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“He’s gaining a lot of confidence, Mike, isn’t he?” That was Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday afternoon, talking rather indulgently about his 40-year-old vice-president JD Vance to House Speaker Mike Johnson — just before announcing heavy tariffs on most of America’s major trading partners.
Trump might have been wrong to celebrate the unleashing of a global trade war as “liberation day”, but he was not wrong on Vance. After all, a man who feels qualified to talk to the heroic president of a war-ravaged country as if he were a small child — demanding that Volodymyr Zelenskyy say thank you to the US president, who had recently described him as a “dictator without elections” — is nothing if not confident.
The same confidence, to which I might add arrogance and ignorance, was on display during Vance’s recent unsolicited visit to Greenland. The vice-president, with his characteristic mixture of earnestness and cloddishness, berated Denmark — a country he had previously accused of “not being a good ally” — for failing to protect Greenland from the threats of Russia and China. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told an audience at an American military base. “You have underinvested in the people of Greenland and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass, filled with incredible people.”
Greenlanders might be forgiven for not finding the vice-president entirely sincere in his flattery. The most startling part of the press conference, though, was when Vance answered a question from a journalist about whether Trump was serious about his desire to “acquire” the territory. “The president said we have to have Greenland, and . . . we can’t just ignore the president’s desires,” was his response.
The idea that Trump should be taken “seriously, but not literally” has been repeated so often as to have almost become a cliché. But Vance doesn’t seem to have got the memo. He appears to view Trump’s word as sacrosanct.
But while Trump appears to be driven most by a desire to be loved and accepted, Vance seems to be driven by a thirst for power. That could make him more dangerous. While Trump is often described as “unpredictable” and “erratic”, he has remained remarkably consistent on a number of issues, trade being one of them — a 1987 interview with Larry King, in which he fumes about other countries “ripping off America”, is worth watching in the current context.
Vance, meanwhile, has radically changed his position on all sorts of things that he now seems to be passionate about — notably on the existence of God (the former atheist now takes his religion very seriously, having converted to Catholicism in 2019) and on Trump himself.
And in both his devotion to Trump and to his radical ideology, Vance displays the zeal of the convert. In 2016 he wrote privately to a friend that he couldn’t decide whether Trump was simply “a cynical asshole like Nixon” or “America’s Hitler”; he now treats Trump as if he were God’s chosen supreme leader. When the president survived an assassination attempt last July in Pennsylvania, Vance told a rally that “God saved President Trump’s life that day”, and that “what happened was a true miracle. And on that day, America felt the truth of scripture.” So dedicated is Vance to the cult of Trumpism, in fact, that he is even happy to criticise the president for not being Trumpian enough, as was the case in the recent leaked Signal chats involving senior members of the administration.
There is a thin-skinnedness to Vance that is also worrying. Like Elon Musk, another recently converted and powerful member of Trump’s coterie, Vance gets into petty spats with journalists on social media, all the while getting his facts wrong. His best friend from university has said that the mockery of the Netflix adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of growing up in poor white America, was “the last straw” in his distancing himself from the “liberal elites” who had initially embraced him.
With three-and-a-half years to go before the next presidential election, Vance is currently the favourite of any party, with bookmakers giving him odds as low as 9/4, representing a more than 30 per cent probability of his becoming the next president. Second-favourite? Trump himself, who says he is “not joking” about the possibility. Bookies are offering 9/2 odds — implying an 18 per cent chance — of a constitution-flouting third term for the monarch of Mar-a-Lago. I’m not entirely sure which one of those stats to be more concerned by.
jemima.kelly@ft.com
