The Immediate Benefits of JD Vance as Trump's VP

Neocons of the Bush/Cheney Era Are Reportedly ‘Scared to Death'

There are many tribes and schools of thought within the great consortium that is MAGAdom. Here at Badlands, and throughout the greater community that spawned it, we see individuals who are steadfast in their support for the former president. But there are those who remain more skeptical despite a yearning for Trump to be everything he and the more Q-centric areas of the internet claim that he is.

These individuals are less willing to forgive or consider his reasons for things like Warp Speed, or the hiring of establishment neocons like John Bolton and Nikki Hailey. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that there are those who are behind Trump no matter what, and there are those who want to be, but need convincing that certain mistakes won’t be repeated; and the selection of his Vice President is really the first glimpse we get at how he’ll run his second term.

Admittedly, I experienced a modicum of fear when I saw Marco Rubio and Tim Scott on the shortlist. Visions of a second term hampered by another Pence-ian Rino as the Wormtongue in Trump’s ear did little to excite me (no offense to the Pence stans out there), but of the options presented, I immediately felt as though Vance would be the most overtly America First choice of the contenders. When he was eventually selected, I definitely breathed a sigh of relief, but I had no idea at first how brilliant of a selection Vance would prove to be.

First, consider the perspective of somebody outside of the movement—someone who doesn’t have the same emotional investment in Trump or the Q-op—the kind of emotional investment that allows us to overlook things that those on the outside see as glaring red flags. While we may explain what seem like poor choices away as being part of some unknowable 5D chess move or default to outwardly dubious individuals like Pence and Pompeo being “actors playing their part,” the folks outside of our movement see these things as errors in judgment, and you really can’t fault them for that because they haven’t been along for the ride.

These onlookers see Trump as perpetually oscillating between two opposing impulses. On the one hand, there is the Donald Trump of 2016, who conducted his campaign with a relentless and unwavering commitment to subvert and overturn the dogma of not only the Democratic establishment, but the Republican establishment as well. But then you also have the Trump who filled his presidency with a litany of traditional Republican operatives who were mostly pro-establishment.

Naturally, everyone’s wondering what course a second Trump presidency will take. Given the options that were seemingly on the table—and I’m referring to the short list floating around the last month or so—I personally saw Vance as being indicative of a the direction I’m hoping Trump will go in.

I’m not saying that Vance is the perfect politician, I don’t think that there ever has been or will ever be such a thing. He holds a lot of views that I oppose; granted, these are views that you pretty much have to hold or at least appear to hold in order to have a career in Washington.

However, based on both his words and his actions in the Senate, I believe Vance to be a truly populist, anti-establishment candidate, certainly more so than Kamala Harris, who doesn’t have a single populist or anti-establishment molecule in her being.

Here is Trump's announcement, published on Truth Social:

Vance is young—he's 39 years old—which acts as a counterweight to this widely held sense that we're living under a gerontocracy or rule by the elderly. He’s articulate, he’s effective in interviews, but most importantly, he has an impressive record of actually defending the working class in a way that will be critical for Trump to win those swing states. Beyond that, Vance may have landed Trump an impossible fish: the Teamsters Union.

The Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, not hours after Vance was named Trump’s running mate, went on Fox News and communicated why the Teamsters regard him as an important ally to the working class.

“I mean, JD Vance, the short time that we've worked together, I mean, he's been great on teamster issues. He has supported/cosponsored an airline manufacturing bill that addresses outsourcing of critical airline maintenance to China. He's also supported paid sick leave for our railroad workers. You remember that situation a couple of years ago, where they weren't getting sick time? He stepped right up. He's also been very vocal and supportive of holding employers accountable who try and skirt their obligation, under the independent contractor model known as DSP. So he's been right there on all our issues, with publicly stated it. And look, I, at this day and age, there's nothing better than having a U.S. Marine represented as a vice president candidate, you know. “

Naturally, I’ve seen Democrat pundits instantly claiming that this was a “terrible pick,” and that he only appeals to the MAGA base and isn’t going to expand his reach. These big-brain statements may have been partly stoked by fear, because the very next day, we witnessed a historic event, as the Teamsters President not only attended the RNC, but actually spoke at the event, saying:

“You can have whatever opinion you want but one thing is clear: President Trump is a candidate who’s unafraid to hear from new, loud and often critical voices… is making lasting inroads with union leaders and broadening the Republican tent in a historic way.”

You have to remember that the Teamsters have been hardline supporters of Democrat candidates going back forever.

Another immediate boon from the Vance selection is his military background. It might seem trivial to some, but having a Marine in the White House is a prospect that seems appealing to a significant portion of the country.

Beyond the pull with the Teamsters and the Marines, Vance has a much more encouraging voting record than the others floated for VP. He hasn’t been in the Senate very long, so his voting record isn’t particularly extensive, but it is trending in a positive direction.

Back in April, the Senate voted on a very expensive bill—$95 billion to be exact—which sought to arm the foreign countries of Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, effectively stimulating the Military-Industrial Complex and prolonging the suffering and death currently taking place in Ukraine, where President Zelensky is fighting Russia with a conscripted army of reluctant soldiers.

The bill also snuck in a provision to ban TikTok, an alleged Chinese spy app that people choose to use by their own free will, and which is run by a Singaporean capitalist, not a Chinese communist. Regardless of where you might stand on the issue of TikTok, I think we can all agree that giving the federal government the power to unilaterally ban Social Media platforms on murky grounds is a precedent that bodes ill for platforms like, say, Rumble, X and even SubStack, for that matter.

J.D. Vance was one of only 15 Republican Senators who voted against this bill, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate. It was one of those quintessential political establishment bloat bills that inspires “bipartisan support,” meaning that the establishment wings of both parties come together to get their nut at the expense of the people they were hired to serve.

Vance has made it perfectly clear with both his words and his voting record that he is ideologically opposed to the funding of endless wars. Granted, he pays lip service to clichés like “Putin is a mad dog,” and “Israel has a right to defend itself,” but you almost have to if you want to have a career in Washington these days.

Another aspect of Vance that I enjoy is how he rails against institutions of centralized power like JPMorgan and Blackrock. Unlike most politicians, he’s well aware that once the devastation in Ukraine is complete, BlackRock and JPMorgan and all the other vultures will swoop in and rebuild Ukraine at a great profit to themselves and at the expense of the American taxpayer.

There’s also the Vice Presidential Debate to consider.

Of all the choices on the shortlist, Vance is the only one who can call out Kamala Harris for being exactly what she is: an instrument of the democrat shadow network of corporations and NGOs that essentially run the party. Tim Scott or Marco Rubio could have made these same claims, but they are very demonstrably sponsored by and beholden to the very same corporatocracy. These corporations, as well as elites like San Francisco’s Getty Family, have literally funded Kamala’s career and put her where she is today.

J.D. Vance represents the death of the Bush/Cheney era Republican party—what leftist media often refers to as “Reaganite.” As we mentioned, he’s railed against corporate power and endless wars, something that would be considered blasphemy in the Republican party of yesterday, and it’s causing all of the right people to squirm.

Immediately after the announcement, a cadre of warmongers in the Republican House scurried to Politico to express their disapproval, many doing so behind a wall of anonymity. They are particularly upset about his reluctance to endlessly fund the war in Ukraine, which Politico claimed “accelerates his party's rejection of its Reaganite roots.”

The aversion to military intervention that has become a hallmark of the America First crowd is typically referred to by modern media as the “isolationist right,” but it is a strain that has always existed on the right.

Sometimes Ronald Reagan would embrace it, and other times he would reject it, but no one more perfectly embodied the neocon, interventionist spirit as Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney. All that said, I find it funny that they attribute hawkishness to Reagan rather than the deeply despised Bush era; they do this because the mainstream media and the modern left are themselves the Warhawks of today, and they do not want their position to be seen as interchangeable with Bush-era policy.

Politico reports:

Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side… What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who oversees military spending as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, told one associate, according to a person familiar with the exchange: 

“The Ukrainians better hurry up and win.” Another influential congressional Republican simply told me about the Vance selection: “I’m scared to death.” In a series of interviews, Republicans from the Reaganite wing openly urged Trump to counter Vance’s influence by appointing more hawkish national security officials.

“I would love to see more like-minded people in cabinet positions,” Sen Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) told me, citing former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), both hawks, as “Ernst-esque” picks. The hawks are eager to install Pompeo at the Defense Department, see Cotton at the CIA or inside the White House and are supportive of Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) or Robert O’Brien, Trump’s first-term national security adviser, as Secretary of State. The fiercest clash may be over Ric Grenell, the troll-happy ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term who is widely thought to covet the State Department or National Security Adviser. (Politico, July 17, 2024)

Despite how it reads, this is actually an extremely encouraging sign.

Trump’s first term was infested with establishment republican neocons, and this VP choice, unlike Pence, actually scares them. The choice of J.D. Vance indicates that the people who’ll be in Trump's ear are the people who favor a rejection of neocon ideology.

The tweet below from We Are Change’s Luke Rudkowski further illustrates my point:

Of course, you have MSNBC trying to tell people it’s some kind of tragedy that such esteemed and beloved figures as Liz Cheney, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney weren’t present at the RNC last week.

Speaking of MSNBC, one of their favorite commentators for the last five or so years is a greasy little imp named John Bolton, whom I would classify as one of the most unabashed, maniacal warmongers in modern American politics. Bolton developed a reputation for being a kind of Doctor Strangelove-like figure during the Bush/Cheney era by constantly pushing for U.S. involvement in conflicts across the globe.

Bolton was yet another perplexing Trump hire, though he inevitably resigned and became one of the media’s favorite Trump bashers. Now he postures as though he were some kind of accomplished statesman who has intimate knowledge of Trump’s alleged ineptitude, and so Liberal outlets that were once adversarial to the John Bolton’s of the world now welcome him lovingly in the same way they do Liz Cheney.

Last week, John Bolton appeared on MSNBC to comment on the prospect of another Trump presidency, where he was asked to comment on J.D. Vance specifically:

The interview is actually pretty insightful, as it provides a glimpse into how both wings of the establishment see this modern reshaping of our politics.

The conversation quickly turns to Vance and Ukraine, with Katy Tur saying,

“JD Vance is somebody who believes that Ukraine needs to make a peace deal with Russia and cede territory if necessary. He doesn't believe it's good financially for the United States to keep sending money to Ukraine because he doesn't believe Ukraine has the ability to win. What's your expectation for a posture toward Ukraine with Donald Trump back in office and now with JD Vance as his running mate? “

What she’s describing is essentially the exact same deal that Ukraine was prepared to make back in the first couple months of the war, that is, until Joe Biden and Boris Johnson sabotaged those talks.

Bolton responds:

“Well, I think it's going to be very bad for Ukraine.

What Vance has said about it is wrong in many material respects. I don't think he appreciates the American national security interest in protecting Ukraine against this unprovoked Russian aggression. There seems to be his idea that we're doing this, out of the goodness of our hearts. It's an act of charity. We're nice people, although we are.

We're doing it because there's an American national security interest in peace and security in Europe. Huge trading partners of ours, and allies in other areas around the world.

You know, it's interesting, one of the things Vance relies on is he says we just need the Europeans to do more in Europe because we have to worry more about Chinese threats in the Pacific. And it is the case that China is the existential threat, in the century, but it's forming an axis with Russia. These conflicts are connected. And maybe Vice President designate Vance or, listen to his boss's interview on Bloomberg News last night where Trump said, you know, Taiwan is 9000 miles away from us. It's 100 miles away from China. It's really not worth the effort, basically, is what he said, which is consistent with what Trump has said about Taiwan on other occasions.

I think there's a real disconnect here. But the bottom line is that these are candidates who do not fundamentally understand that a strong American presence in the world is good for us here at home.”

If Bolton’s unhappy, I’m happy.

Bolton may be poopooing on Trump and Vance for their “isolationist” policy in regard to Ukraine and Taiwan, but what he doesn’t mention is that their stance has also been the stance of every other president up until Joe Biden.

In case you haven’t noticed, "Isolationist" is the hot, new derogatory expression being used to describe individuals who are opposed to funding other countries’ wars, but as a term, it’s highly inaccurate.

Trump and Vance don't want to isolate the United States at all from the rest of the world, they want to trade with China and have a constructive, respectful, peaceful relationship with them. John Bolton's view of the world is that any time we don't go to war, we are somehow weakening our national security, even though it is precisely this attitude which has caused us to pour enormous amounts of money and resources into fruitless conflicts, which not only weaken us monetarily, but cause further radicalization against the west, putting soldiers and citizens abroad at risk.

You might not think J.D. Vance is a very entertaining choice, like Flynn, Gabbard or Ramaswamy may have been, you might not have even been impressed by the anecdotes about his “mee-maw” that he regaled us with during his lengthy acceptance speech at the RNC, but I believe that, when we’re further down the road, we won’t be looking back wondering why Trump made this choice.

The Vance pick, to me, has solidified the fact that Trump Administration 2.0 will not be hampered by establishment stooges.

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