JD Vance Just Gave Us a Preview of Trumpism Without Trump

We might be giving Trump too much credit, however. The radicalization of young Republicans predates his political rise in 2015. The racist, pro-Nazi far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that left one young woman dead was full of young Republican leaders, many of whom had taken official positions before the start of Trump’s presidential campaign. As my former colleague Alex Pareene wrote in an extremely perceptive piece shortly after the Charlottesville rally, “Racial resentment has been a driving force behind College Republican recruitment for years, but at this point it’s really all they have left to offer.” Trump was a catalyst of the Republican Party’s transformation, but his rise was also a symptom of its radicalization and turn toward resentment, in other words. But young Republicans’ Nazi turn started long before his fateful trip down the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015.

Where Trump was different—and one reason why he is so uniquely beloved on the right—is that he provided a permission structure for Republicans to be publicly cruel and hateful. His rise came in no small part because he refused to be cowed or, for that matter, to ever apologize. In 2016, he was openly misogynistic to Megyn Kelly (now a staunch supporter), racist toward Blacks and Latinos, and contemptuous of anyone who opposed him (including war hero and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain). The controversy this generated was a virtuous cycle for Trump. He would say something inflammatory, pundits and politicians would criticize him, and he would not only refuse to back down but mock them as well—a media circus that sucked out all the oxygen from rivals and competitors.

Vance—and most pretenders to the throne—surely understands on some level that he lacks the strange charisma that is central to Trump’s brand. A great deal about Trump is fake—his wealth, his expertise, his skill, his golf handicap, his skin color and hair, for starters—but his contempt for his opponents is organic. But Vance recognizes that he can imitate the president in his refusal to throw any supporter under the bus—and that he won’t face any consequences from his MAGA-drunk party for doing so. So he invents spurious defenses for 31-year-olds making Hitler jokes and spouting racial slurs, rather than calling on them to apologize because doing the latter risks conceding that Republicans have a problem with racism (not to mention sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so on). It also risks alienating allies Vance knows he’ll need when he launches his own presidential campaign two years from now and staffers he’ll surely want to employ should it be successful.