Chapter 1: What sparked interest in J.D. Vance among young conservatives?
Ian Ward, who writes for Politico, became interested in J.D. Vance a few years ago when he realized who else was interested in J.D. Vance.
I was talking to a lot of young MAGA conservatives in Washington who I was asking, who on the national stage shares your worldview? And so many of them were telling me that it was J.D. Vance and J.D. Vance alone who really encapsulated a lot of the political and intellectual currents that were swirling in that space.
Ian went on to spend time with Vance, who arguably is like no other vice president in history. In 2025, yes, he played the traditional role of Veep, traveling to Europe, defending his president. But he consistently pulled focus online, brawling with randos on Twitter, inserting himself into the Nicky Carty beef, RTing memes and rumors, and, like me, hosting a podcast.
Chapter 2: How does J.D. Vance engage with political memes?
Coming up on Today Explained, J.D. Vance vacillating between Trump-era parent and Twitter troll is just getting started.
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Chapter 3: What early wins did Vance achieve as Vice President?
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This is Today Explained.
Politico's Ian Ward here to talk about one year of J.D. Vance. All right. So from late last year onward, you see these memes of Vance with the huge head dancing, the little boy hat, the lollipop. And it starts out as a way to mock the VP. But he does not treat it that way, does he? What does he do instead?
He's embraced it.
Chapter 4: How does Vance navigate foreign policy under Trump?
One notable example was there's this sort of famous meme of the vice president overweight with long curly hair and big bulging eyes that started circulating around the election. And for Halloween this year, Vance dressed up as that meme and took a picture with big bulgy eyes and posted it online.
Happy Halloween, kids. And remember, say thank you.
He's part of a generation, the millennial generation that grew up at peak era of online blogging and sort of early social media. And he understands that those are very potent political and communication tools. And at the same time, I think he understands really innately that Conservative politics are flowing upwards from the internet at this point.
So if you're not engaged in the online fight, you're not really engaged in the engine of conservative politics at this point. I think he understands that. And by engaging with some of those memes, he's signaling that he's kind of in the engine room. of the right at this point, and that he gets it in a way that an older generation of politicians didn't.
There is just a meme of The Pope, Usha, and a couch. And it took me a second to get it, and then when I got it, I was like, man, that's pretty good.
That's pretty good. I think if he was too self-serious, right, or sort of dismissed these things and was offended by them, it would be sort of boomer-coded, right? That's not really how younger generations operate on the internet. It's a lot of exchanging insults And exchanging digs as a way to build solidarity across the coalition.
I think he's privy to that dynamic and sort of savvy at navigating it.
That's a good point. All right. So he comes into office, as everyone does, on January 20th. And then what does some of his early wins look like?
He was deputized very early on, even before they took office, to shepherd some of Trump's more controversial nominees through the Senate to get people like Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard through the nomination process, despite some of the hiccups they run into.
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Chapter 5: What role does Vance play in the upcoming midterms?
And one in Paris, where he laid out the administration's view on AI.
Oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.
And those both showed that he was willing to enter into these spaces and disrupt what he perceived as a status quo, a status quo that in his mind wasn't working.
Also in February, President Trump meets Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. Might have been not a big story, became a big story in part because of the role that J.D. Vance played. Remind us what happened.
Zelensky was in town to finalize a critical mineral deal. Thank you very much. It's an honor to have President Zelensky of Ukraine. The meeting in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky and Vance and a couple other cabinet members very quickly devolved into Trump and Vance berating Zelensky.
And do you think that it's respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Vance has an idea that Europe has benefited tremendously in the past half century or so from the international order governed by American military and economic hegemony. At the same time, I think he thinks that that international order has harmed the type of working class blue collar American that he grew up with in Ohio, right? These are the people who actually fight the wars.
They're the people who've borne the brunt of the deindustrialization that's accompanied economic globalization. So I think in his mind, Europe and Ukraine by extension are sort of freeloaders who are leeching off the economic and actual well-being of working class Americans and not thanking them for it.
And then in June, we have this 12-day war between Israel and Iran.
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Chapter 6: What are Vance's views on immigration and its impact?
Vance defends Trump when Trump drops the bunker buster bomb. And at the time, a lot of people said, hey, Mr. Vice President, didn't you say you were going to be against this type of thing? How does Vance navigate his clear and obvious disdain for foreign wars with President Trump, who at times exhibits the disdain and at times seems like he just really wants to get involved?
All signs indicate that behind the scenes, he was advocating against direct U.S. 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.
When you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it. And then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict. That is the Trump doctrine.
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.
In September, of course, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. What was Vance's relationship with Charlie Kirk? And what did you see him doing in the aftermath of the killing?
Kirk and Vance were very close.
Questions from him. I've known J.D. for a while. He has an only in America story.
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.
to introduce a friend of mine, somebody that I have just been so thrilled to see ascend American politics.
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Chapter 7: How does Vance's multicultural family influence his politics?
J.D. Vance involved himself in that story. How so? What did he say?
He downplayed the nature of those statements.
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that's what kids do. And I really don't want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives.
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. The term that gets thrown around a lot is like giving up a scalp. And I think Vance and others agree.
are trying to effectuate a kind of broader cultural shift where they're going to say, no matter how offensive a comment was, we're not going to give up one of our own and we fight back against our enemies and our perceived enemies in the media.
Does that extend to the next skirmish? Because a few weeks later, Tucker Carlson interviews Nazi curious Nick Fuentes, doesn't ask him any hard questions.
So that's pretty young to get canceled and pretty young to have friendships destroyed over politics. Like that's usually, you know, like decades down the line. Right. What did you do? Well, I just became more emboldened.
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Chapter 8: What challenges does Vance face in uniting the Republican factions?
Do you wear those weird one-piece shoes? I do. You actually do? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like in public? Yes. You don't think that's cool?
Yeah, he stayed sort of conspicuously quiet in that whole controversy. At the same time, I think he's doing some coalitional management here. I think he rightly recognizes that Fuentes, despite his very odious views, has a very real and very mobilized following of young men that MAGA needs desperately to keep in its electoral coalition.
He's called Fuentes some names, but he's made no real effort to actually banish him from the conservative coalition.
In late October, he was at a Turning Point USA event, and he takes a multi-barreled question from a young woman and ends up saying that he hopes that his wife Usha, who is Hindu, will join him in his Catholic faith.
Because I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.
How do you see him walking this line between being a guy who's in a multicultural family and talks very proudly about it, but also has perhaps even a base himself who simply do not like that his wife is from an immigrant family?
There's a term that gets thrown around a lot on the right. called Heritage America or Heritage Americans. And these are Americans whose ancestry stretches back to the colonial period or the founding period. They tend to be white, Protestant. These people form the cultural core of America and their ethos and values should inform the political culture of the country.
And so long as immigrants respect that ethos cultural ethos and immigrate legally to the United States, he's okay with having them there. The Trump administration's crusade against illegal immigration, but also to some degree, legal immigration has just unleashed a lot of xenophobia that Vance is now having to contend with, directed at his own family. I think it's
very hard to stake out a sort of principled anti-immigrant position without tapping into some very, very nasty undercurrents of xenophobia and emboldening those. And once the cat's out of the bag, there's really nothing to stop it from being deployed against his own family. I think you're starting to see a subtle tension emerge between two of the movement's slogans and the ideas they represent.
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