The Economist: J.D. Vance is now the heir apparent to the MAGA movement

                                                                     photograph: ap

For as long as Donald Trump has dominated the Republican Party, much of the old establishment had assumed it could wait him out and eventually return to espousing Reaganite conservatism. After all, Mr Trump is a unique political talent but has not produced a consistent, comprehensive political programme. Yet the Republican presidential candidate’s choice of J.D. Vance, a senator from Ohio, as his running-mate makes it much likelier that the maga movement will last beyond Mr Trump’s time in politics.

“I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of vice president of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance,” Mr Trump wrote on July 15th, ending an Apprentice-style process of elimination. He added that Mr Vance “will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond…”

The 39-year-old rose to national prominence with his bestselling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, which was later turned into a film. Mr Vance grew up in a socially dysfunctional working-class family but quickly rose above his modest upbringing. He served in the Marine Corps and graduated from Yale Law School, eventually joining Mithril Capital, a venture-capital firm started by Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal.

Mr Vance, once a self-described “Never Trump guy”, also wrote for conservative outlets like National Review around the time that his book was published. “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Mr Vance wrote in a private message in 2016. He has since transformed into one of the most ardent defenders of Mr Trump.

Across Mr Trump’s first term, Mr Vance became increasingly sympathetic—and took an interest in laying a firmer intellectual foundation for the maga movement. But he is not a natural political talent. Even with a Trump endorsement, Mr Vance won less than a third of the vote in the Ohio Republican Senate primary in 2022. In the general election he underperformed other Republicans statewide, with the state’s governor, Mike DeWine, running a margin of victory nearly 20 points bigger than his. But Mr Vance has still managed to become one of the least experienced vice-presidential picks in American history. (Richard Nixon, also selected at the age of 39, spent a comparatively lengthy six years in Congress before becoming Dwight Eisenhower’s vice-president.)

chart: the economist

He is also relatively unknown: a survey conducted for cnn in June found that 56% of Americans had never heard of him. The Biden campaign will spend the next few months knocking Mr Vance for both his old criticism of Mr Trump and his more recent fealty. “Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running-mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden campaign chairwoman, said after Mr Trump announced his choice.

Mr Vance is indeed a shameless pugilist willing to back Mr Trump in virtually any situation. He has said he would not have certified the results of the 2020 election had he been vice-president. The first millennial on a presidential ticket, Mr Vance also follows his boomer boss in spending too much time on social media. On July 13th he declared that the Biden campaign’s “rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination” before anything was known about the shooter.

As much as Mr Vance has coarsened American political discourse, his influence on policy could be more damaging. Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former adviser, said last month that Donald Trump was “a moderate in the maga movement”. If that’s the case, then Mr Vance now rests firmly on the group’s right wing.

Mr Vance quickly established himself as a leading isolationist in the us Senate. He is supportive of Israel but more ambivalent on Taiwan. He has made his contempt for Ukraine clear. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” he said days before Russia’s invasion in 2022. And he once called a congressional visit by Volodymyr Zelensky “grotesque”.

One relative consistency in Mr Vance’s approach is his focus on pro-family economics. He belongs to a wing of the Republican Party that supports policies like expanding the child tax credit. Oren Cass, a heterodox conservative economic thinker, praised Mr Vance’s selection because he had been a leader in “supporting domestic manufacturing, confronting Wall Street, and building worker power”. Mr Vance also worked alongside Democrats on a railway safety bill and has said Lina Khan, whom Mr Biden made the head of the Federal Trade Commission, is “doing a pretty good job”.

Another place where Mr Vance, a convert to Catholicism, has also changed his position is on abortion. He once called the procedure “murder” and spoke with scepticism about exceptions in the case of rape. He backed a national ban in 2022 but has since come to Mr Trump’s position that the issue should be left up to the states. He also supports access to mifepristone, an abortion pill.

The most optimistic conclusion from all this may be that Mr Vance’s views are driven more by political opportunism than genuine ideological conviction—and that he could yet return to a more reasonable place.

After being shot, Mr Trump told reporters that he had planned changes to his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and would seek to project a unifying message. Mr Trump also had a chance to pick a running-mate that would strike a similar chord. Nikki Haley, runner up for the Republican nomination, or Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, would have reassured moderate Republicans and independent voters. Mr Trump made the most divisive choice possible. Mr Vance is fairly new in Washington, but he could be there for a very long time.