Clippings From Politico

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-55-things-trump-vp-00167882

“I regret being wrong about the guy,” Vance said about Trump several days later on the campaign trail. “I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.” He later added: “He’s the best president of my lifetime.”

In April 2022, Trump endorsed Vance. “J.D. is kissing my ass he wants my support so bad,” Trump later said.

Vance’s primary supporter inside Trump world was Donald Trump Jr. His most prominent supporter in the conservative media: Tucker Carlson. His biggest donor: Peter Thiel (to the tune of $10 million).

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” Mitt Romney told his biographer in 2022, as Vance was running for the Senate.

On Nov. 8, 2022, Vance beat Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan 53 percent to 47 percent, underperforming other state-wide Republicans by 11 points.

In his victory speech, he thanked his Mamaw: “You’re not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you’re not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me,” he told the audience.

In the Senate, he has emerged as a dogged defender of Trump and the standard-bearer of the “New Right,” a loose movement of young conservatives trying to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist and culturally conservative direction.

His most ambitious legislative initiatives have arisen from partnerships with progressive Democrats: a sweeping railway safety reform bill co-authored by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and an executive pay claw-back provision drafted with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Neither bill has received a vote on the Senate floor.

He is a leading critic of U.S. support for Ukraine. “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance told Steve Bannon in an interview in 2022.

He has suggested that the Biden administration is allowing fentanyl to cross the Southern border as part of a deliberate strategy to kill Republican voters: “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl. . . . It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”

In June 2023, he put a hold on all Biden administration appointments to the Justice Department to protest the indictments of Donald Trump. He has called Trump’s hush-money trial in New York a “threat to American democracy.”

He believes that “the culture war is class war” — that pushing back against the cultural values of progressive elites is necessary to advance the economic and political interests of the working class. In the Senate, his culture war initiatives include a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for transgender kids, a ban on federal mask mandates, and crack-down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities. He publicly supports a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother.

He has said that if he had been in Mike Pence’s shoes in 2021, he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election: “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” he said in February.

He has encouraged Trump to defy the Supreme Court if the justices prevent him from firing executive branch officials.

“He’s by far the smartest and the deepest of any [senator] I’ve ever met,” Tucker Carlson has said.

“I’m sure he’ll run for the presidency one day,” said Bannon.

“Trump will, at most, serve four years in the White House,” Vance has said. “There is a big question about what comes after him"