JD Vance Is The GOP’s Next-Gen Authoritarian
Christopher Mathias
If Monday's RNC is any indication, Vance will have the support of Republicans to make his authoritarian vision a reality.
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Yahoo News
MILWAUKEE — On Monday afternoon inside Fiserv Forum, cameras from every major American news network filmed the smiling face of Sen. JD Vance as he strolled through the floor of the Republican National Convention to wild applause and screams.

Sixwire, a country band from Nashville, played a cover of Merle Haggard’s “Let’s Rebuild America First” before House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), speaking from a lectern on the main stage, made it all official.

“Pursuant to Rule 40-D of the rules of the Republican Party, I formally declare President Donald J. Trump and JD Vance as the Republican nominees for president and vice president!” he said. Vance waved to the crowd and shook hands and posed for photos.

Nearly three years ago, Vance, then a poorly polling Senate candidate, made a less auspicious appearance as a guest on the manosphere podcast “Jack Murphy Live.” He told the pseudonymous host that if Trump ever retook the White House, he’d advise him to purge U.S. government institutions of everyone but MAGA loyalists.

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” Vance said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it,’” Vance continued, referring to when America’s seventh president defied a Supreme Court ruling to stop the genocide against Native Americans and stealing of their land.

Vance’s vision was of a vengeful president disposing of democratic norms and tossing aside the checks and balances of America’s three branches of government. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said at another point. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Ba’athification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

Now, three years later, as the GOP nominee for vice president of the United States, Vance is closer than ever to making that authoritarian vision a reality — and if Monday’s RNC was any indication, he’ll have more than enough support in the Republican Party to do so.

The RNC commenced Monday morning less than 48 hours after Trump was nearly assassinated while speaking at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter’s motives are still unknown, but that didn’t stop Vance on Saturday from blaming the shooting on Trump’s Democratic opponent: President Joe Biden.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Vance wrote on X. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

The flailing Biden campaign has indeed portrayed itself as a bulwark against what it argues would be an existentially dangerous second term for Trump. It has pointed, for example, to Project 2025, the sprawling, 900-page blueprint for Trump’s second term written by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA think tank, and dozens of other conservative organizations.

Included in Project 2025 is a plan that resembles Vance’s vision of a purge: making it easier for Trump, as the 47th president of the U.S., to fire thousands of civil servants he perceives as disloyal. (“In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, recently told HuffPost.)

“There are some good ideas in there,” Vance said of Project 2025 last month, in an interview with Newsmax. “There are some things I disagree with. But most importantly, it has no affiliation with the Trump campaign. The left is trying to make a major news story out of the fact that a conservative nonprofit is engaging in public policy work,” he added, referring to the Heritage Foundation. (Per a CNN tally, some 140 people involved with Project 2025 previously worked in the Trump administration.)

Vance himself has ties to Heritage. Just last month, he tweeted that he was “thrilled” to write the foreword for an “incredible” new book by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of the foundation, which Vance said contained “a bold new vision for the future of conservatism in America.”

And as Vance was nominated inside Fiserv Forum arena Monday, a few blocks away inside a symphony hall, the Heritage Foundation was holding an all-day, RNC-sanctioned conference called Heritage Policy Fest: Fighting for America’s Future. (Heritage denied a HuffPost request to cover the event, saying there wasn’t enough room.)

But perhaps even more alarming than Vance’s ties to the Heritage Foundation are his close relationships with a cadre of powerful, anti-democratic figures in Silicon Valley, as detailed in an explosive 2022 Vanity Fair article.

Among those figures was Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Palantir. Vance became an admirer of Thiel after hearing him speak at Yale Law School. Thiel had made it clear that he did not believe in democracy. “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in a Cato Institute essay. After graduating from Yale in 2015, Vance joined Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm run by Thiel.

Around this time, Thiel had become a prominent supporter of Trump, even speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Meanwhile, as reported by HuffPost, he was also secretly funding and supporting various right-wing extremist figures, including white supremacists, across America.

Among the extremist figures he eventually supported was a blogger named Mencius Moldbug, later revealed to be a Silicon Valley programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who has since become a kind of éminence grise of hyper-libertarian tech billionaires eager to dispose of democracy. Yarvin has stated flatly that he thinks America needs a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

Vance is friends with Yarvin and cited him during that 2021 manosphere podcast episode. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said during that podcast, using a phrase common among Yarvin’s acolytes to describe America on the cusp of finally abandoning democracy and embracing a ruler or dictator. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

The following year, in 2022, Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate after over $10 million in donations from Thiel.

Barbara Wiley and Corinne Hayes, two Trump supporters from Arizona who call themselves the “Grassroots Grandmas,” were thrilled by Vance’s nomination on Monday. “I can’t think of a better pick than him,” Wiley told HuffPost. “I mean, he really came up from nothing and made everything he’s gotten now, he’s worked for it for sure.”

Wiley and Hayes wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “TRUMP” and then “SUPREME COURT, SUPREME COURT, SUPREME COURT” — a reference to the three Supreme Court justices Trump picked while in office. They were thrilled by a recent, shocking Supreme Court decision, enabled by the justices Trump selected, upending the “Chevron doctrine,” which had given federal agencies — the very ones Vance wants to purge — discretion in how to interpret the laws Congress passes.

“It’s gonna eliminate all these bureaucracies that exist that do nothing but take taxpayers’ money, ” Hayes said.

Larry Watson, a pastor from Texas County, Oklahoma, traveled to Milwaukee Monday as a state delegate. Asked about the criticism that Vance’s vision of purging the U.S. government is authoritarian, Watson replied that both sides of American politics — left and right — can “equally be accused of being authoritarian.”

“But to the victor sometimes goes the spoils,” Watson said. “At some point in time, majority rule has to occur along with minority rights.”

Everywhere at the RNC, there was evidence of the Republican Party’s authoritarian tendencies and its excitement over the possibilities of a second Trump term.

Outside the arena Monday evening, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec — who has deep ties to white nationalists and other extremist figures — hosted an episode of the “War Room” podcast from a small, RNC-sanctioned stage. The podcast is usually hosted by Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist, but a federal judge recently sentenced him to four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Posobiec has spoken in deeply alarming terms about a potential second term for Trump. “President Donald J. Trump is waiting in the wings,” he said at the annual National Conservative Conference just one week ago. “And when he assumes office again, let me tell you, the globalists and their entire regime will be smashed to pieces and scattered to the winds.”

He later added, in even more explicitly fascist language: “We don’t negotiate with unhumans because that’s the stakes of this — humanity versus unhuman; populist nationalist versus atheistic Marxist; strength, beauty and genius versus weakness, ugliness and stupidity; civilization versus barbarism; crime and chaos versus law.”

Now Posobiec was at the 2024 RNC, interviewing Mike Lindell, the MyPillow millionaire and election denier, as a gaggle of adoring fans looked on.

Back inside the arena, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took the stage to ecstatic cheers from the thousands of convention delegates. Only a couple of years ago, Greene was the featured speaker at a white supremacist conference in Florida where her fellow speakers praised Adolf Hitler, called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be hanged, and chanted “Putin!” as bombs fell over Ukraine.

A couple of hours later, Trump himself made a surprise appearance at the arena with a bandage over his left ear. The crowd went wild, breaking into a chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — a reference to the words he screamed at his supporters in Pennsylvania after a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped his ear.

Trump wound his way through the crowd, eventually taking a seat to watch the rest of the evening’s speakers. Sitting to his left was his new running mate — a bearded millennial who once said that, unlike Mike Pence, he would’ve carried out Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump and Vance smiled at each other and shook hands.