417. The Real JD Vance: America’s Next President? (Part 1)

Will JD Vance be America's next president, or its first king? What explains his journey from vehement never-Trumper to Trump’s Vice President and heir apparent? How far will he go in the pursuit of unfettered power? Enjoy this extract from Rory and Alastair's new mini-series on the Vice President of the United States, exclusively for members of The Rest Is Politics Plus. 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 and 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.

• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

  If Donald Trump dropped dead,

• 0:03Alastair Campbell?

  this guy is automatically president. How he has become what he's become from this background?

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I'm sitting in the back of this police cruiser. They've just arrested my mom. The relief of having survived another day.

• 0:15Rory Stewart?

  This is a story about something which we don't often talk about in America, which is class.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I came from a southern Ohio steel town, and it's a town that's really struggling in a lot of ways. Trump, I think that he's leading the white working class to a very dark place. I'm a never-Trump guy. I never liked him.

• 0:31Rory Stewart?

  But in the end, the main thing you need to understand about J.D. Vance is, given the choice between his intellectual statements and power,

• 0:41Rory Stewart?

  he chooses power every time. I was wrong about Donald Trump.

• 0:45Speaker 03

  Sundar, this is an evolution. Past comments that you've made. You've said idiot if you voted for him. Might be America's Hitler.

• 0:52Rory Stewart?

  This is where this other side of his personality comes through. He's reverting to blame, anger.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  We're seeing migrants kidnap our dogs and cats. They're eating the dogs. I think the election was stolen from Trump. We're effectively run in this country by a bunch of childless cat ladies.

• 1:09Rory Stewart?

  He needs to prove absolute loyalty.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  And what I worry about is the threat from within. Have you said thank you once?

• 1:16Alastair Campbell?

  You are part of the J.D. Vance story.

• 1:18Rory Stewart?

  A Twitter beef I didn't expect to see this week.

• 1:22Alastair Campbell?

  Rory Stewart, not as clever as he thinks, says J.D. Vance.

• 1:26Rory Stewart?

  This was the final destruction of the centrist dads because J.D. Vance had bossed me. But there's a bigger story, which is the story about this whole alt-right movement. Vance does not exist, really, without Thiel, either financially or politically.

• 1:42Alastair Campbell?

  Because this guy believes that America should be led by a monarch, which of course Trump believes as well. He sees him, frankly, as a future king because he says Vance can tell the story of America.

• 1:52Rory Stewart?

  And in doing so, he crosses the cusp into a whole new vision of the world, at the centre of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch.

• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there, Anister here. Now, as we said in yesterday's Question Time episode, we are doing finally our first ever miniseries for members of the Rest is Politics Plus, and it's all about, da-da, J D Vance.

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  That's right, and it's really great stuff. I really enjoyed putting it together. It's almost us making a sort of mini-documentary on J D Vance. If you'd like to hear the first episode right now, just head to the rest is politics.com to join the Rest is Politics Plus, where you'll find our cheapest rates. New episodes of our series will be dropping every Friday morning for members.

• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  We really enjoyed recording the series. It charts J D Vance's very humble beginnings in the Appalachians, tracks his career and his influences all the way up to his role as Vice President, where he calls out European leaders in Munich and chastises Zelensky in the Oval Office and tries to work out how to stay in with Donald Trump. Here's a clip. Hope you enjoy it.

• 3:17Rory Stewart?

  Vance is many things, many, many things for which we will be profoundly critical. But he's also smart. I mean, he's, he's a, he's a very clever person and he writes very elegantly. We'll get on to that. But, and he has these very interesting ideas. And for British listeners, there's some interesting parallels. He's a, he's got some echoes with figures like Dominic Cummings and other people actually within the new right movement, Conservative Party, that we can talk about a little bit later. In American politics, as you've said, he's part of this amazing development of, on the one hand, conservative Catholicism. He calls himself a baby Catholic. He's a born again Catholic.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And I recognize very much that I am a baby Catholic, that there are things about the faith that I don't know.

• 4:07Rory Stewart?

  But he's also got this whole other thing, a whole economic theory of the world, whole political theory of the world. And he spouts it out with the most incredible, there's a bit like Dominic Cummings, most unbelievable intellectual references. He's like referring to Saint Augustine. He's reading relatively obscure hackers and coders from Silicon Valley. He worships a man called Peter Thiel. So it's a really good route at a moment where liberal democracy, the sort of centrist politics that you and I believe in and grew up in is cracking. Here is somebody suggesting what some of the alternative ideas out there might be. And we'll get a chance to look into whether they actually stack up, how much they contradict.

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  And also, he's having to ride this Trumpian horse and stay close to him. So he is, he is on lots of levels of very interesting character. So let's go right back to the beginning. He was born August the second, nineteen eighty four. His name was James Donald Bowman. And I'm not sure how much I trust somebody who changes their name quite as regularly as this guy does. But there are reasons why he changes his name. And that's, that relates to his mother, who gets through men at a very, very, very, very speedy rate. I think she has five marriages, plenty of blokes in between. And he says that he, he actually, there's one very moving part of the book where he says that, you know, I hated school, but I hated home even more.

• 5:36Alastair Campbell?

  And the worst thing about it was this revolving door of so-called father figures.

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  On this for a second, there are many different things you can talk about in J D Vance's background. And we'll get on to talk about what it means to be Scot Irish, what Ohio and Kentucky were like, what the opioid crisis was like. But let's start just with what you've said with the mother and the different men and her drug addiction. One thing that people have said about Hillbilly Elegy when they're being critical is that it, it plays a little bit too much to stereotypes about what the US would be called welfare queens. So some American commentators reading this says this basically portrays a world of every conservative prejudice about people living on welfare. Single parent families, drug abuse, unemployment, multiple parents, poor educational performance.

• 6:26Rory Stewart?

  And a community that's often, as seems to be in the book, kind of almost opting out. I mean, how did you read, how did he analyze this kind of poverty, this kind of world?

• 6:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's of course, now that he is what he's become, it's kind of hard to. Genuinely to work through it without knowing him really well, which neither of us do. I mean, he wrote this book when he was thirty one. So at that stage, not even in politics, but you read it now that he is a politician. You kind of think, oh, I can see why he wrote this book. But very few publishers are going to take a memoir from a thirty one year old who hasn't done much. It had to be very well written, which it is. It had to be a really interesting story, which it is, and it had to say something deeper about America, which it does. I have a very strong sense, page one hundred and forty six to page one hundred and forty eight.

• 7:15Alastair Campbell?

  It's almost like you lot deserve the life you've got for the choices that you make.

• 7:22Rory Stewart?

  So in that part of the book, he's almost saying, and this is quite important for his politics. And he makes this point at other points in his life, that there are two ways of looking at the community he grew up in. One of them is the conservative view, which is it's their fault because they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They need to get on their bikes. And then there's the liberal view, which is that they're completely victims of their economic and social circumstances. And he sometimes says he doesn't like either view, but give us a bit of a reading.

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  I think he's very, he's very much of that, of that form world view. So he talks about living in a world of truly irrational behaviour. We spend our way into the poor house. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high interest credit cards. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for spending money, then declare bankruptcy, leaving the houses full of garbage. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the dust clears, when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity, there's nothing left over, nothing for tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy day fund. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we ease ourselves up, we do it anyway. And then he goes on and he goes on and on and on like this.

• 8:28Alastair Campbell?

  And eventually he says, we talk about the value of hard work, but we tell ourselves the reason we're not working is some perceived unfairness. Obama shut down the coal mines and all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance, the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. Now, that is diametrically opposed to what he's saying now. This is sort of Trump, you know, blame the Chinese, blame Clinton, blame Obama, blame globalization, et cetera. And there's a lot of that in the book.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just sit with it for a second. So what actually is your sense of this background? I mean, we've interviewed Angela Rayner, the British Deputy Prime Minister, who comes from a very, very extreme example of deprivation.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  I'd say it's on a level.

• 9:11Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 9:12Alastair Campbell?

  At least, at least.

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  And just to remind us, Angela Rayner, that's a mother who had serious learning difficulties, struggling to get food on the table.

• 9:22Alastair Campbell?

  Not having a bath for a week.

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  Lots, lots of unemployment to different generations in the family, travelling families, yeah.

• 9:29Alastair Campbell?

  I would, I would say that as it comes over in the book, and you know, query where there is exaggerated, that has been said, I've got no idea of knowing. But what comes over the book is a level of dysfunction and violence. And you almost, I mean, you have to hand it to him, how he has become what he's become, coming from this background. So just to go back to his name, he starts off with one name, James Donald. The Bowman name then goes because when his mum remarries, his dad is her second husband. The third husband, when she marries him, they change their names. He becomes John David Hamill because she didn't want Donald.

• 10:14Alastair Campbell?

  This is quite ironic, given the importance of Donald in his life, but Donald was the name of his real dad and she didn't want any reference to him at all.

• 10:22Rory Stewart?

  And Donald's the name of his real dad, that's quite interesting too.

• 10:24Alastair Campbell?

  There we go, there we go, there we go. So Don Bowman, he disappears and gives him up for adoption. His real dad, he later forms a relationship with him, which is really interesting and it sort of upsets the mum a bit. That's the second name. And then the third, what happens is that she becomes so troubled, so violent, so unpredictable.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  And she almost kills him in a car, doesn't she?

• 10:45Alastair Campbell?

  She almost kills herself. She almost kills him.

• 10:48Rory Stewart?

  So she basically.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  She tries to kill him.

• 10:49Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  He goes into this complete stranger's house, sort of screaming, help me, help me, my mum's trying to kill me.

• 10:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Alastair Campbell?

  And she calls the police and she also calls what we.

• 10:59Rory Stewart?

  The stranger calls the police.

• 11:00Alastair Campbell?

  Stranger calls the police. Then what happens is mama or papa is what he calls his grandparents. They basically take him over.

• 11:06Rory Stewart?

  Mamor is the, is the woman that he describes as having a bible and whatever it is, twenty four guns in the house, right?

• 11:13Alastair Campbell?

  She carries a gun.

• 11:14Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:14Alastair Campbell?

  She, she has shot people. The dad is a alcoholic.

• 11:18Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:18Alastair Campbell?

  The grandfather's alcoholic, I think he eventually stopped drinking, quite violent again.

• 11:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  There's a lot of violence in the book. There's one scene where he's describing being in the car with his mother, his sister and his grandmother. And the mother is driving while she's basically hitting the kids.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:36Alastair Campbell?

  Because of something that's done to someone. And then the mother, the grandmother is hitting her.

• 11:41Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:41Alastair Campbell?

  So you have this sense of real violence. The other thing that's really interesting about the thing about when his mum tried to kill him in a car.

• 11:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Alastair Campbell?

  And he got out and ran off, is that he then is very, very open about the fact that he lied in court.

• 11:55Rory Stewart?

  To protect his mother.

• 11:56Alastair Campbell?

  To protect his mother. And, and actually dotted through the book, there's quite a lot of, you know, I told this, I said this, but it wasn't true. I lied about this, I lied about that. But it's a level of dysfunction that is, I mean, you will certainly know people through your constituency work and, you know, I've met people who, but this is on a scale. And of course, what he says is this was not abnormal.

• 12:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Alastair Campbell?

  There were worse off families, there were poorer families, there were more dysfunctional families. And actually, when he did have his settled time with his grandparents.

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Alastair Campbell?

  And particularly the mama or the grandmother, he sort of, that's when he settled down a bit.

• 12:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's a couple of points that we can move on to here. And one of them is to remind people. At a moment where we're all obsessed with American growth, Mario Draghi has just written a European Union report, what can we learn from the US? All my friends who work in business and finance are pointing out that the European Union economy was the same size as the US economy 10 years ago. Now the US economy is 50% bigger, that the US is a quarter of the world economy, it's got the most productive, innovative firms in the world, its productivity is unbelievable. And yes, it's got this going on. I would argue much, much more of this type of extreme rural dysfunction poverty than anything that we have in the United Kingdom. Partly because of the scale. Part scale, partly also there's not a proper welfare state, there's not proper

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  health provision. And that leads me on my second point, which is, his mother is partly caught up in drugs and like many, many people in rural communities in the United States, caught up in opioids. Yep. And this matters again, because you know what Trump's doing on tariffs, he's talking about fentanyl and fentanyl is one of these opioids. So that's a story, maybe we can get into it a little bit, because this is maybe the most dramatic example. There's a wonderful, wonderful book on this whole subject, which really brings these communities to light, is of course, this incredible book by Anne Case and the wonderful Scottish academic, Angus Deaton. And Death to Despair, this book really looks at the way in which life

• 13:54Rory Stewart?

  expectancy is dropping in the most astonishing way, health indicators are dropping in a way that just doesn't make any sense in the modern world, because of this incredible combination of unemployment, opioid crisis and hopelessness. Both the criminal conspiracy by the manufacturers and the sellers of these opioids. The second family. Yeah, exactly. And the doctors who worked with them, but also the impact on on these communities. Yeah. And it doesn't happen in Britain. It's very interesting, because that is to do with And sometimes politics matters, and it really matters with things like an opioid crisis. Legislation is different in Britain. What doctors can do in different, what insurance does is different in Britain. The NHS is different in Britain. And all of that means that we don't have anything like this scale.

• 14:37Alastair Campbell?

  But I think part of the scale, so he comes from this part that's sort of known as Appalachia, which is sort of, you know, Georgia and Alabama in the south, right up as far as little bits of New York. And a big part of the industrial success story of America down the years, but then really badly hit by globalization and loads and loads of factories shutting down, factories moving in, then shutting down, jobs going to China. And the point he makes is that it became very, very, very difficult for working class people to find work. And the only way you could really find work is to get a college degree and the education system wasn't working. So I think you're right that the, the American system did not lend itself to helping these people recover from these global shocks. I mean, the, the, the scale of the drug stuff is, is just, you know, the way he writes about

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  it, just, he just takes it for granted that everybody's pretty much at it. And by the way, by the end of it, she, I think now is 10 years sober, but she was on heroin for quite a while. The other thing that comes through, I'd love to know and to talk to him about his relationship with his understanding of addiction. He obviously had to live with it, but my sense is that he finds, he finds it. He talks to some point about, you know, I've read all these garbage books about addiction. And, you know, I think even there he's got a little bit of, you know, it's a little bit of pull yourself together.

• 15:58Rory Stewart?

  To hear the full episode, just go to therestispolitics.com.