JD Vance Has His Reasons

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington on politics and demographics.

Vice President JD Vance, by far the front-runner in the contest for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, has become the leading elected official aligned with a movement questioning the founding principles of American democracy.

In sharp contrast to his political partner, President Trump, who governs from the gut, the vice president has imbibed many of MAGA’s political theories and made them his own. His steady shift to the right has been driven by a deepening affiliation with an intellectual network that describes itself with the seemingly innocuous term “the postliberal right.”

Here are some samples of Vance’s authoritarian-friendly thinking taken from a single 2021 podcast interview when he was running for the Senate with Trump out of power: “Step 1 in the process is to totally replace, like, rip out, like a tumor, the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American, you know, political religion, some sense of shared values.”

If Trump were to win in 2024, Vance continued, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

“The Harvard University endowment pays a zero tax rate. Maybe it’s time to tax that endowment,” Vance said, incorrectly, before noting what was perhaps his real concern: “The Harvard University endowment is ammunition that the left uses to penalize conservatives. We need to give them less ammunition. It’s like a basic principle of warfare.”

There are many more examples.

At the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vance told the audience, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He went on to quote Richard Nixon to say that “the professors are the enemy.”

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His essays on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appear every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.

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