A shooter tried to end Donald Trump’s life on Saturday. On Monday, by elevating J.D.
Vance as his running mate, he has sought to extend his political influence for decades beyond his natural lifespan. Vance is now Trump’s anointed political son and heir. He’s every bit as iconoclastic and disruptive as Trump, and he mounts a more articulate case for Trump’s policies than the former president himself.
And, at 39, Vance is only about half his age. Many never-Trumpers have consoled themselves with the thought that even if Trump wins the November 5 election, he’s a four-year phenomenon that can be endured, an aberration before America returns to something like normal. But by adopting Vance, Trump entrenches his own worldview, his politics, his policies, his loyalists at the top of the Republican Party for as long as Vance survives to carry them forward.
“His selection as the VP nominee consolidates the complete MAGA-fication of the Republican Party,” says a former chair of the Republican National Convention, Michael Steele, a traditional Republican who also served as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. “J.D.
Vance is the younger, full-throated MAGA acolyte that Trump wanted to help him lead his movement,” Steele tells me. “More importantly, Vance will do what he is told; and he’s perfectly happy about that. After all, it got him the VP nomination.
” Vance famously wrote , a memoir that starkly illuminated the plight of the white working class in fly-over Ameri.
