J.d. vance

J.D. Vance is clearly trying to thread a needle as he prepares to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year. On the one hand, the Vice President doesn’t want to appear too eager for the job. He insisted last week he might choose not to run because “we’ve got four little kids” at home. On the other hand, he told 2WAY's Mark Halperin Monday, “I think if I run, the President will endorse me.” But he left himself an out: “Because the President’s endorsement is so dispositive, you could absolutely see a scenario where the President says, ‘You know what? We need to let like this race play out and not preemptively prejudge the results.’” Vance himself has to perform a balancing act.

In Trumpworld, there are whispers that one of the boss's biggest failings is his choice of personnel. Some claim that Donald Trump's appointees are toadies, disasters or novices, and that they drag down the effectiveness of policies that make sense for America. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech chairman of Palantir, has criticized Trump's ill-chosen apprentices. In a podcast interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, Thiel laid out a harsh view of Trump’s second term compared to his first: I think the two administrations made opposite mistakes. The first administration brought in all these people who couldn’t agree, and it was just all this internal fighting. The second administration, I think overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests.

At the opening night of the first ever “midterm” Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump roasted the local Democratic candidate for US Senate, whom he calls James “Talafreako.” “He was also somebody that hated eating meat, but he ran a campaign to beat meat. He called it ‘beat meat,’” said Trump, to cackles of laughter from the MAGA faithful. “I don’t know what the hell he meant by that. These people are going to tell me ‘what the hell… he wants to beat meat?’ But it was bad for his image, so he started eating meat, and he recently – it’s getting worse. I’m getting myself in trouble.” That was the highlight of the President’s almost two-hour-long remarks.

The kids call it “Nixonmaxxing,” and I invented it 30 years ago. “I think that his historical record is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so,” Vice President J.D. Vance says about Richard Nixon, who has become, as a recent Wall Street Journal headline put it, “an unlikely new icon” for young conservatives. Maybe I can’t claim to have been the first teenage Republican to have embraced Nixon chic, but all the way back in 1996 a young Danny, irked by the banality of college application essay questions, decided to make his pitch to higher education by writing about the merits of the president who’d been taken down by Watergate. It was a way of daring colleges and universities to reject me.

At the start of the second Trump administration, the words on everyone’s lips were “breakneck speed.” On the day of his inauguration, Donald Trump declared a border emergency, designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations and challenged birthright citizenship. He withdrew from international climate agreements and ditched Joe Biden’s mandates on electric vehicles. He rescinded various Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives. On January 20, 2025, he issued pardons for individuals connected to the 2021 riot on Capitol Hill. And he established the Department of Government Efficiency (DoGE), which empowered Elon Musk to begin hacking away at federal bureaucratic bloat. Trump signed 143 executive orders in those first 100 days, more than any previous president.

There were many reasons why 2016 was a strange year. One of them was the halfhearted effort by people on both sides of the Atlantic to try to understand why voters had voted the "wrong" way in the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election. The book that was touted as an explainer for all of this was Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by someone called J.D. Vance about his upbringing in rural Ohio. After the election of Donald Trump, Vance’s description of family breakdown, de-industrialization, poverty and drug abuse was said to explain why so many Americans had voted for Trump. There was much that was patronizing about all this – mirrored in France by the attention paid to Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims.

After a week of international agonizing, it looks as if the first round of the latest peace talks between America and Iran will not begin today – at least, not formally. The Memorandum of Understanding has been signed – electronically by Iran and by Donald Trump’s hand in Versailles on Wednesday. But J.D. Vance’s big Switzerland trip, originally planned to kick off the talks, has been put on hold as the Lebanon issue reared its troublesome head overnight. Late yesterday afternoon, Hezbollah fired several salvoes of rockets at IDF targets, killing four soldiers. Israel responded with a wave of airstrikes in Southern Lebanon, killing 18 and wounding 33, according to the Lebanese ministry of health.

Vice President J.D. Vance went on The View Tuesday morning in the vain hope of talking about his new faith-focused book, Communion. Instead, he found himself locked in a debate with a group of ladies who subjected the VP to a show trial. Vance was questioned on topics including immigration and deportation, President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the release of the files. The most eye-catching exchange was with the show’s moderator, Whoopi Goldberg, concerning race. “What did black people do to this administration that has allowed it to really stigmatize folks of color?” she asked. “And you know how hard it is, you have folks of color in your family.