Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
In 2022, I warned repeatedly about JD Vance.
I wrote about the fraudulence, the ambition, the dependency and the danger. I described a man without a fixed conviction beyond his own advancement—a politician prepared to abandon yesterday’s beliefs whenever tomorrow’s patron demanded it.
The latest revelation completes the picture as reported by CHRIS WHIPPLE for Vanity Fair.
In 2016, while publicly denouncing Donald Trump, Vance privately sought a connection to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He wanted to help stop Trump. He recognized the demagoguery and the danger before nearly anyone imagined Trump could become president.
Then Vance calculated the price of power.
He changed everything.
This was an acquisition.
The story of JD Vance begins with a book, becomes a movie, proceeds through the purchase of a Senate seat and arrives at the vice presidency.
Publishing created the authority.
Television created the celebrity.
Hollywood created the mythology.
Peter Thiel supplied the money.
Chuck Schumer surrendered the battlefield.
Donald Trump supplied the humiliation.
Donald Trump Jr. supplied the final connection.
JD Vance supplied whatever beliefs the transaction required.
The original product was “Hillbilly Elegy.” It offered elite America a comfortable explanation for working-class despair. Economic abandonment, addiction, collapsing communities and political rage became scenery behind the ascent of one exceptional young man.
The book made Vance an interpreter of the people he had left behind. Universities, corporations, journalists and television producers treated him as a decoder ring for an America they rarely encountered.
Then Hollywood arrived.
Ron Howard turned the book into a movie. The performance of authenticity became cinematic. The boy who escaped became the man entitled to explain everyone who remained.
The story created the movie.
The movie enlarged the brand.
The brand attracted the patron.
Peter Thiel entered Vance’s life after Vance heard him speak at Yale. Vance later worked at Thiel’s investment firm. Thiel helped finance Vance’s venture-capital enterprise.
Then Thiel made his decisive investment: $15 million into the political organization supporting Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign.
Vance did not arrive in the Senate as the spontaneous voice of forgotten Ohio. He arrived as the beneficiary of one billionaire’s enormous financial commitment.
He was a kept man before he became a bought man.
The obstacle was Donald Trump.
Vance had already revealed what he thought of him. He regarded Trump as dangerous and potentially catastrophic. The approach to Hillary Clinton’s campaign gives those judgments greater weight.
Vance was never confused about Trump.
He saw him clearly.
That is the central fact.
By 2021, Vance was preparing to run for the Senate. His anti-Trump declarations began disappearing. Moral alarm became political adoration. The sophisticated critic became the eager disciple. The man who once wanted to stop Trump traveled to Mar-a-Lago seeking his blessing.
Vance required Trump’s voters, Trump’s endorsement and Trump’s permission.
He accepted humiliation as part of the price.
Trump publicly degraded Vance even after endorsing him, describing a candidate desperate for his approval. Vance absorbed it. He smiled. He continued performing loyalty.
Peter Thiel’s money built the vehicle.
Trump’s endorsement cleared the road.
Then Chuck Schumer helped leave the road open.
Tim Ryan ran the kind of campaign Democratic leaders spent years claiming they wanted. He spoke directly to workers and competed in abandoned communities in a state Trump had carried twice by eight points.
Ryan was confronting a Republican candidate dependent upon Thiel’s fortune and massive support from national Republican organizations.
The Senate Majority PAC, closely aligned with Schumer, spent nothing on the Ohio race.
National Democrats treated Ohio as lost while Ryan was still fighting for it.
Vance won by six points.
Thiel understood the opportunity.
Schumer failed to contest it.
One billionaire placed a massive bet on JD Vance while the Democratic establishment left Tim Ryan largely on his own.
That surrender belongs inside the story of Vance’s rise.
The corruption extended beyond campaign finance. It became the corruption of identity itself.
Vance entered the Catholic Church in 2019. Within a few years, the new convert was presenting himself as an authority on the moral boundaries of Christian obligation, using Catholic intellectual language to defend a politics that ranked human obligation according to proximity and nationality.
Vance set himself against Pope Francis over the meaning of Christian love.
Francis answered with the image at the center of the Gospel: the stranger encountered on the road, suffering and abandoned, whose humanity creates the obligation.
The contrast was complete. The pope described mercy without borders. Vance constructed borders around mercy.
He later visited Francis on Easter Sunday, one day before the pope died. The image carried an unintended severity: the ancient church beside the new politician, humility beside ambition, faith beside performance.
Photo credit: White House
The transaction reached its summit when Donald Trump selected Vance as his running mate.
Donald Trump Jr. played a decisive role. Vance later acknowledged that his elevation probably depended upon the president’s son. The Thiel network advocated for him. Wealthy technology figures rallied around him.
The purchased Senate candidate became the preferred vice-presidential candidate of a new oligarchic faction.
Then came another story that captures the moral atmosphere surrounding the entire ascent.
Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for two nights of celebrations connected to Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas. The festivities included a private island and fireworks. Trump Jr. and his wife described the extravagance as a wedding gift.
Kremlev has been honored by the Russian state, and operates within Vladimir Putin’s orbit. The international boxing organization he led was financed by Gazprom.
He is also deeply involved with Healthy Fatherland, an organization run by his wife’s twin sister that Ukraine sanctioned over its alleged role in removing Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory under the language of recovery and rehabilitation.
The kidnapping of Ukraine’s children is one of the obscenities of Putin’s war.
A man deeply connected to an organization implicated in that system financed lavish wedding celebrations for the president’s son.
The president’s son helped place JD Vance on the Republican ticket. JD Vance became vice president.
These facts belong together because they reveal the ecosystem. Corruption travels through relationships, favors, introductions, patronage and money.
Access becomes friendship.
Friendship becomes generosity.
Generosity becomes influence.
Influence becomes power.
The American vice presidency sits at the end of that chain.
This is how decay looks in a republic.
It advances through thousands of accommodations. Editors suspend skepticism. Producers simplify reality. Investors purchase political talent. Party leaders concede whole states. Candidates erase their convictions. Religious language sanctifies politics. Political families accept the generosity of men orbiting hostile regimes.
JD Vance is the perfect figure for this era because he embodies its central corruption: the conversion of everything into an instrument of personal advancement.
His childhood became a commodity.
His family became material.
His region became a brand.
His faith became a costume.
His convictions became negotiable.
His humiliation became proof of loyalty.
His office became the return on somebody else’s investment.
He is a puppet. A political whore in the oldest meaning of the accusation. A kept man. A bought man.
He knew who Donald Trump was. He tried to help stop him.
Then Peter Thiel’s money, Republican power and personal ambition pointed in the opposite direction. Vance turned around and marched toward the danger he had already identified.
The Hillary Clinton story destroys the final alibi.
Vance saw the threat, understood it, and chose to serve it.
The greater indictment belongs to the institutions that packaged the story, filmed the mythology, financed the rise, abandoned the opposition, and normalized the corruption.
JD Vance did not ascend alone. He was published, promoted, filmed, funded, indulged, endorsed and installed.
The story became the movie.
The movie became the rise.
The rise became the corruption.
The corruption became the government of the United States.
In 1941, Dorothy Thompson examined the character of the people who would surrender themselves to fascism when the crisis arrived.
Eighty-five years later, JD Vance stands as an archetype she would have recognized immediately: the embittered Ivy Leaguer, burdened by grievance, ravenous for status and endlessly attentive to the direction of power.
Thompson named him before he was born:
“The frustrated and humiliated intellectual … the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success.”
That is JD Vance.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
