2024-09-17 03:54:32
If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election, JD Vance will be his running mate. A former college friend is now warning against Trump’s “running mate”.
JD Vance has already had a remarkable political turnaround: When Donald Trump was surprisingly elected president in 2016, Vance was a prominent critic of the US head of state. Years later, however, there is nothing left of that: Since 2023, Vance has been a senator in Ohio, his party: the Republicans. His biggest supporter: Donald Trump.
The 40-year-old’s change of heart went so far that Vance should become Trump’s vice president if the 78-year-old were to move into the White House again. A former fellow student of Vance is now warning of this: In a guest article for the website of the US broadcaster MSNBC, Sofia Nelson writes that with Vance, an ideology could enter the US government that Nelson considers more dangerous than Trump’s “Make America Great Again” policy (MAGA).
Nelson, who studied law with Vance at the elite Yale University, sees the 40-year-old as a supporter of right-wing post-liberalism: The ideology is characterized by the fact that, according to Nelson, it rejects the separation of church and state and is oriented towards an ultra-conservative, Catholic worldview.
Specifically, Nelson writes that post-liberals “despise” secularism and individual freedom and instead have sympathy for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whose policies are a model “for the kind of regime they want to establish in the United States.”
The religious character of the movement is evident in the demand to restrict contraception and divorce, as well as to ban pornography and marriage equality. Nelson points out that Trump himself actually embodies few of these values: The 78-year-old is married for the third time, has been on the cover of Playboy magazine and has been in court for a hush money scandal with a porn actress: “He is not exactly a model of Christian morality.”
The lawyer accuses Vance of hijacking Trump’s MAGA politics in order to make his own ideas better known, which are too extreme even for loyal Trump supporters. However, the two political approaches are not completely opposite: Nelson sees similarities in the rejection of migration and the rights of trans people, for example. In addition, both are actually not interested in doing anything for the working class: “A post-liberal supporter like Vance knows how to talk populistically, but like Trump, he has no interest in doing anything for working people. His true devotion is to the culture wars.”