Ian Ward

intervention in that conflict.

But once it became apparent that Trump was going to intervene, Vance publicly fell in line.

After the strikes in Iran, Vance articulated what he called the Trump doctrine to justify these strikes.

So it all sort of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about him as not just a defender, but a kind of explainer and justifier, right?

It's not really sufficient in his mind to defend these things.

He wants to offer a kind of intellectual rationalization or justification for them.

Kirk and Vance were very close.

Some reporting came out after Kirk's death that Kirk was actually one of the first conservatives to identify Vance as a rising star, that he eventually introduced him to Donald Trump Jr.

's team and vouched for him as a legitimate convert to the MAGA movement.

He hosted Charlie Kirk's show a couple days after his death, sitting behind his desk in the old executive office building, delivering a straight-to-camera monologue with an American flag behind him.

I can't promise you that all of us will avoid Charlie's fate.

Go do it.

It looked extremely presidential.

He sort of led the charge in positioning Kirk's death as a consequence of rising political violence on the left, which he said is a much larger issue than right-wing political violence.

He has mentioned this German philosopher by the name of Karl Schmitt, who was a very prominent Nazi jurist back in the day during the Weimar period and then the Nazi period, who had this distinction he drew.

He said all politics can be reduced to the distinction between friends and enemies.

You help your friends and you attack your enemies.

And I think that sort of informs Vance's broad political view and can help explain his asymmetrical deployment of the free speech argument.

He downplayed the nature of those statements.

I think more broadly, there's a sense on the right that for the past five or 10 years, Republicans have sort of laid down and let what they call cancel culture take over.