By Mayank Chhaya-
The Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee James David Vance, better known as J D Vance, is a breathtaking example of political opportunism.
In the four years prior to 2020 Vance, also a Senator from Ohio, called former President Donald Trump names, using a wide variety of unvarnished epithets. Since then, he has become an exultant Trump follower and defender.
In private messages, he had once wondered ahead of Trump’s election in 2016 whether he was “America’s Hitler” and in 2017 called him a “moral disaster.” Publicly, he described Trump as a “total fraud”, as well as an “idiot” who didn’t care about regular people and called him “reprehensible.”
In his best-selling book best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” about his difficult early years growing up and middle-class dysfunction, he described Trump as “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America.
It is a stunning 180-degree turn that he is now Trump’s most ardent supporter to the extent of becoming a gushing devotee and likely successor. His turnaround as a Trump acolyte happened around 2020. He is also the most assiduous supporter of Trump’s manifest lies about the 2020 election being rigged.
On July 13, soon after the attempt on Trump’s life, Vance tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
In picking the 39-year-old Vance, it appears that the former president has convinced himself that he is going to win mainly on the strength of his MAGA base. The former president, it would seem, does not feel the need to court independent voters.
Before his conversion from an assertive “never Trumper” to what can only be described as “only Trumper”, Vance could have had the potential to expand his party’s base beyond MAGA. However, since 2020 he has chosen to be more Trumpian than Trump in his quest to endear himself to the former president.
Vance’s appeal among independent voters, especially women, remains seriously doubtful given his views on abortion which is potentially an election-defining issue. Trump has sought to diminish abortion as a national issue by saying it is a state subject.
However, the Democratic Party, the Biden campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris see a great opening to attack Vance on his radical views on abortion and women’s reproductive rights. At one point he indicated in an interview in 2021 that he did not support abortions even in cases of rape or incest.
The vice-presidential debate between Harris and Vance could be quite the political treat since she has positioned herself as the most vocal supporter of abortion and women’s reproductive rights in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning abortion as a constitutional right. That was almost exactly two years ago in June 2022 ending the 50-year-old protection.
Separated by nearly 30 years, Vance’s relative youth is being widely seen from two specific standpoints. One is that being so young means that Trump likely sees Vance as his political heir in the Republican Party. Unlike Trump, who is an in-the-moment politician prone to impulses rather than ideology, Vance is seen by many observers as having given MAGA/Trump worldview ideological legs and underpinnings.
The other point that could have propelled his choice is to bring in younger voters into the Republican fold by riding on Vance’s youth.
For Indian Americans, the fact that Vance is married to Usha Chilukuri, born to Indian immigrant parents, is a source of some enthusiasm about the ticket. This is notwithstanding that Harris had already made history in 2021 by becoming the first woman vice president who was also of Indian and African American heritage.
Usha Vance is a successful attorney who clerked for Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the latter before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. She was born in San Diego, California. She attended Yale University and also graduated from Yale Law School. Vance has been known to significantly credit Usha during his early struggles.
It is quite extraordinary that Indian Americans, who number 4.4 million in a population of about 335 million—that is a little over 1 percent, are either directly or indirectly at the heart of America’s presidential politics and race. Kamala Harris and Usha Vance, the former directly and the latter by implication, are uniquely prominent Indian American presence on the national political platform.
