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For its first 177 pages, J.D. Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is a thoughtful read. He spends chapters meditating on trauma and fatherhood, on periods of feeling spiritually adrift, on coming to love a “majestic” faith tradition while remaining connected to the rowdy evangelicals of his childhood. And then you hit the moment where he stops thinking as a writer. 

After a section about his own adult baptism, the pinnacle of his faith journey, Vance launches, jarringly, into a chapter about his views of the international order. But before can get into his political career, he has to do a tiny bit of throat clearing: “Much has been made of my evolution from Trump critic to Trump supporter,” he writes. “To my critics, it was a politically cynical maneuver to gain political power. I doubt I’ll ever change their minds.”

From that point on, Communion, which came out on Tuesday, is a stiff and unimaginative political memoir. It deploys an eye-roll-worthy staff of straw men as it defends Trump’s policies. The voices he hears in opposition to harsh immigration policies are CEOs angry they have to pay American workers living wages. The advocates for women’s equality dream of a world in which young mothers have to spend late nights working at high-power law firms. The world leaders of the Munich Security Conference engage in “thought policing” instead of trying to solve global problems. The rest of the book is, in other words, what we might have expected from the vice president.

The tragedy of Vance’s new book is that this split........

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