JD Vance: Trump’s running mate is serious about the White House in 2028

When the 2024 US Presidential race is in the books, it will be Trump who’s remembered for its immortal line: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”

So what? Trump said it, but JD Vance deserves the credit. The Republican vice presidential nominee prepared the ground by spreading a baseless rumour about Haitian immigrants, then doubled down when he was rumbled. 

The tactic may be paying off. With 22 days to go, Trump is riding a mini-surge in swing state polls and scaring Democrats who know historically he’s finished strong. It’s unclear how much he has his running mate to thank for this, but as a new Tortoise investigation reveals, it is clear Vance is every bit as serious as Trump about the big-time:

• Ideology: Vance has one*; Trump only has himself.
• Personality: Trump has one; Vance has several.
• Strategy: Trump offers chaos; Vance offers his own White House bid in 2028.

*The New Right. Vance calls himself a post-liberalism conservative, aligning with the writings of the Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen and a movement that calls itself the New Right.

The New Right is a series of overlapping networks with very different styles – and Vance speaks all their languages: 

• Pod. When Vance talks about “childless cat ladies”, he’s adopting the scathing tone of aggressive online misogynists on right-wing podcasts, fighting against what they see as a feminist cultural takeover.
• Wonk. Project 2025’s 900 pages of detailed plans to take control of US education, health, foreign policy and trade from January next year have become uncomfortable for Trump, but Vance is close to its leading lights.
• High table. Vance, who earned his law degree at Yale, sees himself in the vanguard of the intellectuals who saw the rise of Trump in 2016 as an opportunity for a new conservative political philosophy.

Diagnosis and cure. Deneen’s 2018 book How Liberalism Failed claims that the liberal order built around free trade, the spread of democracy and expanding personal freedoms – gay rights and women’s right to choose – has created an unaccountable liberal elite that ignores the concerns and priorities of ordinary Americans.

Deneen claims this elite, which prizes individual freedoms, has damaged the foundations of family, religion and small town institutions – and the gap between rich and poor has grown.

In his follow-up book Regime Change, Deneen prescribes a cure. He describes a new vanguard of the right (Deneen calls them “aristos”) that should be put in control to

• deliver an economy that puts ordinary workers first; and
• imposes thoroughgoing conservative social policies that put ‘traditional’ families first and people with different ideals last.

Dineen is coy about how his regime change would come about, but quite open about using Machavellian means.

Vance was at Dineen’s latest book launch in DC and swept Deneen up in a bearhug. They’ve publicly praised each other and Vance has spoken about his own belief that conservatives must seize the administrative state, fire every civil servant and “replace them with our people”.

Worth watching: American Moment, an organisation training thousands of young conservatives to be ready to step into roles in public life. Vance is on its board of advisers. 

What’s more? Trump can win in three weeks’ time, and if he does, Vance will be vice president and the natural successor in 2028. Even if Trump loses, Vance is just getting started – and he could be more formidable than Trump.

He has

• the backing of billionaire tech chieftians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; and
• an ideological purpose that is a lot more defined than Trump’s self-regarding politics of grievance.

He’s also capable of adapting to his surroundings so he can be the angry brawler one moment and the toned-down reasonable guy the next, picking up votes from the centre. 

The 2028 US Election has begun.

Listen now: Our new episode of the Slow Newscast Beyond Trump: JD Vance and the New Right explores how Vance got on the Trump ticket – and where Vance himself wants to take America next.

Photograph by Jamie Kelter Davis/New York Times / Redux / eyevine