Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have
carried out Trump’s scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has
fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to
open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week’s assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting
on Democrats’ rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.
This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In
a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat” in the US government and “replace them with our people.” If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.
“You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,” he declares.
The President Jackson quote is likely apocryphal, but
the history is real. Vance is referring to an 1832 case,
Worcester v. Georgia, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the US government needed to respect Native legal rights to land ownership. Jackson ignored the ruling, and continued a policy of allowing whites to take what belonged to Natives. The end result was the ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Natives — an event we now call the Trail of Tears.
For most Americans, this history is a deep source of shame: an authoritarian president trampling on the rule of law to commit atrocities. For Vance, it is a well of inspiration.
J.D. Vance is a man who believes that the current government is so corrupt that
radical, even authoritarian steps, are justified in response. He sees himself as the avatar of America’s virtuous people, whose political enemies are interlopers scarcely worthy of respect. He is a man of the law who believes the president is above it.
Ultimately, whether Vance truly believes what he’s saying is secondary to the public persona he’s chosen to adopt. Politicians are not defined by their inner lives, but the decisions that they make in public — the ones that actually affect law and policy. Those choices are deeply shaped by the constituencies they depend on and the allies they court.
And it is clear that Vance is deeply ensconced in the GOP’s growing “national conservative” faction, which pairs an inconsistent economic populism with an authoritarian commitment to crushing liberals in the culture war.
Vance has
cited Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, as the source of his ideas about firing bureaucrats and defying the Supreme Court. His Senate campaign was
funded by Vance’s former employer, Peter Thiel, a billionaire who
once wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
He’s a big fan of Patrick Deneen, a Notre Dame professor who recently wrote a book
calling for “regime change” in America. Vance spoke at an event for Deneen’s book in Washington,
describing himself as a member of the “postliberal right” who sees his job in Congress as taking an “explicitly anti-regime” stance.