Vance It Is

If there was any question about what the rest of this campaign is going to be like, I think we got the answer with the selection of JD Vance. Vance is no dummy and he is probably the most revanchist nationalist choice Trump could have made. He’s definitely an anti-U.S. alliances person, isolationist in a very Trumpy way, but more coherently so. He was out aggressively over the weekend blaming Democrats for the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. I expect that to be the theme of this week’s convention, whatever the early claims about national unity. He’s one of those guys who initially found Trump disreputable and beyond the pale and then did a full makeover to embrace the man and his politics after Trump took over the GOP. Notably Vance comes out of the Peter Thiel world in Silicon Valley. So he likely brings a significant amount of money with him, which won’t hurt. It’s the kind of choice you make if you’re pretty confident you’re going to win because this takes you from 100% Trumpy to more like 130% Trumpy. It’s a fateful choice. We’ll see if that prediction is right.