The Daily Populous Sunday June 21st, 2026 evening edition
Authored by inews.co.uk and submitted by theipaper

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JD Vance calls his new book on his spiritual journey Communion but it reads as a confession of his cynicism and ambition. There are remnants of the loving, decent Vance we saw in his memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family, Hillbilly Elegy, but also evidence of the heartless Vance who turned from Donald Trump critic to bootlicker on his way to becoming the youngest Vice President of the United States.

Serving a mercurial, demanding President – with the highest office in America tantalisingly within reach – you have to wonder whether Vance really has changed over the years from the guy who called Trump “America’s Hitler” to the patsy twisting himself into a pretzel trying to defend his master.

Indeed, if Trump ever bothered to read the book, he would probably laugh at his Vice President’s attempt to reconcile his newly found Catholic faith (Vance converted only in 2019) with his weak-kneed loyalty to a secular supreme leader who demands worship from his aides.

If anyone can see through Vance, it is Trump himself, who despises flip-flopping, unless it involves himself.

In his latest incarnation, Vance has been assiduously flogging what US critics are calling Trump’s “Versailles treaty” with Iran, a nod to that other disastrous post-war settlement in 1919. The President has gone from demanding “unconditional surrender” from the Islamic Republic to negotiating with the regime in the Memorandum of Understanding signed at a post-G7 dinner in Louis XIV’s French palace.

Vance has been mouthing platitudes such as, “If Iranians behave like a normal country then we want to treat them like a normal country”, and claiming, absurdly, that the Second World War ended in “some kind of negotiation” instead of total defeat of the Nazis in order to justify American concessions that Tehran hasn’t even fully accepted yet.

The Vice President’s trip to Switzerland this weekend for talks with the Iranians is currently on hold. Trump has kindly warned Vance that, if the deal works out, “I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m going to blame JD”.

This, it seems, is Vance’s reward for having taken too literally Trump’s campaign promise to stop wars, not start them – he’s attracting all the blame from disgruntled Republican hawks for being too much of a peace-monger, while trying to build a bridge to the younger, anti-Israel, borderline far-right crowd, whose support he needs to become president.

Will he ever get there? New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have just revealed in their new book, Regime Change, that when Trump was asked if a successor would get rid of all the gilt he installed in the White House, he allegedly replied, “Cubans love gold”.

Vance’s new book reads as a confession of his cynicism and ambition (Photo: Heather Diehl/Getty)

Trump has long delighted in playing off Vance against Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose parents are Cuban. Rubio has been surprisingly silent during the Iranian peace negotiations and Trump seems very unmotivated to give his Vice President a leg-up, however hard he tries to please.

However, the signs have been there since childhood that Vance is capable of absorbing tremendous ill-treatment, such as his abandonment aged six by his “holy roller” evangelical father, while remaining single-minded in pursuit of his goals. This resilience would be incredibly admirable if he were more honest about his present position.

In Communion, the older Vance scoffs at the young Vance’s ambition to escape his background and join the Ivy League elite at Yale Law School. “I was desperate to make it,” he writes. “I was so focused on winning the game of life that I had neglected the deeper truths.”

Can he not hear himself when he criticises himself for having a “craving for conquest” and for prioritising “striving over character”? Same ambition. Different elite.

There is a telling scene where Vance describes seeing a billionaire at an Oscars party prancing around with celebrities. A friend observed, “Look at them, man. It’s high school all over again. The awkward kid laughing too hard at the popular kid’s jokes. The girls floating around them.”

Surely he noticed the same phenomenon at Trump’s inauguration, where Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk jostled to be near the 47th President? And Vance, too, was once that awkward kid, who is now inside the vice-presidential mansion and close to all that money and power as a reward for his fealty to Trump.

Vance displays almost a willful lack of self-awareness. But this is the price of serving mammon in this US administration. He mentions at the very beginning of Communion that, “We are all searching for the truth”, while as a politician he has excused plenty of whoppers by Trump and added several of his own (about pet-eating migrants in Ohio, for instance).

His only mistake, he confesses, was to have accused “childless cat ladies” in the Democratic Party of “running our country into the ground”. It was “boneheaded”, he admits, and caused a “firestorm” during the 2024 presidential campaign.

I wonder if one day Vance will make a more honest confession about the spiritual cost of pandering to Trump. For, in words he might recognise from the Bible: “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

espresso_martini__ on June 21st, 2026 at 08:34 UTC »

JD Vance changed his name 3 times. He called Trump the new Hitler. Nobody with a single brain cell can trust this guy

hyenaDeli on June 21st, 2026 at 08:09 UTC »

Everything about him is fake, including the cover photo of his book.

Past_Farmer34 on June 21st, 2026 at 07:37 UTC »

JD Vance is such a lying sleazebag