J.D. Vance, man who would be king of a kingdom that nobody is sure exists
by Joseph Curl · The Washington TimesOPINION:
Let’s get one thing straight about Vice President J.D. Vance: The man contains multitudes.
Specifically, the kind of multitudes that change depending on which audience is watching, which podcast microphone is closest and whether President Trump is in the room.
Mr. Vance is doing three things simultaneously. He’s positioning himself as the heir to Trumpism and the MAGA throne. He’s negotiating a peace deal with Iran that has already collapsed. And he’s moving into an $8 million horse farm in Middleburg, Virginia — a quaint, old-money enclave where residents are less concerned about his politics than the 50-vehicle motorcade clogging their country lanes.
The Middleburg move is, unintentionally, the perfect metaphor for Mr. Vance’s entire political project. Here is the man who made his name writing “Hillbilly Elegy” — a soulful lament about Rust Belt communities gutted by economic neglect — now leasing two homes on a nearly 500-acre Virginia estate while simultaneously occupying the 33-room Naval Observatory mansion in Washington.
That’s a lot of square footage for a man of the people.
To be fair, Mr. Vance is aware that power changes a person. Speaking candidly about life as vice president, he noted, “My life is — dude, totally transformed. People go to the grocery store for me. I don’t have to cook anymore because I have an army of people willing to cook my food. No more TSA lines for me.”
He also acknowledged the obvious risk: that all this could turn you into “an entitled a———” (his words, not mine). Points for self-awareness, J.D. Minus several points for the motorcade.
Back in Middleburg, residents are not exactly rolling out the welcome mat. Gift shop manager Kenna Day — whose shoulder tattoo reads “Hell Is Other People” in French, which tells you everything you need to know about Middleburg — put it succinctly: “I can’t even paint my building without a permit — you’d think they would’ve had a town meeting to discuss it, but it just got dumped on us,” she told The Washington Post.
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“I worry it will be disruptive to the calm we have here. It’s like walking into a Hallmark card. We all get along so well,” she said. A Hallmark card, presumably, that now features black SUVs and armed agents in aviators.
But the real drama isn’t happening in horse country. It’s happening on the national stage, where Mr. Vance is attempting the most ambitious political tightrope walk since — well, since he went from calling his boss “America’s Hitler” to becoming his most loyal attack dog, a pivot so dramatic it deserves its own Netflix series.
Here’s the problem with being J.D. Vance in 2028: Every bold stance comes with a bill. He staked out an isolationist position on the Iran war — a war he reportedly opposed from the start — and brokered a memorandum of understanding with Tehran that would have unfrozen roughly half a trillion dollars in assets.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican who is sniffing the 2028 air with considerable interest, was ready with a line: “Giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea.”
The deal subsequently collapsed. The war is back on. Mr. Vance is left holding the flaming brown paper bag.
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Former Vance adviser Rod Dreher didn’t sugarcoat it: “The vice president is now in the position of looking like a political loser … even though it seems to me he was trying to protect the U.S. from a greater disaster of Trump’s own making.”
There’s also the Israel question, which Mr. Vance has managed to make into its own separate headache. He’s criticized Israeli leadership publicly, warned it that it is an “international pariah,” and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, suggested that Jeffrey Epstein was connected to “elements of the Israeli deep state.”
When you’re invoking Epstein conspiracies on a podcast while simultaneously negotiating Middle East peace, you may need to recalibrate.
Republican consultant Marc Short — who watched the previous vice president, Kamala Harris, self-immolate — offered perhaps the most backhanded compliment in political history. Mr. Vance, he said, has shown himself to be “pretty nimble and flexible on his convictions — if he has any.”
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The portrait that emerges is of a genuinely fascinating political creature: a populist intellectual who was bankrolled by Silicon Valley billionaires, a Catholic who criticizes the pope, a blue-collar chronicler now renting estates next to Salamander Resort suites at $1,100 a night. He openly admires Richard Nixon, comparing himself, on multiple occasions, to a president who resigned in disgrace.
Only time will tell what will happen to Mr. Vance — and what he’ll have to morph into to win the White House.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com.
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