JD Vance's downfall is coming – and soon

Sooner or later a transactional guy like Trump finds an ideologue like Vance just too much

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They were the names of our fallen who gave their lives serving Britain alongside the US.

At the start of Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Keir Starmer paid tribute to each of the six young soldiers who died in a bomb attack 13 years ago and a Royal Marine killed 18 years ago, all in Afghanistan.

Starmer was remembering those who US Vice President JD Vance forgot when he told Fox News earlier this week that Donald Trump’s minerals deal with Ukraine would protect the country better than “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”.

Though Vance insisted he hadn’t meant to slight the UK, there was obviously a barely concealed political motive behind the PM’s remembrance: to tell the increasingly obnoxious Vance to get back in his box.

But there was perhaps also a somewhat more discreet political message – to encourage President Trump to put Vance back in that box himself.

And trust me, that moment is coming. The Trump-Vance partnership cannot last.

Elon Musk, left, and JD Vance at a Trump campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania in October last year (Photo: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Vance has been very useful to Trump so far. He provides a perception of intellectual heft within the administration, combined with a backstory stretching back to the Appalachians which has enabled him to profess true understanding of “left behind” Americans.

While the President was a millionaire aged eight, Vance was living in relative poverty with a violent, alcohol and drug-addicted mother. Trump is a fraud – Vance is the real deal.

Some commentators have tried to knock down the working-class story Vance told in his 2016 autobiography/manifesto Hillbilly Elegy in a way that seems churlish. We may not like the conclusions he drew from his difficult childhood but there is little doubt he suffered.

Vance sees himself as the avenger for his mother, and for Mother America, taking on the drugs trade, low-cost foreign imports and immigrant labour which cheapened their existence.

But the clues to Vance’s brewing storm with Trump lie in Hillbilly Elegy too. He writes furiously about the revolving door of boyfriends in his mum’s life. Yet the anger appears less that each man ended up abandoning his mum, and more that they left him.

Particularly when he tried so very hard to make them stay. “I had grown especially skillful at navigating various father figures,” he writes. He tells how he got an ear pierced to impress Steve, “a midlife-crisis sufferer”, how he loved police cars to please Chip, an alcoholic police officer, and how he was kind to the children of Ken, an odd job man.

Vance while campaigning as the Republican Senate candidate for Ohio in August 2022 (Photo: Gaelen Morse/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“But none of these things were really true,” he wrote. “I hated earrings, I hated police cars, and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year.”

Who can read that and not think of Vance’s behaviour in the Oval Office last week, and his ability to behave just the way he knew would make his latest father figure – President Trump – proud?

Firstly he took aim at Starmer with a little dig at infringements on free speech in the UK – which Starmer quickly shut down by saying he was very proud of Britain’s history on free speech.

The following day he was back at it with the now infamous goading of Volodymyr Zelensky over what he deemed to be insufficient gratitude to the US.

He knew exactly which buttons to press to incite a Trumpian explosion of anger towards Zelensky and a pat on the head for himself.

But the question is, does Vance care any more about free speech and gratitude than he ever did for earrings, police cars and Ken’s kids? I wonder if even Vance himself knows the answer to that question.

The clues to Vance’s brewing storm with Trump lie in his autobiography (Photo: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images)

Throughout his life, Vance has come under the thrall of dominating male personalities. The consummate shape-shifter has moulded himself to their views.

At Yale he maintained a fairly stolid centre-right position under the influence of his law professors. But his move to Silicon Valley and the growing influence of PayPal founder and far-right techno-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel saw him take a giant step to the right.

Holding sway in Vance’s mind now – alongside Trump – seems to be the thinking of Curtis Yarvin, an extreme right-wing philosopher and blogger who writes about replacing American democracy with a techno-monarchy. (You might hope that’s some kind of new wave music genre, but it is actually where Elon Musk is heading at speed.) Yarvin has called the civil rights movement a “black rage industry” and said the American people must “get over their dictator phobia”.

It is said no one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more. And remember, for tech kid Vance, the online world is the world.

But Vance hasn’t just become more right wing – he has also become way more ideological.

He has said: “We have to go in and do a lot of things that conservatives don’t now feel comfortable with.” As his desire for the presidency grows, so does his almost demonic fervour for free speech and combativeness, for deregulation and the smashing of established elites.

And here is where the rupture with Trump must come.

For Trump is the ultimate transactional politician. The art of the deal isn’t a life guide for Trump – it is his life.

Vance is now an ideologue – admittedly one who is prepared to adapt that ideology – but is a man who is not interested in deals or negotiations or trades.

And sooner or later a transactional guy like Trump finds an ideologue like Vance just a bit, well… much. Vance, meanwhile, will one day soon wake up despising the grubby trader Trump as much as he did Steve, Chip or Ken.

For despite all the influence on his life he is a man increasingly convinced it his judgements alone which can save America – and the wider world – from moral, economic and societal decline. And that’s when the real moment of danger will be with us.

Alison Phillips was editor of the Daily Mirror from 2018-24; she won Columnist of the Year at the 2018 National Press Awards