424. The Real JD Vance: From Never Trumper to Vice President (Part 3)

How do you go from calling Donald Trump “Hitler” to becoming his most loyal ally? Why did JD Vance abandon the thoughtful, Christian conservative image that made him famous? And what does his transformation reveal about how power really works in Trump’s America? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in Part 3 of their first ever miniseries, The Real JD Vance, exclusively for members of The Rest Is Politics Plus. New episodes every Friday morning. Claim your FREE TRIAL at ⁠therestispolitics.com⁠. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Join with a FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com, for exclusive bonus content including Rory and Alastair’s first ever miniseries The Real JD Vance, early access to Question Time episodes and live show tickets, ad free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠GetFuse.com/Politics⁠ ⚡  Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠ Instagram: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Twitter: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ Writers: Callum Hill, Evan Green Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  The price of getting Trump's support is you have to say the election was stolen, or you have to say that Trump won the election and Biden is not the president.

• 0:07Alastair Campbell?

  Which he doesn't believe.

• 0:08Rory Stewart?

  How's it actually possible to say, "I'm this really serious heavyweight guy who cares about morality and character, and Donald Trump is abhorrent and the Antichrist", and then say, "Actually, I was wrong. Donald Trump's great"?

• 0:20Alastair Campbell?

  The shift has been so profound to accommodate Trump, to be alongside Trump, to be the vice president and hopefully set himself up to be president.

• 0:29Rory Stewart?

  He does it by choosing to abandon the thoughtful, Christian, empathetic, tolerant, conservative vision and instead re-embrace his hillbilly identity. This is where this other side of his personality comes through. He's reverting to blame, anger, anger with immigrants.

• 0:49Alastair Campbell?

  There is some talk that the Vance's favoured idea for the next election ticket is Vance-Trump.

• 0:57Rory Stewart?

  Vance with Donald J. is his running mate.

• 1:00Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. How better to keep Trump Senior on board than to have Trump the name still on the ballot?

• 1:05Rory Stewart?

  As the VP.

• 1:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there, it's Alastair here. Now, you may know Rory and I are right bang in the middle of our first ever long-form series, The Real J.D. Vance, exclusively available on The Rest Is Politics Plus. In episode one, we explored Vance's early life, the chaotic family background, the small-town struggles, and the personal myth-making that turned Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir, into a bestseller and made Vance a political rising star. In episode two, we looked at the billionaires who are backing him, a really powerful network of tech elites who frankly see democracy as a total inconvenience and who've alighted upon Vance as their political vehicle. Chief among them, a guy called Peter Thiel. He doesn't just see Vance as a future president.

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  But as a kind of American monarch. And now in episode three, we look at frankly, the most extraordinary transformation of all. That's J D Vance's journey from the days when he called Donald Trump Hitler to become his most loyal acolyte and vice presidential pick. He's abandoned the thoughtful, Christian, moral persona that he once performed and now leans hard into grievance, anger and conspiracy. So how do you make peace with your former self to get close to someone you once referred to as cultural heroin? What does it take to go from moral clarity to sycophancy? And what is the end game? To hear all three episodes in full, just go to therestispolitics.com and sign up to the Rest is Politics Plus. There's a seven

• 2:39Alastair Campbell?

  day free trial, no ads, loads of bonus content waiting, and it takes less than two minutes to do so. Here's a short extract from episode three. I really hope you enjoy it.

• 2:50Rory Stewart?

  The price of getting Trump's support is you have to say the election was stolen.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Rory Stewart?

  Where you have to say that Trump won the election and Biden is not the president.

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  Which he doesn't believe. But also, the other thing I don't find, we talked about his wife, Usher. You have to assume, I know that, you know, if you're in a political family, you're a political person, you have to assume there's a sort of, there's some kind of political crossover going on. Have there been no points since he stopped being an ever Trumper and started to sort of move over? Have there been no points at which he's gone home and his wife or other members of his close entourage have said to him, hold on, this is disgusting. You can't pretend you believe this. Or do you believe this? In which case, that person that I married, is that the same person? Now, I don't want to intrude into their marriage. I get the feeling with Usher that she's totally on board for everything. Looks like she's really enjoying it. Travelling

• 3:42Alastair Campbell?

  around the world, taking the kids to this Europe that they, that he seems to despise. But I just, I just don't get that nobody says to him, he does occasionally do difficult interviews, but I've very rarely seen him pressed on, hold on a minute, you said this, did you believe it? You now say this, do you believe it? What do you really believe?

• 3:59Rory Stewart?

  Let's go through what we think J D Vance does believe. Number one, I think he's pretty consistent in his social conservatism. He's pretty consistent in believing that the world was better in the good old days when people had more traditional values. And those traditional values range from anti-abortion to the good old days when you could appear extrajudicially kill people because you thought they raped someone and throw them in a lake, right? So there's that kind of sort of traditional, traditionalism. Number two, I don't think he's ever been very interested in the constitution. Oddly, when he was criticizing Donald Trump first time round, he's never been a great one for democratic theory, liberalism, human rights, constitutional protections.

• 4:43Alastair Campbell?

  That's because he believes it's still Yavin stuff.

• 4:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so he's an authoritarian, I think it's the second thing. So number one, he's traditional. Number two, he's an authoritarian. He buys into the kind of monarchist thing. Number three, I think he has this very, very weird thing going on, which is mesmerizing in the Christian right in the US, which is the ability to project a Christian message, which is about care for the poor, about humility, about truth and about integrity, onto this figure of Donald Trump, with his gold-bath taps, his contempt for the poor.

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  His lies.

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  His lies, yeah.

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  And corruption.

• 5:22Rory Stewart?

  And he's somehow able to do that.

• 5:24Alastair Campbell?

  But how can you do that? I think it is basically ambition. And interesting, when we interviewed David Frum, and Frum now, who of course Frum, people will know is very, very, very critical of Trump. He's also very critical of Vance, I think in a way even more disappointed because he sees Vance as somebody who's very intelligent, very driven, got a really good brain, but actually feels that now the shift has been so profound to accommodate Trump, to be alongside Trump, to be the vice president and hopefully set himself up to be president, is that he thinks it shows an absolute lack of character. You said to him, you once described him as having moral flexibility. Were you aware of that earlier on, that his ambition might drive him to shift? From Reaganite conservatism to Trumpism. And David says.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  No, not at all, not at all, quite the contrary. When he wrote his famous book, in which he has some nice things to say about me, for which I thank him. When he wrote his famous book, I I wrote back that I had just one criticism of it, which is, he said in the introduction to the book, he says that the story I tell here, I tell not because I'm an extraordinary person, but because I'm an ordinary person enabled by the promise of America. And I wrote back and said, you know, that's that's not true. You are an extraordinary person. And and I understand why you said the contrary, but it's important that you, in your private thinking, understand that what you did is not available to everybody because of your extraordinary drive. And but I said this as compliments, your extraordinary drive and gifts and energy and ability, they're they are beyond the ordinary. I think we tend to believe that when the good fairies give you some gifts, they give you all of them. And so you think with those gifts would also come integrity and character.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  I mean, he had showed so much character getting from point A to where I knew him, that you thought that it never occurred to me that character would be the defect, actually, that that was the deficit quality.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that's a very, very, very powerful statement.

• 7:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, and part of the reason why none of us saw this coming, why it's such an amazing left field, is the entire brand of J D Vance was supposed to be character. So to go back to his kind of intellectual formation and these Catholic philosophers he quotes, he's very interested in a guy who's currently in Hungary, no accident, hanging out with Viktor Orban, whose intellectual lineage goes back to Alistair McIntyre, which is all about virtue.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Rory Stewart?

  Virtue, character. Remember I said that, you know, he'd become a Catholic because he decided what he'd realized is that what matters in life is not success, not promotion, but character, right? So when somebody has made their entire shtick, character, Christianity, my love of Muslims and immigrants, my abhorrence of Donald Trump, to then turn out that actually the one thing you don't have is character.

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Rory Stewart?

  Is is kind of weird.

• 7:54Alastair Campbell?

  Problem. But I also I also.

• 7:56Rory Stewart?

  Except it isn't a problem. I mean, that that tells you a lot about the sort of modern political world. I mean, how is it how is it actually possible to spend, say, I'm this really serious heavyweight guy who cares about morality and character, and Donald Trump is abhorrent and the Antichrist, and then say, actually, I was wrong. Donald Trump's great. And.

• 8:15Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. So I suppose you read out some of those statements about the things that he said about Trump when he was not a Trumper. And there's just as many then statements explaining. Why he didn't think that anymore, including he's the best president of my lifetime. And this was in defence of Trump's actions on January the sixth. So it is, it really is a kind of very, very, very, very big leap.

• 8:39Rory Stewart?

  Let's just quickly get people up to date on the chronology. So I think we left it with Vance being a bit behind in the polls for the primary. He wins the primary because Trump actually, for the reasons you've talked about, comes strongly out behind him. And, and at that point, the attacks on him, it, it, he needs it, desperately needs it. Cause the only way of killing his opponent's attacks, which is this doofus was really rude about your hero Trump, is to have Trump himself come out and say, I love J D Vance, which, which he, he does in classic Trump style. And so in September twenty twenty two, just before the election, he says, J D is kissing my ass. He wants my support so bad. And then he adds, this is a great person who I've really gotten to know.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he said some bad things about me, but that was before he knew me and then he fell in love.

• 9:26Alastair Campbell?

  It's all about him, isn't it? It's a relationship. So, and, and one of the things, you know, as we know, Donald Trump likes to sort of sit and watch television all day long. It seems he watched some of the debates.

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  Vance debates in the primaries.

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Alastair Campbell?

  And one of them, he was, he was pressed on this thing. How can you go from that to that? And he says, I got baptized three years ago. I've had three kids since then. A lot's different.

• 9:48Rory Stewart?

  That's it. He's found God and Trump.

• 9:49Alastair Campbell?

  One of the things that's different is I've changed my mind about Donald Trump. He was a great president. At the end of the day, one of the things this race presents is an opportunity. Who actually agrees with Trump on the core issues of trade, immigration? Who's willing to fight for an America first foreign policy? I think it's me. I mean, that's quite an effective piece of communication.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  And this will bring us to Senate, but in order to achieve this, he needs to do two things. He needs to, as Trump says so politely, kiss Trump's ass, prove absolute one hundred percent loyalty. But number two, he needs to psychologically get himself into the place of justifying this. And he does this, and this is something that Ezra Klein has pointed out when we interviewed him on the podcast on leading. He does it by choosing to abandon the more thoughtful, Christian, empathetic, tolerant conservative vision, and instead re-embrace.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  His hillbilly identity.

• 10:46Alastair Campbell?

  He also starts to flirt with conspiracy theories. So, listen to this. 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 deadly fentanyl? This looks intentional. It's like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn't vote for him. And opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it. So he's basically saying that Biden is targeting MAGA voters with fentanyl.

• 11:13Rory Stewart?

  So this is where this other side of his personality comes through. Not the tolerant Christian intellectual side, but he's reverting to blame, anger, anger with immigrants. He begins to really get into, as you see, he's beginning to hint that he's in chart, he's in favour of protectionism. We already know he's gone from liberal democracy to authoritarianism. He's gone from free trade to protectionism. But one of the other things he's changing on is America's role in foreign policy in Zelensky.

• 11:40Alastair Campbell?

  There you go. Thank you so much for listening to that extract from episode three of our mini series, The Real J D Vance. To hear the full conversation between me and Rory, along with episodes one and two, just go to therestispolitics.com, sign up to The Rest is Politics Plus. You'll get a seven day free trial, ad free listening, new episodes of the series dropping every Friday morning. Takes you less than two minutes and just a couple of clicks. Just go to therestispolitics.com.