Politics
Who J.D. Vance Is For
MAGA is all in on macho.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images, and Twitter/@JDVance1.
In choosing Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made his campaign strategy clear: boys, boys, boys.
White working-class men were key to Trump’s victory in 2016, and Biden’s ability to peel off some of their support was one reason he won in 2020. Now Trump seems to be doubling down on the strategy of catering to disaffected men—mostly white ones, but also Black and Hispanic men and young men. He’s doing so to some degree in policy, promising to close the border to immigrants, whom he paints as physically dangerous to vulnerable white women and economically threatening to the forgotten white men.
But Trump is just not much of a policy guy; he’s an entertainer and a symbol-maker, equal parts savior and avenger, a man onto whom fans can project all sorts of hopes and inclinations. And as such, his appeal to men is much more about masculine performance and cultural signaling than about expertise, competence, or even a loose plan of action.
Which is why Vance, perhaps the least qualified and least experience vice presidential nominee in decades, may have appealed to Trump. Vance brings no practical skill set to the ticket. Yes, he could pull more money from Silicon Valley billionaires, but he doesn’t promise to deliver any key state (Ohio, where Vance is a senator, was already Trump’s) or bring along any new demographic (white men are already Trump’s). Instead, he supplies youth and vigor, masculine embitterment, and white male rage. (“Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion,” he wrote in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.) And that, Trump’s campaign has banked, is enough to win the election. Perhaps it’s even enough to give the MAGA movement a second life once Trump is gone.
MAGA is a movement of both gender traditionalism and cartoonish machismo, rejecting the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush’s evangelical Christianity for the muscular reactionaryism of Jacked Jesus. Trump’s sexism and his poor treatment of women in his personal life have been extensively documented; Vance has been outspoken about his particular ire for women who have an insufficient number of children, as well as for mothers who work outside the home. (Vance has three children and, until his candidacy was announced, his wife worked a demanding job at a law firm.)
He has complained that childless women have too much power, griping, “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He has argued that “a healthy ruling class” must be made up of people with children.