Only fools discount J.D. Vance’s rise, whether due to his considerable intelligence (likely) or dumb luck (arguably), from blue-collar life in Butler County’s Middletown to No. 1 Observatory Circle, in Washington, the vice-president’s 33-room official residence.
It’s also foolish to discount the possibility that, whether by election or otherwise, Vance, age 40, will succeed Trump, age 78, as president. That is, J.D. Vance could be destined to eventually get his mail at another Washington address – 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and maybe sooner rather than later.
(The president-elect’s father, Fred C. Trump, died at age 93 in 1999. In an obituary, the New York Times reported that the elder Mr. Trump had been stricken with Alzheimer’s disease six years before.)
Ohioans elected Vance to the Senate in 2022, when he bested Democratic nominee Tim Ryan, for 20 years a U.S. House member from Trumbull County representing the Warren and Youngstown areas.
Vance’s best-selling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” recounted his arc of experiences, from Appalachian roots to Yale law school, using them as prisms to examine the American interplay of class and poverty.
The U.S. Senate is a country for old men, where seniority is everything and a newcomer is to be seen, not heard, so freshmen don’t get to fashion legislative landmarks. Still, Vance responded vigorously in 2023 when a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in Columbiana County’s East Palestine, imperiling its residents. (In contrast, President Biden didn’t visit East Palestine until a year after the derailment.)
Before 2016′s presidential election, which Trump won not in popular votes but in electoral votes, Vance said he couldn’t support Trump: “I think that I’m going to vote third-party because I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance said in an interview with National Public Radio. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”
But Donald Trump is evidently a persuasive salesperson; he courted then engaged J.D. Vance to be his 2024 running mate. Then, Vance made his bones with Trump’s posse by, among other examples, defaming Haitian refugees legally present in Clark County (Springfield), falsely claiming they were slaughtering and eating pets.
Vance accompanied that with these verbal acrobatics: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” that is, with political language manipulated like the “Newspeak” in George Orwell’s “1984.”
Now, with Donald Trump as president-elect, Vance likely sees nothing but blue skies over America, as, seemingly, do the 77.3 million other Americans who voted for the Trump-Vance ticket.
Vance’s long-term prospects will likely give him outsized clout in Ohio GOP politics, a role not all senators have sought. That’s because DeWine will retire in two years, other statewide elected Republicans have conflicting ambitions, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Westlake Republican, is a Capitol freshman.
The first rule of warfare is to secure the home front. For J.D. Vance, that will mean focusing his eyes on – and keeping his hands in – politicking among potential statewide rivals and factions inside Ohio’s Republican Party.
Meanwhile, no need to fret about your pets: Our new vice president will have you covered.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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