Hillbilly Apprentice: An Interview With Trump Running Mate JD Vance

Vance talks like this at each of his campaign stops. The bottom line behind the boilerplate?

The lawyer trained at Yale Law School replies that the Republican Party agenda ought to be about making “it easier for young families to have children and raise them in prosperity.” The Appalachian son from Ohio says simply, “I want more Americans, right? I want more Americans.” 

Enter the latest addition to the Era of Trump. Donald Trump’s Hillbilly Apprentice has arrived.

The Republican vice-presidential candidate and author of the best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance represents a flesh-and-blood rebuke to what he describes as the elitist idea from Democrats “that we just don’t need to support working families anymore.” Aboard the chartered jet with his name on the side, he tells RealClearPolitics, “President Trump and I disagree.”

A man from the bottom now on top, he is the vanguard of the new right, a kind of populist conservatism unconcerned with the niceties of long-established GOP orthodoxy on everything from federal regulation of business to foreign wars. Charlie Kirk, the political activist who lobbied hard to make Vance the party’s vice presidential nominee, calls him “the perfect complement” to the former president. First, Trump blazes a trail with impulsive gesticulations and instinct. Then Vance follows, reinforcing and further rationalizing those arguments with a mix of polished talking points and unvarnished lived experience.

In the West, the MAGA faithful are overjoyed. “We’re going to win the state,” Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald told RCP. “Here’s why: union members, police officers, firemen.” It was a nod to the populist ethos embodied by Vance, whom the party boss says is “blue collar” and “one of us.” And for their part, crowds in Las Vegas and later Phoenix seem to appreciate the sermon he delivers about standing for “the least of these” against the “failed politicians in Washington.” 

Vance believes, like Elon Musk, that population collapse due to low birth rates is a bigger risk to civilization than other global challenges like climate change. The candidate declared enthusiastically, “I agree!” For this reason, Democrats have decried him and his policy ideas as not just “weird” but also “dangerous.” They aren’t alone. Some prominent Trump supporters, figures who should be open to Vance, are less than enthusiastic. Dave Portnoy, the influential founder of Barstool Sports, reacted to his proposal for families with children to pay less in taxes by saying Vance “sounds like a moron.”

“This is … idiotic,” Portnoy wrote on X, sharing an old clip of Vance defending the child tax credit. “You want me to pay more in taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” The policy in question has been in place for decades, but the jarring introduction to the Vance version of Trumpism was instructive. Portnoy wondered, “Are we sure this dude is a Republican?”

Back on the plane with RCP, Vance laughs at the criticism. He will turn 40 in two days. He is familiar with Barstool and the sort of bro conservatives who hang on Portnoy’s every word. “I like Dave. I listen to his podcast and his content from time to time,” he says, “but I would suggest that he should just look at what we are actually saying.”

“Dave should talk to his accountant about the child tax credit because we have long recognized that we should support working parents in this country,” he notes. Regarding the expanded tax breaks he plans to implement if the Trump-Vance ticket is elected, he adds, “We are not saying we want to raise the taxes of people who don’t have kids. We are saying we want to support working families because this country has been a disaster for them.”

If there is any confusion about Vance, it isn’t because he is hiding his views. While accepting the vice-presidential nomination in Milwaukee, he blamed the Biden-Harris administration for continuing the foreign interventionism, deindustrialization, and globalism that he insists have hollowed out the heart of the country. Bad trade deals, foolish economic policy, and disastrous wars: He lays it all at the feet of Democrats during each campaign stop. Yet those decisions were often bipartisan. Vance knows this and offers as much of a critique against the old GOP as a rebuke against the current White House.

At each stop, Vance, a former U.S. Marine, walks on stage to “America First,” an anti-war ballad from the Bush era by the late country legend Merle Haggard. “Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on the track,” the song declares, “and let’s rebuild America first.” Both the messaging and the foreign policy proposals espoused by Vance alarm the traditional internationalists inside his political party. The junior senator from Ohio appalled many of them while first running for election.

“I’ve got to be honest with you,” Vance told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during a 2022 interview. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” The vice-presidential nomination has made him only slightly less inflammatory.

It is a question of comparison, Vance tells RCP. His concern is with America’s territorial sovereignty more than Ukraine’s, he says. “My position is that we care a lot more about what is going on at the southern border than we do almost any other issue in the country, and certainly what is going on 6,000 miles away as tragic as it is.” The next day, Vance will travel to the Rio Grande to make that argument in person, blasting Vice President Kamala Harris as a failed “border czar” who has turned a blind eye to the “human toll” of her administration’s permissive immigration policy.

“We have got kids who can’t learn in schools because they have been overwhelmed with migrant children who shouldn’t be there,” he said within sight of Mexico. “We’ve got hospitals where the wait times have exploded because illegal aliens are standing in front of the line of American citizens.” All this injustice, he complains, has been ignored in the papers: “The media needs to tell the truth.”

Unfortunately for Vance, the press has spent more time focused on old, private comments than his current public arguments. There is plenty of fodder from his past.

Vance regularly condemns Harris for her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and he almost always takes a moment while on stage to recognize police associations for their service. Just days before his western swing, however, the New York Times published unearthed emails between Vance and a former law school colleague. A decade ago, citing past negative interactions, he wrote, “I hate the police.” Asked about those comments, Vance replies that not only have his views changed, but so has he.

“I wrote in a private email that I was pissed off at the police, and I guarantee that 10 years ago I was,” he explains of his evolving personal views before pivoting to policy. “But it’s different to write that in a private communication 10 years ago; what Kamala Harris has done is try to enact public policy that makes us less safe, that defunds the police, and that also releases a lot of violent criminals into our community.”

“What I would say is that being pissed off at the police, or a particular police officer 10 years ago, has never manifested itself in my actual policy preferences,” Vance continues. “It’s why the [Fraternal Order of Police] has endorsed me, it’s why I’m one of the most-backed candidates by law enforcement in the country, and the proof is in the pudding in my actual policy prescriptions.”

Vance has been on the defensive for most of his first two weeks on the ticket. Before his past comments about the police were unearthed, there was his quip about “childless cat ladies” and also his suggestion that children get votes that their parents are allowed to control. So, when the latest Trump controversy flared up, the candidate reacted with a mixture of amusement and what seemed like relief.

He said he wasn’t surprised at the media reaction to Trump’s remarks Wednesday questioning how Harris has characterized her racial identity. “The president is pointing out the very simple fact that Kamala is a chameleon,” Vance says when asked about his running mate’s suggestion, hours earlier, that the first African and Asian American vice president had “only become a black person” for political advantage.

“Depending on her audience, she changes who she is and what she says,” Vance replies before dismissing the entire episode as “hysterical” and praising Trump for being willing to “answer tough questions and punch back.”

Vance was likely relieved that, perhaps for the first time since accepting the nomination, the firestorm focused on his new boss, not him. It was also an opportunity for Vance to go on the offensive while demonstrating two of the traits Trump respects the most: an unwillingness to apologize and an unrelenting loyalty. Since entering politics, the senator has never let daylight emerge between himself and the former president. To dismiss Vance as an unthinking partisan, however, would be an error.

Vance sent the libertarian-minded editorial board of the Wall Street Journal into fits with his praise of Lina Khan, the head of the Federal Trade Commission, who the Journal calls “Elizabeth Warren’s favorite regulator.” She is not the most popular business watchdog. Business moguls are reportedly urging Harris to dump Khan if she wins the White House. All the same, the progressive has a bit of an ally in the Ohio Republican. Asked if the regulator deserves a second term, this time during a Republican administration, Vance admits that he has “actually never spoken to the president about Lina Khan.”

“There are things that I like,” he says of the regulator, “including the fact that she wants to take on Big Tech. Whether from the left or the right, they have way too much control over our free speech and our electoral politics,” he explains. By way of illustration, he points to Google.

“If you type ‘Donald Trump’ right now into a Google search bar, you get a bunch of shit about Kamala Harris,” he says. Try looking up the Trump assassination attempt, he adds, and the autocomplete function will suggest entirely different queries.

And it is true. Internet users shared screenshots earlier this week of Google suggesting searches about the attempted assassinations of Harry Truman and Gerald Ford, but not Donald Trump. The ether behemoth insists censorship is not at play, let alone election interference. Google told the Associated Press that the situation was the result of existing protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, noting that “no manual action was taken” to suppress information about Trump.

Vance is hardly convinced. The corporate skeptic says, “I actually agree with Lina Khan, I think my fellow Republicans have to wake up to the dangers of Big Tech.” Although that doesn’t mean they are entirely sympatico, he does offer her a completely unqualified compliment.

“The one thing I’d say is that, unlike almost every other person in the Biden administration, she at least kept the focus on public policy and not on DEI, ‘woke’ stuff. So even when we disagree with her, there’s at least a foundation of good faith disagreement,” Vance continued before concluding that the Biden administration’s most ambitious regulator “is not a crazy person.”

These are not the kind of things that Republicans typically say. But of course, Vance has proven not to be a typical Republican, at least when it comes to guarding the old, unflinchingly pro-business orthodoxies of the right. Neither is he too concerned with past connections.

Even before Vance came to Congress, the Heritage Foundation, in concert with over 100 other conservative groups, was preparing to remake the federal government. They drafted policy battle plans, put together a database of trusted conservative staffers for the next Republican administration to hire, and rehearsed a two-minute drill for undoing Biden’s legacy “on hour one, day one.” They dubbed the effort “Project 2025,” as RealClearPolitics was the first to report.

But then it came to the attention of Democrats. Trump repeatedly disavowed having anything to do with the plan as Harris and others encouraged the country to “Google Project 2025.” The proposals, which include abortion restrictions and abolishing the Department of Education, suddenly became a political liability.

When Paul Dans, former chief of staff of Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, departed the project earlier this week, the Trump campaign blasted out a statement celebrating the effort’s “demise.”

This could have put Vance in a bit of an odd position as Trump publicly rebukes what was once his favorite think tank. The senator recently wrote the foreword to a book published by Heritage President Kevin Roberts, praising the institution as not just “some random outpost” inside the Beltway but as “the most influential engine of ideas for Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.”

When asked if Trump World was turning its back on ideological allies they might need in the future, Vance reiterates simply that Project 2025 and the Trump campaign are not the same.

“Look, it’s a 900-page document,” he replies, admitting that “there are some ideas I like and a lot of ideas I dislike in Project 2025” without expounding on specifics. The mistake the media, the left, “and frankly even some people involved” in the effort have made, Vance explains, is “overstating” how much of a connection there is between the initiative and the campaign.

“Donald Trump speaks for himself. Nobody else speaks for him. The Trump campaign has its own agenda. That’s not the same as Project 2025,” Vance concludes. “And that’s just how it is.”

The episode perhaps illustrates how Vance did not just accept the Republican vice-presidential nomination as much as he accepted the role of MAGA heir apparent. Trump, 78, needs not just a right-hand man for the next four years, but a successor. Could that be the Hillbilly Apprentice who turns 40 on Friday? Vance is all Midwest modesty when asked that question.

“I think the president has started a movement, and I think it can go in many different directions, and a lot of people are going to have a say over that,” he replies. “Hopefully, including me.” But this presupposes that MAGA conservativism is a cohesive thing that will outlast Trump, the author of MAGA himself.

On this point, as his plane begins its landing, Vance is unequivocal. “What the president has started has fundamentally transformed the Republican Party,” he replies as the wheels of his jet are ready to touch the tarmac. “It’s not going to just disappear in the next four years.”