JD Vance once feared Trump was ‘America’s Hitler.’ Now his own authoritarian tendencies are coming to light | JD Vance

JD Vance once feared that Donald Trump was “America’s Hitler.” On Saturday, the Ohio senator claimed that Democrats who called Trump “an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs” were behind the assassination attempt the former president survived.

But on Monday, after Trump named Vance his pick for vice president, concerns about Vance’s own authoritarian tendencies came to the fore.

“Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence would not do on January 6: bend over backwards to allow Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda to come to fruition, even if it means breaking the law and regardless of the harm it does to the American people,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s re-election campaign manager, told reporters.

Vance has indeed said that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what Trump and his supporters demanded and blocked the certification of results in key states won by Biden in the previous election weeks.

On Monday, a profile of Vance was widely shared. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, author of a new book called The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, described political views that are “fundamentally incompatible with the core principles of American democracy.”

Beauchamp described how Vance repeated Trump’s lie about the stolen election; called for a criminal investigation into a reporter he disliked; advocated for the politicization of the federal bureaucracy; and believes presidents can simply ignore the law.

“JD Vance,” Beauchamp writes, “is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that radical, even authoritarian, measures are justified in response.

“He sees himself as the embodiment of the righteous people of America, whose political enemies are interlopers unworthy of respect. He is a lawman who believes that the president is above all.”

Trump’s lawyers recently made this argument to the Supreme Court, which was comprised of right-wing justices, and they won. But Trump will eventually be gone, and as Vance recently told Politico, “the big question is who comes after him.”

It appears to be Vance, now the leading elected representative of the “New Right” political thinking championed by figures such as PayPal co-founder, tech billionaire and influential donor Peter Thiel.

Biographer Max Chafkin has described Thiel’s politics as “closer to authoritarianism” than typical Silicon Valley libertarianism, “super-nationalist (and) aspiring to some kind of more powerful chief executive or … dictator.”

Although Vance is an admirer of writers who advocate “monarchical” government or “regime change,” Thiel himself once wrote, “I no longer believe that liberty and democracy are compatible.” He also played a key role in the creation of Vance.

Born in Middletown, Ohio, in 1984, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marines, became a military journalist and served in Iraq. A graduate of Ohio State and Yale Law School, he became a venture capitalist, notably for a Thiel company in Silicon Valley.

Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in 2016. Subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, it was a huge bestseller, widely acclaimed for its portrait of a region where support for Trump is strong.

Vance returned to Ohio and ran a nonprofit and venture capital fund. Initially opposed to Trump, he switched sides and won his Senate seat in 2022, with Trump’s support and financial backing from Thiel.

During that campaign, the libertarian magazine Reason said Vance was “more willing than most members of the New Right to openly declare his intention to use the state in blatantly extralegal ways.”

The magazine noted Vance’s assertion that “conservatives should use the taxing power to ‘seize’ the assets of ‘woke and left-wing’ nonprofits such as the Ford Foundation and universities such as Harvard.”

Vance has continued to target universities that he believes should be brought under state control. In May, speaking to CBS’s Margaret Brennan, he said, “If they’re not educating our kids well and they’re burdening the next generation with mountains of student debt, then they’re not holding up their end of the bargain.”

“I think it is quite reasonable to say that there needs to be a political solution to this problem.”

Asked about his admiration for the way Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, has taken control of universities in that country, Vance said Orbán has “made some smart decisions … that we in the United States could learn from.”

On Monday, reactions to Trump’s nomination of Vance highlighted his affinity with Orbán. Many also focused on Vance’s warm words toward Project 2025, a plan for a second Trump term coordinated by the Heritage Foundation that advocates radical right-wing reform in all areas of government.

Trump has denied any connection to Project 2025, given the power of Democratic attacks on the issue. But Vance has long advocated an attack on the federal government.

As Reason notes, Vance told controversial “manosphere” figure Jack Murphy in 2021: “A lot of conservatives have said we should… essentially eliminate the administrative state. And I support that.”

“But another option would be to take over the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all the people. I think Trump… will probably win again in 2024, and he will win by such a margin that he will be president of the United States in January 2025.

“I think what Trump should do, if I had to give him advice, is to fire all the mid-level bureaucrats, all the civil servants in the administrative state.

“Replace them with our citizens, and when the courts – because you will be brought to justice … arrest you, stand before the country as (President) Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The Chief Justice has made his decision. Let him enforce it now.'”

As Beauchamp noted, Jackson’s quote “is probably apocryphal, but the story is real.”

In 1832, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must respect Native American land rights. Jackson simply ignored the ruling. The result was the forced removal of 60,000 people, an outrage known as the Trail of Tears.