Donald Trump Selects His Wingman

First things first: Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate on Monday evening is insignificant. The office itself is insignificant by its nature and doubly so to Trump himself, who historically extends the sort of care to the people that make themselves subservient to him that most people reserve for single-use plastics. Vance himself, who is a greasily servile striver even by the standards of his diseased cohort of sociopathic Yalies, is insignificant as well. He’s a suck-up, mostly, a dress shirt taken straight out of the packaging and stuffed to bursting with familiar antique bigotries and exhausting contemporary Reaction Industry cynicisms; he is readily identifiable as an adult convert to Catholicism at 100 paces.

No real thought went into the selection, although it feels redundant to point that out given the parties involved. Trump has long seemed unsure of what a vice president might be for—the most obvious answer would never occur to him; whatever might happen to the world after he leaves it is everyone else’s problem—and on that specific issue you almost have to hand it to him. To the extent that Trump’s personal opinion of Vance is known at all, it is that he thinks he is a “handsome son of a bitch.” That Vance is good at sucking up to Trump is not really surprising, given that he has built his career around doing that. If it is probably a challenge to burp up appreciative laughter and meaningful so-true-sir’s at Trump’s material—musty stand-up gags about Diet Coke and doomy skeins on The Invading Brown Hordes, delivered in the same register and whatever order strikes him—it is also one that Vance has been practicing for his whole life.

What Trump actually thinks of Vance doesn’t really matter, either, although it seems fair to guess that Trump identified in Vance, who worried in 2016 that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” and has since done an ultra-unctuous 180 in his opinion of either Trump or Hitler, a shamelessness that could come in handy down the line. Trump surely noticed that Vance has some very rich patrons among Silicon Valley’s community of increasingly reactionary adult libertarians. These two goofs belong together insofar as they are both crushingly status-conscious and gnarled by vanity and grievance in ways that are entirely, hilariously unsympathetic. Only a supremely unhealthy culture could have produced either man; it is honestly pretty fucking wild that both can be so profoundly monstrous, so eat-the-world vicious and so annihilatingly petty and vengeful, while also remaining so uninteresting.

They are flotsam from different eras of American reaction, Trump a sea-burnished knob of gilded plastic from a 1985 New Year’s Eve party at which more than one person drowned and Vance a creature that evolved to live near the sulphuric ocean-floor money vents that sustain conservatism, carried up from those depths and cast, worryingly translucent and grasping and very hungry, upon some scandalized Connecticut shoreline. Tides will carry them in or out, but it is their nature to keep showing up. They do not, could not, really have a relationship. That reflects their damage, but also that of the movement they represent; their dynamic with the broader world allows for only enemies and patrons, and they live to destroy the former and will happily destroy themselves for the latter. Most Americans fall into that first category.

It is the business of the industry that covers all this to make it seem like something other than what it is, and in that industry’s terms it is significant that Trump chose Vance. Or anyway it is as significant, in roughly the same way, that it was significant when Adam Schefter reported last March that the New York Jets were “actively working to reach an agreement with Packers’ free-agent WR Allen Lazard, per league sources.” That was obviously not important, but it was something not-yet-known that was newly becoming knowable, and therefore news.

Sort of. But it was, more than that, something kind of like gossip and also something even less interesting than that. There was just nothing much to it. It was an institution that had for lack of any better idea pegged its fortunes to a volatile, narcissistic, rapidly deteriorating famous person publicly shopping for a playmate that their difficult chosen protagonist might at least tolerate. That is not a very meaningful or interesting thing, really. But also: which playmate?

There were other considerations—what that playmate might offer, relative to the other available options at that price point—but fundamentally the stakes were pretty low, both because of the roles involved and because a pacifier is finally just a pacifier. It might be a well-reviewed model, it might have a USB-C port in it for some reason or just lower in latent heavy metals than less expensive ones. But it is a thing to buy and throw out, and whose purpose in the time in between is more or less to be spat onto the floor whenever the mood moves the person who actually matters. Lazard was targeted 49 times and caught 23 passes last year, none of them thrown by his former Green Bay teammate Aaron Rodgers, whose arrival preceded and precipitated Lazard’s, and who got injured moments into the team’s first game; Vance has spent the last two nights sitting in a box near Donald Trump, both of them pursing their lips and pretending to pray and clapping when it was time to do those things. It’s tempting to write something like “it’s a living” here, but that’s not quite right.

The jobs aren’t the same. Lazard, like everyone else that plays his position, is only as effective as his quarterback lets him be; it’s not an equal relationship, but it is a symbiotic one. Vance is just as dependent upon his vile patrons, but servile enough to revel in it. There is nothing Vance actually wants or believes that is important enough to him that he will not instantly replace it with the preferences of the elite creeps that have sponsored him along his rise, from the conservative connector and Yale Law professor Amy Chua to the passel of unsettling Silicon Valley donkeys that handed Vance his venture capital sinecure and promised millions to Trump’s campaign after his selection. It is not just his work but something like the essence of the man himself that Vance is so eager to do whatever is necessary to ingratiate himself with this diseased and disastrous cohort.

On the merits, the movement is a sham and its policies are pure curdled kitsch. Vance made his name with a memoir trading in ancient, acidly cynical conservative pablum about values, then smoothly pivoted to the speed-addled futuristic Caesarism of his latter-day Silicon Valley patrons. As that super-class of rich freaks grew darker—as they stopped seeing the majority of Americans as insignificant and began seeing them as something less than human—Vance changed his coloration in lockstep. There are various scrims draped haphazardly over this, some stuff about tradition and working people and the old stuff about values and faith, but all of it is transparently false. None of it fits together, or has to; the lack of effort that Vance has put into his more populist gestures as an elected official, which amount to conflating “working class values” with his party’s (and paymasters’) musty bigotries and advocating for toothless alternatives to unions, is as obviously insulting as the policies themselves. (The cosmetic efforts Vance put into trying to address the social problems he lavishes over in Hillbilly Elegy are somehow even more so.)

Once again, Vance isn’t in any kind of vanguard, here. American Conservatism, as an intellectual movement, is just like this. It is incoherent because it can afford to be, but also because it has never really been about anything but the rich mediocrities who bankroll it keeping what they have. There is no intellectual or ethical foundation upon which to build; there is nothing that it is actually trying to do beyond make it impossible for anything ever to be different.

In the same way that the promise of Trump has always been to wind the clock backwards and then stop it in place, and in the same way that the ongoing conservative judicial power-grab has always been about finding ways to make affirmative change not just impossible but illegal, Vance’s gambit has always been to affirm that everything that is, is right—that the people stifled and suffering under all this, which he alternately claims and disclaims as His People in his memoir and public persona, deserve all that suffering and more, and that the lazily vicious rich people to whom he has spent his life sucking up deserve all that they have, and more. His inauthenticity is the only identifiably authentic thing about him, and it unlocks every other thing worth understanding about the man. There isn’t an ideology to find, here, but there is a lesson—about how deep these idle urges go and how far they might be followed, and how fast a sufficiently servile follower can rise, and how terribly, terrifyingly significant even the most howlingly insignificant person might become.