What St. Paul had been to Jesus, JD Vance could be to Donald Trump: a linchpin to transform Trumpism into a governing ideology transcending even Trump’s presidency.
By Chudi Okoye
He went from childhood poverty and abuse, having a thrice-married mother menaced by drug addiction, to the US Marine Corps, Yale Law School, stints in legal practice and venture capital, and then election to the US Senate. He became a best-selling memoirist married to a Yale Law School alumna who worked for a prestigious Washington DC law firm, having clerked for a couple of conservative judges: Brett Kavanaugh, who would later be appointed to the US Supreme Court; and the current US chief justice, John Roberts.
He has cycled through several surnames – from his birth surname to his stepfather’s surname and then his grandparents’ surname. And in like manner, he went from an ardent ‘Never Trumper’, an implacable and highly vocal critic of the former president, to MAGA ideologue who has now been picked (and on July 17th accepted nomination) as Donald Trump’s running-mate for the November 2024 US presidential election.
The metamorphosis of JD Vance is nothing if not spectacular.
With a brainy and quietly impactful wife born to first-generation immigrant parents from Andhra Pradesh, the advance of Vance to VP nomination is a certain win for India, and it will be more remarkable still if the couple makes it to the White House, so soon after Rishi Sunak’s breakthrough as Britain’s first prime minister of Indian-Punjabi ancestry.
But it won’t be India alone that would gain unexpected presence in the White House with the accession of JD Vance and his Indian-American wife. Right-wing orthodoxy too would have found a firmer footing at the centre of power, its unstinting advocate there providing ideological coherence and policy evocation to Donald Trump’s inchoate and scatter-brained MAGA utterances.
Oftentimes, the selection of a running mate by a US presidential nominee isn’t followed by too much flutter outside the party circle. Even when, as is usually the case, a VP nominee is chosen for strategic reason – to capture some crucial voting blocs or swing states, promote party unity, or give Beltway street cred to a greenhorn president – the focus is always on the presidential candidate. More so for a big – if abrasive – personality like Trump. But in this case, there is something to be said for what JD Vance brings to the Republican Party ticket. There appears to be a changing zeitgeist in US politics – a worrisome one, mind – and Vance seems to be its avatar (in tow with Trump), tailor-made for the disruption that is likely to come.
A brief biblical reference may help make my case. Specifically, a New Testament allusion.
Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, who’d been a vicious persecutor of the emergent Jesus movement, would become – following his Damascene conversion – a major force in the propagation of Christianity. He indeed became the greatest Christian proselytizer, as some scholars and theologians argue, taking the faith far into the Gentile world where it blossomed but might never have reached had Christianity remained a Second Temple Jewish sect, as it was under Jesus himself and his initial disciples. Ditto, possibly, for MAGA.
Trump has certainly found his Paul in JD Vance. MAGA proselytizing will require a true convert, a fervent adherent like Vance who has drunk deeply of MAGA grievances and imbibed the movement’s ethos, after his earlier very loud disapprobation of the movement. But Vance, 39, brings much more to the table: youthful vim and intellectual vigor; a deep commitment to right-wing philosophical and policy orthodoxies; and a willingness to pound the pavement preaching the gospel of MAGA to wider congregations. Not unlike what Paul did for Jesus and the 1st century Christian movement (I don’t mean to liken Trump to Jesus, though some of his evangelical supporters have certainly done so, especially since his ‘miraculous’ escape of an assassination attempt).
Vance and the MAGA Gospel
Saul of Tarsus had his Damascene conversion; Vance of Ohio had his ‘MAGA-scene’ conversion. Jesus, as we know, inspired the Christian religion. But, beyond his brief teachings and his works as recorded in the Gospels and elsewhere, Jesus never wrote anything down or synthesized his teachings into a formal religious doctrine. It was Paul – a highly educated Pharisee and Roman citizen who’d received a formal and highly structured education, studying Jewish law and traditions under the prominent Jewish teacher Gamaliel (see Acts 22:3) – who incubated the “mustard seed” of Jesus’ teachings, laying the intellectual foundation for a new Christian religion different from ancestral Judaism. Paul provided the intellectual framework later, over centuries, developed by a succession of Christian philosophers and theologians.
The slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has long provenance in America politics. It was notably used by the Republican, Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 presidential campaign; and even by the Democrat, Bill Clinton, in 1991/92. Trump’s frequent claim to have originated the slogan is therefore unsubstantiated. But he has been, without question, a great popularizer of the potent slogan. Even so, Trump – a flighty, more reflexive than reflective, character – has never turned the ‘MAGA’ slogan into a political or even policy doctrine. It has been more a rousing – and merchandizing – slogan for his political campaign. Now, similar to what Paul did for the nascent Christian movement, with the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, MAGA might become intellectualized, woven into the fabric of extreme-right ideological and policy thinking to which Vance is much more cognitively connected than Trump.
Many leading American pundits have speculated on the reason Vance was chosen to be Trump’s running mate. Far be it from me, a Nigerian-American scribbler, to question their celebrated expertise. But it seems to me that some of them miss the obvious point: that Vance could vanquish the other contenders because he offered greater promise as an ideological linchpin, a means to turn MAGA into formalized Trumpism, an ideology and a governing doctrine for the Republican Party representing Trump’s ultimate capture of the party. Trump has already defeated the establishment elites in the Republican Party, planting his family members and acolytes in the party’s governing structures and winning the fealty of the party’s elected officials. See how the latter debase themselves swarming around Trump. But the one redoubt of the fading establishment was the intellectual disposition of the party. JD Vance represents the intellectual arrest – a ‘MAGAfication’, if you will – of traditional Republicanism, and simultaneously an intellectual extremification of Trumpism. Vance checked many boxes, such that he was likely at once strongly recommended and also independently favored by Trump.
Vance is an intersection point for several strands of the emerging Trumpist ideology. He likely aligns with the views of the conservative justices in the US Supreme Court, for two of whom his wife clerked, as I earlier noted. These justices, in their recent ruling on Trump v. United States, propounded a maximalist theory of presidential immunity which, I argued two weeks ago, suggests “a yearning for ‘Caesarism’ or ‘Bonapartism’, a leap from Locke to Hobbes.” Vance has previously invoked Carl Schmitt – the 20th century German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party who despised liberalism and offered an expansive vision of executive power – claiming that liberals are enthralled to him. But, as several commentators have observed, Vance’s “politics hardened as he prepared to run for elective office,” and the accusation he levels against liberals in relation to Schmitt is “pure projection.” If in fact Vance is a closet admirer of Schmitt’s, he’d be in the good company of another Trumpian acolyte, Michael Anton, who’s greatly influenced by a Schmitt contemporary, the conservative German-American scholar, Leo Strauss, who also rejected liberalism.
Vance has also been linked to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-thank affiliated with the Republican Party which produced the controversial Project 2025 document, a far-right governing agenda which it proposes for a second Trump term. Vance previously praised the document, and is in fact said to be friends with the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts.
Vance is sometimes associated with ‘national conservatism’, a growing movement in parts of the West with a reactionary, anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian outlook which rejects the liberal notion of a teleological progression of history towards greater liberty, enlightenment and democracy. In some cases, advocates of this view exhibit alt-right and neo-fascist tendencies, and openly support a return to traditional forms of government, including even absolute monarchy. His dalliance with national conservatism notwithstanding, Vance – in part reflecting his own straitened background – also cultivates right-wing populist views focusing on the needs of the neglected White working class, families, communities, and the nation, and frowns on foreign military adventurism.
The upshot of this ideological portrait of JD Vance? An ambitious fellow who – though arguably “ideologically labile,” as the New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, described him – is firmly entrenched on the right, perhaps far-right, of the spectrum. As the ‘young man’ voraciously explores ideological viewpoints and consolidates his own views, he’s perhaps the perfect pick to help define Trumpism as the ideological plank for a Republican Party now completely dominated by Donald Trump. On current form, that ideology is likely to be far further right of the mainstream instincts of the now defenestrated conservative elites.
It is a frightening proposition. Not least because it confronts a flailing and seemingly dispirited Democratic Party, riven and openly antagonizing its frail front-runner, Joe Biden, who seems to have little to offer in the face of a resurgent Republican Party except his much-touted governing record (a record tarnished by his enablement of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza) and a laming promise to “finish the job.”
It is also frightening because of what it portends for the world. What becomes of liberal internationalism – the belief in international law, multilateralism, collective security, economic interdependence, human rights and democracy – if America retrenches and in fact tilts towards autocracy? Will this add impetus to the problem of democratic recession around the world, especially because Trump palls around with dictators and has expressed dictatorial ambitions?
A Trump victory in the coming US election should worry all of us. Jesus wisely chose Paul of Tarsus who set a small, proto-Christian, Jewish sect on the path to becoming a global behemoth. Trump has chosen JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Will this choice produce an illiberal dynamic that may propagate around the world?
This is a brilliant balanced article, you can’t put it down once you start reading it. I dispute the comparison by the article of the Saul experience on the way to Damascus and the choosing of JD Vance by DT. It simply does not compare. The seeming similarity is only in the fact that Saul was an earlier persecutor of Christian’s and was converted to Christianity and he later became both the intellectual and evangelist of the religion, while Vance was an earlier critic of Trump and is today his apostle. The comparison of the two in the article fatally did not take into deep consideration the nature of the dramatise personae especially on the side of Jesus/ Saul, and their objective and raison d’ etre. A deeper dive of these aspects would have revealed the inordinate ambition of those evangelicals who are principally propagating this comparison. In the first instance, the one is divine the other is mundane. DT is devious, selfish and self serving, in my opinion he chose this young man purely for raw political calculations that he thinks will give him the immediate benefit of winning the election. He realizes that as at now the only pathway for democrats to win is if they win the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. He therefore hires Vance from neighboring Ohio to try to block this pathway. Though Vance is a later day MAGA maverick but there are more ardent adherents like Tim Scott. Let me say that there is nothing wrong with this political strategy and it may still be potent. I dispute any imputations of a longer, more enduring philosophical reason for Trumps choice of Vance. That is an exercise in sophistry and a clear “under rating”of the man DT. He does not care what happens to the Republican Party tomorrow or the white working class people’s of the Rust belt states as far as he can become President again and mend his over sized ego which the loss to Biden inflicted on him. As long as he can be on the world stage again with Putin, Xi and the North Korean chap. DT has no care if his son Don or daughter Ivanka, much less the others, have control of the party if it will not serve his immediate plan to return to the White House
For JD Vance there are two possible outcomes from his nomination, they will either win or lose the election. in my considered opinion,he will not come out better in any outcome. If they win, he would have helped to achieved DT objectives. DT immediate response will be to begin to whittle down his power and influence so he does not over shine him. DT will end up damaging and destroying him politically. We have seen him do this to Mike Pence and the litany of brilliant people who went to work with him in his first term. If they lose the election, DT will start another round of stop the steal and merry go round of the courts,meanwhile that will be the beginning of the unraveling of the MAGA movement and reclaiming of the party by the real republicans and Vance will probably return to the Senate with his tail in between the back of his legs.
This nomination of Vance is the advance to political oblivion of Vance. He should have waited for 4 more years. Served out his term in the Senate He would be 43 then the age bracket of most great American Presidents. John Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama