S4 Ep46: MAGA According to JD Vance (with Ian Ward)
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. And this week, we're covering a guy whose rollout on the national stage has gone worse than the Obamacare website. I'm talking about J.D. Vance. As soon as Vance joined Trump's ticket, everyone remembered that he'd done things like say Trump may be America's Hitler and called him cultural heroine.

That was before he befriended Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump Jr. and said the country is run by a bunch of childless cat ladies. But crazy though he may be, Vance is indicative of a new strain of thinking in the GOP that will outlast Trump, regardless of how this election turns out. And that is what I want to talk about today.

My guest is Ian Ward from Politico, who spent quite a lot of time with Vance over the last couple of years and has been really grappling with what this new right means for the future of the GOP. Ian, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

So you just wrote a big piece about Project 2025, which is excellent and I recommend to everybody. And you write about how what you found inside the Heritage Foundation was a low-budget operation beset by internal dysfunction, political miscalculation, and questionable leadership.

Nevertheless, you say that the Trump transition team may rely on the project and its personnel database out of sheer necessity. So let's talk about what role is Project 2025 likely to play if Trump wins?

It might be too early to tell exactly. I mean, I think some of this will depend upon how the rest of the campaign goes and specifically who ends up in his chief of staff position if Trump were to win. You know, his current campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Weil, seem to have soured pretty definitively on the project. Traditionally, the campaign team does not end up in

in a chief of staff spot. But Susie has been floated as a possibility. You know, I think if Susie were to be in charge of the executive office, they might get marginalized even more than they've already been. You know, if there's a shakeup in the next Trump White House and someone like Russ Vogt from Center for Renewing America comes in, he was the last

OMB director under Trump, you might see them wielding more influence. So I think it will depend in large part on the personnel decisions he makes between now and a potential victory. So Chris LaCivita has been very aggressive about trying to get Project 2025 away from Trump. Trump's been pretty aggressive about trying to get Project 2025 unattached.

to Donald Trump, to the extent that the person who was at Heritage running this project has been fired. That's pretty aggressive. Like, what happened? Talk about how this all came to be. Yeah, I think it's a confluence of a couple things. One is that the project has four parts, and this has kind of gotten ignored. The first part is the policy book, the 900-page policy book, which is what everyone's been talking about and paying a lot of attention to. Which nobody has read. Don't you think it's fair to say no one has read all 900 pages of this book?

Yeah, except those like sorry journalists who are like, I read all 900 pages, so you don't have to, you know. Yeah, so there's the policy book and then there's a personnel database, which they've been putting together, which is what they're calling the conservative LinkedIn, which is like vetted personnel. They claim to have 20,000 profiles. We don't actually know how many of those profiles are legitimate or like vetted.

And then there's a training academy, which is an online sort of video course that people in the database can take, which teaches like 101 for conservative governance and a handful of other sort of like how to navigate the administrative state and things like that. And then there's an 180-day playbook, which is being written by Russ Vogt. And that's a plan for implementing some of the recommendations from the policy book. But, you know, I think what Trump sensed and

And what Trump's team sensed was that the policy book was politically radioactive. That includes things like restricting access to Mifepristo and the abortion drug, which Trump has not himself endorsed. A whole host of things that he doesn't want to touch now that he's in the general election. You know, I think another part of it is just Trump doesn't like...

having anyone speak for himself. And the project promoted itself very aggressively. It sort of claimed the imprimatur of Trumpism for itself, which aggregates power away from Trump, takes donor dollars away from Trump, takes media attention away from Trump.

And then the other is a sort of internecine fight within a couple of different conservative groups over who will handle the transition. There was Heritage, but the America First Policy Institute, which is run by Brooke Rollins, was another group vying for legitimacy and authority in that space. The Trump campaign, of course, wants to retain control over any transition plans. So I think it's a confluence of things. But yeah, they moved pretty aggressively to sideline them.

So I got to say, I come from this world a little bit, right? Like back in my day as a young conservative, I was involved with some of these organizations. In fact, I used to work at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which is where J.D. Vance gave that speech yesterday.

where he said that they should get extra votes. The kids get the votes, but the parents get to use them, like whatever. He was throwing out some weird stuff. Back when I was there, it was just like a place that gave conservative books to kids on college campuses and like helped publish conservative and libertarian papers on campuses and like took kids on trips to study Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke.

But here's what, to me, what is wild about the heritage thing, and you just touched on it, which is the internecine fight over who gets control of Trump and Trumpism. Because the Heritage Foundation, which I have been in that building a ton of times back in the day when I was just doing different things or even just to go to events and see different speakers, the extent to which they have done a complete overhaul of who they are and what they stand for has been pretty stunning. And I think this has happened to a lot of conservative organizations as

They've been sort of whipsawed by Republican voters and who the GOP has become since Donald Trump sort of came on the scene in 2016. And so there's a whole think tank universe. There was Cato, there's Heritage, there's AEI, then second tier organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that all kind of play a role. And that used to be the personnel. Like you went into the think tanks and then you would maybe like join an administration. People came out of administrations and they ran the think tanks.

When I was at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, it was somebody from the Reagan administration who was running it. But what's interesting is that since Trump took over, there's also been a bunch of new organizations that have come on the scene, right? There's now these think tanks that are specifically built in Trump's image. And so it surprises me not at all that Heritage, in its attempt to survive, has become so Trumpy and is trying to hold on to power because...

being the serious MAGA people who can put together a playbook because they are basically having their worlds encroached on by these MAGA think tanks that are like Trump adjacent and populated by people that come out of the Trump administration. So did you learn more about that dynamic during your reporting? Yeah, well, I think the irony is that

Heritage has had to contend with claims in this sort of conservative ecosystem in Washington that its conversion has not been entirely sincere or thorough, that it's like adopted the aesthetics of Trumpism, but that it's sort of the kind of Trojan horse for Reaganism still, you know, that they're just...

Trump washing like the old conservative agenda. And I think part of what wrong with Project 2025 maybe is that they overcompensated for that perception. I was hearing this from some conservatives who were involved in the project, that there was a sense in heritage, like we need to prove we're MAGA and like we're based and like we're really far out there. So the policy recommendations reflected that. And what they ended up doing was going so far to the right that they ended up alienating Trump as he was tacking back to the center.

Certainly part of the motivation for the project, I think, was to be a kind of big tent and gather all of these disparate organizations and claim the mantle of Trumpism from those newer organizations. And I think it backfired a little bit because it created some of the tensions and rivalries and it boils down ultimately to personnel. Like, I don't think this is at the end of the day, an ideological fight. Like, I don't think Heritage is on a substantively different page than Stephen Miller's

America First Legal or Russ Votes, Center for Renewing America. But there are personnel disagreements, which I think drove some of the demise of the project, which isn't dead, but it is certainly damaged. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to get into what a group of two-time Trump voters said about Project 2025. Before I do, I think one of the things I just want to say is

For a long time, people were asking us, well, what do you hear in the focus groups about Project 2025? And I was like, nothing. You know, like every now and then someone might drop it, but they were like somebody who was either super online, highly informed. But it was like during the period of time where there was a fight over Biden stepping down,

And voters were like, why are you talking about this? And Project 2025, like the zeitgeist just grabbed it. And then all of a sudden, it is in the focus groups all the time. And so we went from just never hearing about it to hearing about it a lot. So let's start with what Trump voters said about it. Let's listen.

It looks to me like something somebody just made out of the blue as a way to scare liberals as if they aren't scared of their own shadows most of the time. So they bought into it. It's just a list of really extreme actions President Trump would want to take. But if you really read through it, everything on there just looks like made up nonsense that somebody made up. And Trump has even admitted he's never even heard of it. So I haven't bought into it too much.

It's a proposal. It's a suggestion. I think that he would be inspired from that, but he would have the smarts to know what to do with it and the business sense. When I saw it online, of course, on Facebook for the first time, I immediately went to research it.

And who knows if what I saw is correct or not, but it looked like it is an advisory board and that's basically what it is. And apparently it was used during the Ronald Reagan time. So however it's being presented or approached or shared,

is maybe not necessarily the truth of what it all is because everybody seemed to like Ronald Reagan. So, I mean, what's the panic about that then? I mean, sounds like it's an advisory board, but do you think Trump's going to follow every advice he gets? I mean, no, he's a smart businessman. He knows what he's doing. So he has got the intelligence and the common sense enough to know when something's not right. You know, he wouldn't use it.

verbatim because i mean that's giving the other team your playbook so i think he would glean what he could do or get away with or get past congress and stuff and you know work from there

So about half this group of Trump voters had heard about Project 2025. And I would say that number is much higher now in sort of swing groups, certainly in Democratic groups where they're talking about it all the time. But I was kind of surprised to hear Trump voters had like heard about it and gone and kind of looked it up to be like, is this scary? What's happening? And they had like these variety of opinions that kind of came from their own preconceived views of Trump. Either he's too smart to take it seriously or...

It would never take this because it's just giving the other side your playbook. One guy says he went and looked through it, all 900 pages, I'm sure. Probably not. But it is interesting that they are being messaged to defensively

around Project 2025. Did it surprise you that these Trump voters had heard about it? No, I mean, the interesting thing listening to those people is that all of those points of views are actually represented within the conservatives who I talked to who are in the coalition fold. Like you heard some people saying it's a ton of hype. None of it's all that substantive. I heard some people saying, you know, it's just advice. He'll take what he wants. I heard other people saying,

he won't touch that thing with a thousand foot pole, you know. But, you know, I think the hype cycle around the project got incredibly out of hand. And that was from both sides, right? That was Heritage and people on the right talking up the scope of this project and saying, this is a generational attempt to institutionalize Trumpism, to rationalize his program. We've never done anything like this before. You know, we've published the policy mandate going back to the

Reagan era, but we've never done the personnel database. So a lot of hype coming from inside Heritage. And then Democrats and Biden and Harris obviously glommed onto it as a point of attack saying, this is a sweeping campaign to...

undermine democracy and implement autocracy. And the truth was like, neither of those really the case. It was a fairly standard think tank led project that suffered from all of the issues that think tank projects suffer from, you know, and there's sort of like fundamental tension there. Like you have a think tank dictating policy to a political organization, the Trump campaign, and there's always going to be a sort of mismatch there.

So, you know, I wasn't surprised to hear, you know, Trump further specifically reacting defensively to it. I think they're responding to a lot of the hype that came out of Democratic circles, but the hype certainly...

was shared by all sides. It is wild to see like a 900-page policy proposal and transition team deep enough in the zeitgeist that just like people are arguing about it. So I know things are really breaking through. Now you wrote even before he was on the ticket, before Project 2025 became so prominent, that J.D. Vance

is plugged into the new right think tank ecosystem in Washington, D.C., of which Project 2025 is only one part, right? He even wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts' book, which, by the way, gets confused. Sometimes people think he wrote the foreword to Project 2025, which is not the case. He wrote the foreword to Kevin Roberts' book.

So what role do you see Vance playing in governing in a second Trump administration? Do you think he could be like a MAGA Dick Cheney or do you expect them to sort of distance themselves from Vance or something that Vance is so obviously tied to?

Well, to give you some context for this answer, the reason I started paying attention to Vance was because I was talking to young conservatives in Washington and I was asking them like, who represents your worldview on the national stage? Like which politicians are you seeing who speak your language and speak to you? And they were all across the board saying J.D. Vance. Like, and it wasn't even close. It was like J.D. Vance and then no one for 10,000 yards. And then like maybe, you know,

Mike Lee or Marco Rubio. Not Rad DeSantis. Yeah, DeSantis was sort of cooked at this point, never really seen as an authentic new right guy, wasn't really plugged into the circles as closely as Vance. And Vance is young too, so he spoke to the youth of all of these guys. And the answer to this question has to take into account a theory of how Trump operates, which is hard to theorize. There's

There's that joke about Trump being like a couch, like he bears the impression of the last person who sat on him or whatever. But, you know, I think Vance will be a very vocal voice for this new right view. And like insofar as Trump listens to the people who are in the room on any given decision, like Vance will be able to have direct influence on that. You know, I think the VP...

historically has had outside influence over national security. And Vance has been a very vocal anti-interventionist, foreign policy realist, skeptic of Ukraine. So I think foreign policy could be the area he has the most influence and where his views, I think,

maybe diverge from Trump's the most insofar as like Vance is sort of ideological about foreign policy, where Trump is more transactional about it. So I think foreign policy is one area definitely to pay attention to.

So I want to get into what swing voters have thought about Vance. You may remember when, and by you, I mean the listeners, Ian, I don't expect you to have known this, but when I chatted with Mark Caputo a couple of weeks ago, Bulwark reporter and sort of MAGA whisperer type, knows what's going on in MAGA world, he and I were talking about how voters...

At that time, they still didn't know much about Vance, but they were very unimpressed with what they did know. And having seen more of Vance, these swing voters who are sort of Trump to Biden voters, the vote for Trump in 16, Biden in 20, they still are not terribly impressed. Let's listen. He's basically a...

just a younger version of Trump, unlike Pence, who didn't always say yes to him, obviously, what happened January 6th. Vance would definitely be supportive 100% for whatever Trump says, but some of the policies you look at, he's even more extreme. So that is...

not going to help him run his base besides, you know, just a mega base. But I think Trump, you know, initially picked him because he thought he was going to run against Biden and picking him would just be good enough. But now with Kamala on the ticket, I think they're regretting the choice. Yeah, he just seems to be loud, bombastic, really just...

He's Trump, right? But I'm not impressed. Again, I don't know what he stands for, and I don't know if it's going to be helpful for the country. A lot of division there. It's frustrating because to me, Biden was more of a uniter, and that's what we need in this country. I'm not impressed by J.D. Vance. He doesn't strike me as an organized, thoughtful politician. One of the vibes that I get off of him is that he comes out very borderline arrogant and

And I imagine like Trump to be also arrogant, like even during his speech and stuff,

I don't think it's a good mix, just like personality wise. But I don't know a lot about like the political aspect of like what he stands for, if him and Trump are going to be a good mix. But just personality wise, like I don't like either of them with either of their personalities. Yeah. I remember Vance, he kind of was against Trump in the past. So he's definitely switched the whole 180.

But now he's taking on the bully portion. He's shaking the saber and he's really stirring the pot. He's bringing up anger. If you want to build a country, how about you build it on facts? And let's go with the facts and let's go with the policy and let's lay it out. And why do you have to knock down the other opponent? Build yourself up. Donald is more than capable to continue on his current attacking face. So now we have two of them.

i don't really know a lot about him but i did see apparently disparaging remarks about trump in the recent past and uh so it tells me he's just kind of a sleazeball doing whatever he can to advance his career i don't think he really cares about the american public personally it's just very apparent that it's a pay-to-play community hat that they have going on there you know just like who was that one guy that trump said his wife was ugly and then you know they're all friends again too

It's just that. And Trump's speech said the same thing, too. I mean...

All right. So this is the question. Who is J.D. Vance? And Ian, one of the things that struck me in your reporting is that you said sort of Vance is like a nerd who's much more comfortable having philosophical discussions than he is being like a MAGA pugilist type. And you wrote that when he's trying to dish out red meat, he sounds like a high school thespian trying to wring every last ounce of emotion out of an overwrought monologue. It's very evocative. Also, I do notice he's been like cursing more than other candidates usually do.

So it seems like Vance has landed himself in a sour spot where he has this like crazy worldview and is inauthentic in his delivery of it. And so which part of Vance's image is the big problem? Is it his worldview or?

or is it the delivery? Like, is it his persona? Like, what do you think's holding him back here? I think it might be the delivery. I mean, you mentioned ISI. Like, Vance is very at home in the ISI world. Like, I've seen him speak to ISI crowds. He kills with the ISI crowd. Like, he speaks their language. He speaks the language of, like,

conservative intellectualism. You know, he's conversant in the people that ISI teach. He's like reading the cool policy journals. He can like name check the people who are ascendant within this like very niche world of conservative intellectuals. Like the talk I saw him give at ISI was with Patrick Dineen, who's like a very hot political philosopher. And like they had a very interesting conversation with Kevin Roberts actually from Heritage. And

So that's like a world he's totally at home in. Like, I think when he conveys his worldview in that setting, like people are on board, you know, I think he struggles on this stump for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Maybe his biography helps explain this a bit. Like he came from,

out of these very rarefied institutions. Despite his upbringing, he went to Yale Law School. After Yale, he was on all the Sunday talk shows. He was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He was giving book talks at liberal bookstores. I just don't think he's got

at this point, the muscles developed for that kind of like national stump speech and especially not like opening for Trump. He doesn't have that. Trump is charisma down entirely. So I don't think we've seen him. Is charisma a thing you can get down or is that a thing? You kind of have it or you don't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to imitate Trump. You know, no one really has like the zip and zing that he does. So the like second rate imitation of it, I don't think plays very well. But yeah,

But I don't think we've seen him articulate his worldview in a really fulsome way yet on the campaign trail. I think this gets to a broader question, which is like, was it smart of Vance as the figurehead for national conservatism to hitch his wagon to Trumpism so closely? There's a timeline here.

where the vehicle for national conservatism or like the new right, whatever you want to call his worldview, like was not Trumpism. Like you could imagine a future where he delayed that marriage. You know, think back to like Reaganism, right? Like movement conservatism hitched its wagon to Reagan and the Republican party. And like that ended up working out for them, but they had to go through like Barry Goldwater first. Like, I think there's a situation where you see that with fans where,

You don't choose Trump necessarily. You wait, you find someone better suited and then the thing takes off. But I think it's like a risk that he ultimately decided to hitch the national conservative wagon to Trumpism. I'm not sure that will work out for them in the end.

So let me ask you something. I'm a little hesitant to even go down this road, but as you were talking about Vance's profile, I've had this thought a couple of times. I grew up in central Pennsylvania. I didn't have the same upbringing that he did because he had a very troubled upbringing and mine was not troubled. And then I went to Kenyon, which I had never heard of when I was younger. I've

It felt nice to me, nice and small and nestled in cornfields and didn't like stress me out like a big city would have at that point coming from sort of more rural Pennsylvania. And then I went to work at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, right? I spent three years at ISI and I'm so old. I can just see how young you are, but I'm so old that at the time we didn't have smartphones yet when I was working there. And so we got all these free books and

And so I would just sit there and read like The Road to Serfdom and like whatever. And I didn't know anybody in Delaware. It's like not the most hoppin' place. And I loved just being ensconced in this sort of conservative intellectual tradition. And so I know what you are talking about. And part of what was interesting to me, though, as I got older and became sort of like

Somebody who was trying to be a conservative in the world is that I saw the tension between sort of intellectual conservatism and just live in real life and how much some of it was like a fantasy land thing.

This like new right and the J.D. Vance intellectualism ultimately actually doesn't have very much to do with MAGA. Like it is trying to repackage what is a frenetic and chaotic man who has like a few deeply held values, right? Less immigration, protectionism on trade.

stuff that helps rich people get richer. And so Trump is the furthest thing from an intellectual conservative. So J.D. Vance, he is both somehow a doubling down of MAGA, right? That's how people interpret it. And yet the new right intellectualism to me seems totally fake in the sense that it is not rooted in the conservative tradition, but as an attempt to sort of jam so

some kind of conservative ideology into the cracks that Trump leaves open by having sort of a minimal group of things that he actually cares about. I think they see Trumpism and the Republican Party as a vehicle to advance their political project. Not to revert to this analogy again, but like movement conservatism in 1955 was like a very marginal ideology that was not reflected in

the mainstream of the Republican Party. Like, they identified the party as the vehicle for their movement, and then they took the party over and turned it into, you know, what we now think of as the Republican Party, you know? But this is what I'm trying to ask you is, is Vance really committed to the New Right Project?

So much so that he thinks that by cozying up to Trump, he becomes the heir apparent and then he gets to implement the new right, which sort of goes back to the original question I have is like the MAGA Dick Cheney. Is he there under Trump with all his bluster and nuttiness implementing like the new rights vision for America? Is that his role? He said that to me, basically, and I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of that.

All we have to go off really is his Senate record, right? Which is not that extensive. It's 18 months. And the stuff he did in the Senate was not conventional Republican fare. You know, he was doing like rail safety stuff and financial regulations with Elizabeth Warren, you know? So what we have of a very limited legislative record is not like traditional GOP tax cut stuff. You know, it's like more...

of heterodox new right thinking, you know, and he's paired that with like really intense culture war stuff, you know, bans on transgender care for minors, bans on federal mask mandates, you know. So if you go off a Senate record, I think, yeah, there's a potential he actually does advance a kind of heterodox new right agenda. Yeah.

But then the new right agenda and Trumpism are not the same thing. No. And it seems like the fact that they're not the same thing is part of what's getting Vance in trouble right now with Trump. Because Trump's superpower has always been that he is perceived as a cultural moderate. And the new right agenda is actually very extreme. Yeah. And so...

What was it about Vance that Trump found so appealing? And why do people sort of feel like these two things are actually complementary when they are actually not complementary at all?

Well, let me give the new right gloss on this and I'll answer the what did Trump see question. Vance himself has not said this to me. Other people in the new right orbit have said this to me. Like they see Trump as fundamentally destructive. Like he blew open like the fusionist consensus, you know, like he was the wrecking ball that came in and then Vance would come in on his heels and like build up from the rubble, you know? So Trump was a destroyer. Vance is the rebuilder. I see. You know, I think what we're seeing now is like,

Trump's instinctual politicking cohering into a policy platform that's not entirely congruent with the new right. So now you're seeing that friction there, right? So I don't know how that will play out. That would be very interesting. I think what Trump saw in Vance was sort of the inverse of what Vance saw in Trump. And this was refracted through Donald Trump Jr., who like

orchestrated, as far as we can tell, the rapprochement between Trump and Vance and then also lobbied for him. Donald Trump Jr. pitched Vance to Trump as the person who is capable of building a legacy for Trump. If Trump just existed and a normal Republican came on his heels, he'd have no legacy.

But if you hand the keys over to Vance, suddenly you have this whole like tradition opens up to you. You know, this whole legacy opens up to you. You can be the first step in a right wing revolution, you know, that remakes America rather than like a one off that disappears when like Mike Pence becomes president in 2028. So I think these are kind of symbiotic ideas that Vance can build on what Trump did and Trump sees him as able to carry his legacy forward.

To me, it seems crazy that he would find his legacy being carried on by somebody like J.D. Vance to be remotely attractive. And I don't even mean like this iteration of J.D. Vance that now has been widely mocked. I just mean in general, like I actually think what Trump wants his legacy to be is that he was singular in his ability to disrupt

And like the idea that he's part of the opening of a new ideological project seems to me a shocking thing for Trump to care about. Like I think his legacy he cares much more about. Does he have a placard at Mar-a-Lago about how many golf tournaments he won?

Look at the people who are lobbying for Vance. It was Don Jr. It was Tucker Carlson, who clearly sees himself as part of a generational ideological project. It was people in Bannon world who think in these terms. It was Peter Thiel, who's thinking in like decadal, if not century long terms. You know, the people who are in Vance's court

and who are in Trump's ear are people who view this populist nationalist revolution as like a generational multi-presidential project. They said this to me, they see Vance as the person capable of carrying that forward. So I don't know if that was Trump's thinking definitely, but the people who are lobbying for him certainly view it in these terms. Which actually I want to underscore because you are effectively making what I think is an enormously interesting point and something that people should think

hard about. People are asking themselves, why do these Republicans stick around Trump? Like, why do people still want to be part of his administration? But you are right. I think Trump has very few fixed principles. But this idea of him blowing things wide open so that new people can come in with their own ideological projects, people who do care. And I don't just mean the new cons or the new right. There's also like the free cons. There's other cons. You know, everybody sees Trump's

disruption as an opportunity for them to become ascendant. And many of these people were the people that Heritage used to sort of keep out, right? Because a lot of this institutional conservatism, these organizations were there to keep out the weirdos. Like they actually did have a mechanism for when they pushed out the birchers. And I'm not saying that there weren't still some strange people, but it was a place that was populated by

much more by people who were like serious thinkers in a way that now it's like every fringe person just sees Trump as somebody creating an opening for their sort of view of things.

Back to your point earlier, like you said, when you worked at ISI, you were reading like Hayek and Milton Friedman and these guys, you know, Edmund Burke. Like if you're a 25 year old conservative now, you're reading Patrick Deneen, you're reading Menchus Moldbug, you're reading Michael Anton. Michael Anton, for sure. You're reading Bronze Age pervert. Yeah.

to some extent, like ISI still has a tradition, but like the institutions of the right have been captured by this new group of intellectuals. And like, this is a group that Vance comes out of, you know, like part of why I'm a bit hesitant to write his ideological evolution off as completely opportunistic is that you,

you've seen it with so many people. Like, it wasn't unique at all. Like, there's a whole cohort of young conservatives, like, between 18 and 30 who got radicalized online between, like, 2016 and 2022, which is exactly when Vance got radicalized. So,

The fact that he's like one data point and a much larger trend here, which leads me to believe like something real is happening. And I think it has to do with the type of intellectual generation that you're talking about. Okay. And this is probably too late in the game to really do this, but I guess I should ask now that we've gone so deep on this piece of the conversation, can you define like what are the top agenda items of the new right? Like what is that project about? Yeah.

Yeah, it's economic nationalism, which means both like industrial policy, economic protectionism in the form of tariffs and like immigration restriction, etc.

It's cultural conservatism, specifically like a religiously inflected, often catholicly inflected cultural conservatism. It's like a weird techno skepticism, you know, the idea like technology as it currently exists has been perverted, but like there's a true regenerative power of technology that if you just like got rid of Silicon Valley elites could like probably be regenerated. That's the T-list part of this whole worldview. I mean, and like fundamentally it's,

They've cohered around this belief that the post-World War II and really the post-Cold War order built around economic liberalization, globalization, the relaxation of social hierarchies has been a tremendous mistake. They don't think that's progress. They think that's national destruction. And so it's really an effort to reorient the country around...

a different vision. They wouldn't call it progress, but a different vision of like national flourishing, you know, that rejects that liberal vision of progress, like whole cloth. You know, I think that's the philosophical vision and the policy sort of ramifies from that.

Okay, I want to get into how Trump's base is feeling about Vance. I'm interested in A, what these voters have seen of him, and B, whether he's a welcome addition to the ticket and to the broader constellation of GOP stars. So let's listen to what two-time Trump voters said about Vance's selection.

I do appreciate having a fresher, more youthful perspective in office. I believe I've heard that he's a veteran, so knowing that he's gone to war for the country and then being in a position where he will make important decisions for us, that gives me a lot of hope, but I don't know what to expect. I mean, I don't even know. What was the last veteran president we had? Ford? I mean, so that's a great addition.

especially with Trump's message, I think that's a great attribute.

And honestly, with the exception of a couple things that you can pick and choose from, he's 100% in line with Trump's policies. So I think that's always a good thing when everybody's on the same page and you don't have somebody in the background trying to undercut you. So I like it overall. I would have liked to have maybe seen somebody, believe it or not, as conservative as I am, somebody a little bit more moderate

to balance out Trump a little bit, especially on the Roe v. Wade stuff. He's got very staunch Catholic beliefs on abortion. That limits us a little bit. I thought he was a safe pick, which I don't think is bad. Just Trump's the kind of guy who's a little polarizing. And I think there could have been somebody, I don't know who, I don't have a name, but there could have been someone who

would have been like, oh, I don't love Trump, but I like this person. And I don't know that Vance is that because Vance feels to me in a good way for Trump, but like a Trumper, right? You know, he's going to try to flip Ohio red. He's got enough Rust Belt influence. Maybe he gets a little Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Michigan, flipping red. We'll try. So I kind of feel like he's like young Trump, right? So he aligns really well. And that's good because there won't be conflict between them.

Ohio is firmly red. I'll just put that on the record. So one of the things that was interesting to me when, I think there were a lot of Republicans who were genuinely surprised by the Vance pick. And you saw sort of like,

the howling and rending of garments from kind of the normies who also still think that there's a place for them in this Republican Party over the Vance, but especially people who care about foreign policy because they view J.D. Vance as somebody quick to abandon Ukraine. He belongs to this, as you pointed out, kind of Tucker Carlson group of people that is

seems to like Russia more than the average bear in a way that feels kind of strange. So as bad as Vance's rollout has gone in the rest of the country, though, Trump's base kind of was like...

He seems fine. Seems all right. Seems like he's Trump's guy. Which incidentally, you know, the reason that J.D. Vance is in the Senate, I remember doing focus groups all over Ohio during his 22 Senate race. Nobody liked Vance. You know, there was a big five-way race and this guy, Josh Mandel, who was also a super mega weirdo, was mainly leading the pack until Trump endorsed Vance and pulled him over the line. And people were like, fine, if Trump says so, fine.

But the fact that the Republican sort of establishment was pretty mad about this pick and not getting a Rubio, it's like another version, just because this is the theme of this episode, of people thinking they can get something they want out of Trump. People have been wanting to make Marco Rubio happen for a really long time and thought he could slip him in under the wire here of Trumpism. And so what kind of future does Vance want to see for the Republican Party? And is he going to spend the rest of his career kind of locking horns with Trump?

the normies in the party who want it to go back to something that does look like free markets, American leadership in the world, and like a kind of Reaganism.

He views himself as an insurgent. You know, I think he sees himself as within the minority of the GOP now. Like hating Mitch McConnell has become a cool thing to do within the Republican Party and like the MAGA wing of the party. But I think Vance really sees himself as like diametrically opposed in many respects to like the Mitch McConnell wing of the party. I think another big X factor in how much influence Vance is able to exert if Trump were to win

is who becomes the next Republican leader in the Senate.

have backed Rick Scott in a kind of three-way race. I don't think they're going to prevail in that fight, but my understanding is that they're going to use Rick Scott to extract a whole lot of concessions from whoever ultimately does become the leader, and that could strengthen their hand significantly. And if they do get some of those major concessions, I think you could see Vance working very closely with the cohort of national conservatives in the Senate to advance some really robust negotiations

new right legislation. You know, like if they have Rubio, Hawley, Mike Lee, if you add another seat from Ohio, Bernie Moreno is running in Ohio and he signaled he would be aligned with the kind of Vance wing of the party. You could see the emergence of a real like new right block in the Senate, which could work very closely with the White House and like make gains gradually. Like it's not going to happen overnight, I think.

There are probably like 10 young conservatives in Washington who I've talked to who are like, yeah, like I really want to be like Reaganite. The energy is not there. Like the energy is behind the Vance, Pauly Rubio wing of the party there. Jim Banks too. He's another one. Yeah. Jim Banks is running for Senate. Yeah. Well, he'll be in the Senate, don't you think? Almost certainly. And one of the things I remember, I read a couple of memos that Jim Banks had sent to Kevin McCarthy. And I remember thinking, this is the guy.

who understands the Trump project and knows how to turn it into an articulatable conversation

ideological project. I don't know that I've seen anybody do it better than Jim Banks. In fact, I don't think J.D. Vance is particularly good at it, but Banks was very serious about figuring out how to be like, we are going to build a multiracial working class coalition that is ascendant in the United States in a way that I think Democrats don't even realize there is a Republican effort as part of the sort of nationalist...

pro-worker, this new coalition that's forming. It's funny. I think Project 25.5 is interesting in the sense that

It at least helps people understand that there is a broader ideological project taking place. I'm not sure Project 2025 is actually the one that ends up being. Like, I think what Jim Banks is putting forward, the Democrats as the party of Wall Street, Republicans the party of working people, like, that is much closer to where this is going. Yeah, I talked to Banks actually for a piece I wrote that involved Vance about how these anti-Ukraine Republicans, many of them had actually served

in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Banks was in the Navy Reserves, I want to say. Don't quote me on that. Deployed to Afghanistan. Vance was in the Marines, deployed to Iraq with the Public Affairs Division. And they both talked on the record, Banks talked to me about how their experience on the ground

in the war on terror had like shaped their foreign policy thinking and really like radicalized them against the kind of neoconservatism that underlie a lot of like the Bush foreign policy. So he doesn't just get the domestic policy stuff. He gets the foreign policy stuff as well. Like he's totally on board with the kind of fancy and realism. So yeah, those two together in the Senate could be a pretty formidable front for this project. Yeah.

Yeah, that's super interesting. Okay, so I want to get into how the base thinks about Vance's flip-flopping on Trump and whether they were skeptical of his credentials because of it. That's not what we found. Actually, they were cool. Let's listen.

That's how politics works, because now we're all great friends. He also didn't like Trump in the beginning, much like Kamala with Biden in the beginning. So he had some derogatory comments, and I'm sure there's going to be a couple of commercials made of those in the coming months.

So one thing I've always loved about the Republican Party, Trump's even like this too, back in the day, they were calling him flip-flopping on a couple issues, is I think when you see Trump and you're only seeing news blips, eight seconds, eight seconds, you can get an opinion about him. Then you meet the man in a room, you shake his hand, you really learn about his values. If that's why Vance now is more aligned, that's the kind of people we want. We don't want people to be

well, this is the way I think and I won't change and I'm headstrong. And if there's an issue that maybe someone 20 years ago thought a certain way, but now they've learned some more and now it's impacted their family and now they see what's going on. I want people in there who are willing to take information and change. So even for him to win Ohio, he probably already was starting to align with some more things closer to Trump, even previously before being a candidate consideration.

I mean, those past comments will come back to haunt him. But I think what Kamala said was just more bitey, more evil. You know, and it just when I saw that and then he picked her, that just showed me that, well, they're not really honest, are they now? You know, it just doesn't give me a good feeling.

taste in my mouth. I was like, oh, okay, I get it. But I feel that he's a little more spicier and a little more take charge than Pence. Pence is solid, good, strong, quiet, determined. But I think that this candidate will be a little bit more of a tiger. So we'll see.

Got to say, that is the nicest thing anybody has said about Mike Pence in a focus group in a really long time. Usually people are pretty tough on him. So with my team here, we did an internal poll for some of our other work of suburban voters in swing states recently. And by a 60 to 24 margin, voters thought Vance's conversion on Trump was a politically expedient move and not a genuine MAGA conversion. Although, as we've just discussed, the MAGA conversion, like if you really dig into it, that's not quite what it is.

But only 25% of those intending to vote for Trump think it's a politically expedient move. So most of Trump's base buys the transformation. And I got to say, I've always said for a lot of Trump voters, they started out not so hot on Trump either. Right. And so there's a lot of grace among voters.

Trump voters for people who have made that conversion, because many of them made it themselves, whereas with swing voters who converted themselves away from Trump, it's one of the reasons I think why they dislike him so much is that they went the other ways. But maybe to cap off this conversation, maybe you could walk us through how Vance's conversion took place.

and like who some of these big influences were on him. Because I got to say, in 2016, he, like me, was a never Trumper. And in fact, one of the... I'm not on TikTok because I think it's Chinese spyware and you should get your kids off it. But one of the funnier things that I've seen is people taking his statement, I'm a never Trump guy, and turning it into a music video. Like there's all these people dancing to a remix of J.D. Vance saying, I'm a never Trump guy. I'm a never Trump guy. So...

Just like walk us through it. How did he go from J.D. Vance then to J.D. Vance now? Or was it not a real conversion? He just didn't like Trump. Well, I can say what he said. You know, it's like impossible to get in his head ultimately. Sure. What he's told me and other reporters is that his conversion was kind of twofold. One was he saw that Trump was right on the issues he cared about. You know, like he was right on the foreign policy. He was right on the trade stuff. He was right on the China stuff. He was right on the culture war stuff.

And he was over time. They saw that he was like the right vehicle for these ideas and that the hysteria around his like personal shortcomings had been overhyped. So that was half of it. The other half was,

was that he was at this point ensconced in these really elite liberal worlds. And he says watching the liberal reaction and the never Trump reaction to Trump totally radicalized him as well. He said, I don't agree with these people. Their reaction has been so vociferous and so negative and so personal that I came to sort of feel for the guy. It made me like Trump more watching liberals lose their minds over him

taking power and implementing his policies and so on. I mean, he's also gotten sucked into this world of right-wing conservative intellectuals who are articulating this sort of ideological superstructure to the Trump phenomenon. And like he says, that helped him articulate this critique in a new light. But like, how did he find himself with Peter Thiel? Thiel spoke at Yale Law School when Vance was a student there. And like Vance called it the most important moment of his time at Yale. So he and Thiel became friends.

very close. He went to work for Thiel. Thiel helped him fund his own VC firm. Yeah, I mean, Thiel's another huge influence. Like you could spend an hour talking about how Thiel has shaped his worldview. He converted to Catholicism in 2019, which Thiel played a big part in it as well. And that, I think, hastened his political conversion. Did Thiel convert to Catholicism? Thiel's not a Catholic. He's like non-denominational.

But he introduced Vance to this guy, Rene Girard, who's a Catholic apologist. And like Vance has cited Girard as an important part of his Catholic conversion. Here's like the gloss I give on Vance's conversion. Like even if conversion was not authentic, like if Vance doesn't really believe the ideas that he claims to believe or he adopted them for opportunistic reasons, like

Those ideas are eventually going to find a figurehead who authentically believes them, right? Like every young conservative is doing in this stuff now and accusing Vance of opportunism, like is probably good politics for this election. But in 10 years, when you have someone who's a true believer in this stuff, unless you've like come up both among the democratic crowd and the never Trump crowd, like unless you have

a response to the set of ideas he's proposing and the worldview, like account to the worldview, like it's not going to go away, you know? So accusing Vance of opportunism is like in some respects, just kicking the can down the road on the more substantive policy questions that he embodies. Um,

So it's a double-edged sword, I think. Like, why not take it seriously is kind of my question. Like, there's no downside politically to taking the ideas he's proposing seriously. And the opportunism accusation, to my eyes, is a bit of a dodge. I think that that is an extremely important point, in large part because it's

The reason I sort of talked a little bit about my own trajectory is just to me, listening to how all these organizations, how much they've changed, people have got to at some point understand that conservatism

as a project is not what it was 20 years ago when I was coming up. It is unrecognizable to me. And I was steeped in it too. You got those books for free, so they were just piled in my apartment. I had nothing else to do in Delaware. And I read them all and went to all those speeches. And back then it was Andrew Sullivan and, I mean, you did have a couple of these guys like a Victor David Hanson, like you had some cranks in there, although they didn't sound the way that they sound now oftentimes. But

I do think that the media or people who've long looked at the conservative movement and

may not realize just how much it has changed, how much that heritage has reimagined itself to combat or compete with or exist with the emerging MAGA intellectual, I'll say in scare quotes, think tank ecosystem. But they do all have pipelines to young people. Like that was ISI's thing. I came in because I had written for my conservative magazine at Kenyon. Like

Two articles. But like it was enough that they had met me and been like, oh, you should apply for this job. And they do create the pipelines. And so they are finding the next generation, which means that there is an ongoing project because Trump is just a guy and there's a personality cult.

And then there's an intellectual project. And I think it is so easy to get distracted by the guy that nobody ever really gets their mind around what is happening with the intellectual project. My producer was desperate to have you on. I was really excited to have you on because I don't know that there's been anybody, I think, who has looked as deeply as you have lately at like what really is going on in these groups.

I appreciate that. Yeah, I'll also say it's not just an intellectual project. I profiled a group earlier this year called American Moment, which is run by two guys in Washington who have been doing what Heritage has been doing for the past three years. They're building a talent pipeline for young conservative people.

like America First staffers. They go out to high schools, to college campuses. They're finding people. They're bringing them to Washington on fellowships. They're training them. They're giving them that stack of books that you read, but their own stack of books. And they've been doing this for three years, plugging them into House offices, Senate offices, think tanks, conservative nonprofits, conservative businesses, and saying, hang out here for a couple of years. And when the next Republican administration rolls around,

they're all there, right? So it's not just an ideological project, though it is that. It's also a personnel project. Yeah, it goes deep. It goes very, very, very deep. Well, I suspect we have only just scratched the surface, but this was an enormously interesting conversation. Ian Ward, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the Focus Group podcast. Remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to The Bulwark on YouTube. We will catch you guys next week.