceedingly rare.
Andrew Jackson, Van Buren’s predecessor, was arguably
quite popular at the end of his term, and I know many people like to compare
Trump to Jackson. But Van Buren benefited from the fact that the Whigs
nominated four different candidates to run against him. The Dems may
indeed be in disarray in 2028, but I suspect they’ll still nominate just one
candidate.
Bush’s predecessor was Ronald Reagan, and he was
definitely popular. Even so, Bush was fortunate enough to run against Michael
Dukakis.
Regardless, most of the scenarios for Vance to succeed
Trump depend not only on Trump being popular in 2028 but on a majority of
voters wanting four more years of Trump. That’s possible, but for now seems
fairly unlikely. Bush pulled off being mildly critical of Reagan—he promised a
“kinder
and gentler nation”—without alienating too many Reagan fans. Personally, I
don’t think Vance has demonstrated anything like that kind of finesse. He’s not
nearly as good on the stump as his boosters think he is. His recent speech to the Marines was decidedly meh, as was his convention speech in 2024.
Vance’s skill as a politician has mostly been at the
inside game. He cozied up to tech bros when he ran for Senate, and still needed
to be bailed out by Mitch McConnell’s PAC. He got the vice presidential
nomination for sucking up to Trump. And he still only won in Ohio by about 6
points. Trump had carried the state two years earlier by 8 points. In the same election year as Vance’s
6-point win, the incumbent governor won by 25 points, the Republican attorney
general and secretary of state both won by about 20 points, and the treasurer
by 17 points. In other words, lots of Republicans didn’t like him.
But even if I’m being unfair, which is possible given my
general opinion of Vance as a politician, does anyone think Trump will have the
same maturity and grace that Reagan did? Will his fans tolerate anything like
Bush’s “kinder and gentler” talk? Will anyone else buy it coming from the guy
who spent four years lying about immigrants and running cover for Nazi
cosplayers?
And this assumes he’ll get the GOP nomination. Of course,
Vance is the favorite right now. He’s the only person everyone knows will run,
and he’s deeply bound up with the Trump fundraising machine. But contrary to a
lot of progressive protestation about money and politics, having a lot of money
is necessary but not sufficient. Just ask Ron DeSantis, Phil Gramm, and
countless others.
One of the weirdest things about MAGA world is its
unalloyed confidence that everything they are doing is popular. I think some of
it comes from believing Trump’s B.S. But some of it is also a consequence of
nationalist and populist rhetoric. They insist they represent “the people” and
so therefore everything they do must be popular as a result. But that’s just
not true. Trump’s poll numbers aren’t good. Even his handling of immigration is
now underwater.
But I think the biggest reason that a lot of people think
Trump is more popular than he is stems from the fact that Republicans and
conservative media “influencers” are scared of criticizing him. If you don’t
hear dissent from the right, and all you consume is right-wing media, you can
be forgiven for thinking everyone is psyched about how things are going.
But you know what? None of that will work the same way
for Vance. Republicans are scared of Trump, not Vance. Trump unifies the right
in ways Vance won’t. Vance’s fans won’t like criticisms of Vance, but they
won’t take it personally the way Trump’s fans do. Vance is a politician, not a
celebrity. He’s nowhere near a good enough politician to turn himself into a
celebrity. And he won’t scare away every other politician who wants the
nomination.
Back when Hillary Clinton was first running for
president, I was amazed at the degree to which her fans believed that her
husband’s skills and appeal were a kind of marital community property. Bill was
charismatic, Hillary was the kind of woman who chastises you for being too loud
in the library. If your husband is a great piano player, getting a marriage
certificate doesn’t magically make you a concert pianist.
The same point applies to Vance. Whatever magic Trump
has, Vance doesn’t have it any more than Mike Pence did. Moreover, the Trump
coalition isn’t a crown that can be handed off to a successor, because nothing
holds the Trump coalition together except for Trump himself (and right now the
Trump coalition doesn’t even look like a majority). The Trump coalition is
divided over everything from tariffs to Israel to tolerance for crude Nazi
joke-telling jabroneys. Trump can spackle over party differences with his
bulls–t and threats. Vance cannot hold it all together with mere lies.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Rubio, DeSantis, Cruz, Cotton, and
all the rest will put aside their ambitions and get out of Vance’s way. Or
maybe I’m right, but the Democrats will nominate a Dukakis and make me look
wrong just the same.
But for now, I’m just not buying it.
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