J.D. Vance: Trump's attack dog

"Few public figures have exploded onto the world stage quite like US Vice-President J.D. Vance," said Dominic Sandbrook in The Times.

In his first major foreign speech, at the Munich Security Conference, he caused a stink by berating European leaders about free speech. After that, he laid into Ukraine's President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for supposedly showing insufficient gratitude to President Trump. And he then upset more people by dismissing talk of UK and French peacekeepers in Ukraine, saying a US mineral deal would protect the nation better than "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn't fought a war in 30 or 40 years". One assumes copies of Vance's misery memoir, "Hillbilly Elegy", aren't "flying off the shelves in Royal Wootton Bassett". Vance has swiftly established himself as a hate figure among critics of the Trump administration, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The internet is so awash with parodies that he is now "more meme than man".

This mockery by progressives won't bother Vance, said Yair Rosenberg in The Atlantic. He's used to being "the outlier in the room – whether as a conservative in liberal spaces" such as Yale Law School, or as a self-styled hillbilly "in the halls of Washington and Silicon Valley". The vice-presidency has traditionally been the "booby prize" of US politics, but Vance has proved effective and versatile in the role so far. He has "played the pugilist provocateur on conservative podcasts and the civil conciliator on the vice-presidential debate stage"; he also spends a lot of time on X/Twitter deftly skewering Trump's opponents. If the administration completes its term in decent shape, he'll be well-positioned to replace Trump in the White House.

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I suspect Vance and his boss will fall out before then, said Alison Phillips in The i Paper. That partly comes from reading Vance's memoir, in which he angrily relates how, in his youth, he tried to ingratiate himself with his mother's successive boyfriends in a vain attempt to stop them leaving. He got his ear pierced to impress Steve, "a midlife-crisis sufferer", pretended to love police cars to please Chip, an alcoholic police officer, and was kind to the children of Ken, an odd-job man.

Reading this, one can't help but see Trump as just another "father figure" who is destined to let Vance down. The president is "the ultimate transactional politician" – for him, it's all about deals. Vance, at heart, is an "ideologue", with little interest in deals. Sooner or later, that difference in outlook will lead to a rupture.