Editor’s Note:This analysis was originally published in CNN’s Meanwhile in America newsletter. Read past issues and subscribe here.
JD Vance is a different kind of vice president.
He’s not the Machiavellian master of Washington who works in the shadows – like Dick Cheney. Neither is he the safe pair of foreign policy hands – like a George H.W. Bush or Joe Biden.
The youthful Vance seems instead to have fashioned himself as the personification of his boss Donald Trump’s most extreme social media posts. His provocation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office last week ignited a diplomatic crisis. He relished traveling to Munich to insult America’s European allies. And Vance was front-page news in Britain after saying Ukraine needed better security guarantees than those offered by “some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” Vance later said it was “absurdly dishonest” to say he was talking about Britain and France – but those were the only allies to publicly volunteer for a Ukraine peace force.
Vance knows which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party. That’s why he ditched his contempt for the President – after reportedly wondering in 2016 whether Trump might be America’s Hitler. Now, in a party that worships its leader, the vice president is one of the president’s most prominent public admirers.
But Vance is a fascinating character. He rose from a hard scrabble upbringing in the Appalachians to the Ivy League. He’s exceedingly smart – one reason why his political positioning is often taken as evidence of nefarious calculation. Vance, who briefly served as an Ohio senator, despises traditional media and Washington elites so he’s a natural fit with Trump’s populism. He’s also a US Marine veteran – so he ought to know better about the contribution of US allies to the war on terror. And he got rich in Silicon Valley and has an in with the big tech barons who’ve moved sharply to the right and embraced Trump in his second term.
The vice president made his name with “Hillbilly Elegy” a memoir about his childhood in deprived areas of Ohio and Kentucky. The 2016 book explained how deindustrialization fostered poverty and drug addiction and an eventual political backlash against globalized free trade policies. It became a kind of handbook for understanding Trump supporters in his first term.
Given that background, it’s not surprising that Vance produced the campaign’s most eloquent arguments for an America First economic policy. At 40, he’s a potential heir to Trump – although the president amusingly refused to anoint him in a recent Fox News interview, unwilling to think about ceding his throne so soon.
Vance is the epitome of what many Europeans disdain about America. An isolationist, he sees no vital national interest in Ukraine. His bluntness and hint of smugness irk many foreigners, as does his support for Europe’s far-right – including Germany’s extremist AfD. A day before confronting Zelensky in the Oval Office, he rebuked Keir Starmer over free speech in the UK – although the British PM shut him down.
Since Vance is young, ambitious, ideological, and has an apparent chip on his shoulder about establishment intellectuals, there’s one vice president he does remind us of – Richard Nixon.
When Nixon joined Dwight Eisenhower’s ticket in 1952, he’d spent about enough time in the Senate to have a cup of coffee – just like Vance. And like his 21st century successor, he was a new breed of GOP ideologue – while the current VP upbraids “woke” liberals, Nixon hounded supposed communists living in the United States. And like Vance, Nixon had his eye on higher things. His ambitions and penchant for the dark side of politics sometimes caused tensions with his more experienced boss – a possible omen for the relationship between Trump and Vance.
Nixon used his eight-year vice presidency as a crash course in global affairs that was key to his success as a statesman after he finally won the big job in 1968. Vance however seems unlikely to emulate Nixon’s long global odysseys – he has political interests back home.
But don’t underestimate Vance. He’s risen high and fast. But will hubris lead him to fly too close to the sun?
Canadians are about to get a new prime minister
The Liberal Party will elect a successor to its unpopular leader Justin Trudeau on Sunday and that person will quickly replace him as prime minister. The favorite is Mark Carney – the former governor of the banks of Canada and England. Former Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, whose resignation was instrumental in Trudeau’s fall, hopes to beat him to the top job.
Suddenly, the Liberal leadership looks worth having. Trump’s trade blitzkrieg and demands for Canada to become the 51st state have transformed politics north of the border. Trudeau’s party once looked doomed to defeat by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party in an election due by the fall. But Poilievre’s Trumpy themes left him exposed and Liberal’s deficit in the polls has evaporated.
The big question now is what is next? Carney doesn’t currently have a seat in parliament, so will have to seek one at the earliest opportunity in a by-election if he becomes PM.
But might he take a gamble and try to exploit an explosion of patriotism and antipathy towards Trump by calling a snap general election? If he were to lose, he’d become a political punchline. But fortune favors the brave – and this may be the Liberals’ only chance of a shock rebound.