Last week, amid the NATO summit in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell boasted that he had effectively stymied the America First movement by helping pass a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine. Republicans, he said, were starting to realize that supporting assistance to Kyiv was “not some kind of political suicide mission.” The 82-year-old Cold Warrior went on to condemn Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban for his intimate ties to Russia and China, and he suggested that Donald Trump and other conservatives might be having “second thoughts” about cozying up to the authoritarian leader.
Oops. If anyone should be having second thoughts, it’s McConnell. The seven-term senator and the longest-serving leader in the upper chamber’s history, who will give up his leadership role in November, was roundly booed by delegates at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee on Monday as he announced his home state of Kentucky’s support for Trump during the roll call of the states—usually a moment for cheers. Worse still for McConnell in Milwaukee, Trump doubled down on America First nationalism by selecting one of McConnell’s most tenacious antagonists to be his running mate—Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. The 39-year-old author turned politician, elected less than two years ago to his first public office and who was born in 1984, the year McConnell was first elected to the Senate and Ronald Reagan won his second term as president, sought to scuttle Kyiv’s desperately needed aid package and happily echoed Russian disinformation about President Zelensky’s wife, Olena, supposedly diverting millions in American financial aid to procure an exotic Bugatti Tourbillon sports car in Paris this past June during D-Day commemorations. Vance has also gloried in his indifference to the fate of Ukraine. In February 2022, when he was first running for the U.S. Senate, and as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, launching the biggest war in Europe since 1945, Vance said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.” His antipathy for Ukraine is mirrored by his admiration for Hungary, which he has hailed as an exemplar for America. His enthusiasm is reciprocated. Top Hungarian government adviser Balazs Orban tweeted a picture of himself with his arm around Vance in his Senate office: “A Trump-Vance administration sounds just right. Congratulations to JD Vance on being appointed by Donald Trump as his running mate!”
Trump could have selected a traditional Republican hawk such as Senators Marco Rubio or Tom Cotton or former United Nations Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. The 78-year-old nominee went in the opposite direction. As William Ruger, whom Trump, late in his term, nominated to be ambassador to Afghanistan, put it on X: “There are very few ways you could make Never Trumpers and neoconservatives (including the ones that will try to get a job in Trump 2) hate the Trump ticket more than selecting JD Vance as VP choice.” In The Bulwark, William Kristol lamented that Vance is even Trumpier than Trump: “In just eighteen months in the Senate, Vance has shown that he’s all in on autocracy, on authoritarianism, on an anti-liberal movement to transform American politics and America itself.”
For all the apprehensions among the Never Trump intellectuals like Kristol over the selection of Vance, they probably should not be surprised since the Yale Law School graduate and bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy exemplifies an older impulse in the Republican Party. If anything, the GOP, in many respects, has come home again.
As I tried to show in my new book, America Last, there is a long tradition on the American Right of venerating dictators such as Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and even Adolf Hitler as a nifty model for America.
At the contentious 1940 Republican convention in Philadelphia, for instance, former president Herbert Hoover (who had met with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in March 1938 to express his approval for the imminent Nazi takeover of Central Europe) scolded Franklin Roosevelt’s administration for engaging in “provocative speech” against Hitler and Mussolini and argued that American liberals posed the real totalitarian threat. At the same time, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering in 1938, was the leading voice of the isolationist America First Committee, alleging that the “United States cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we send.”
After Pearl Harbor, the America First contingent dwindled into insignificance. But the end of the Cold War revived it. In the 1990s, even as a phalanx of old-school institutions on the Right, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the William F. Buckley, Jr.-founded National Review continued to espouse free trade, immigration, and a global crusade for democracy, Patrick J. Buchanan, the former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, conservative columnist, and presidential candidate, urged conservatives to dump Ronald Reagan-style internationalism and reembrace America First—opposition to intervening in the Balkans, free trade agreements, immigrants, and international institutions such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. Buchanan even wrote a book in 1999 called A Republic, Not An Empire that resuscitated ancient isolationist dogmas about World War II. He not only chastised Great Britain for declaring war on Nazi Germany after it invaded Poland in September 1939 but also contended that the U.S. should not have fought Hitler’s Germany, insisting that America was better off having Moscow and Berlin duke it out.
As the 21st century dawned, what Buchanan wanted America to emulate was something else—the nascent dictatorship of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a December 2013 column, he extolled Putin’s opposition to gay rights and the former KGB officer’s promotion of traditional religious values as a beacon for America. He asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” Four years later, Buchanan declared approvingly, “Putin puts Russia first.”
Now Vance is being hailed on the Right as someone who can hold aloft the Buchananite flame that Trump relit with his America First crusade. After Trump selected him, the conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson declared, “Vance it is. The Reaganites are passing the torch to the Buchananites.” And in a new essay in Compact, “The Courage of J.D. Vance,” Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a flagship paleoconservative journal, also depicts the freshman senator as carrying on Buchanan’s important labors. “The work of uprooting the Cold War neoliberal legacy in our country is still ongoing,” McCarthy writes. “Conservatives have fundamental questions to face that the clash with the USSR disguised for decades. Vance is not only facing up to those questions—he is answering them.”
Some of Vance’s answers are more than a little discomfiting. This past April, in a New York Times op-ed, Vance stated that the “White House has repeatedly said that it can’t negotiate with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. This is absurd. The Biden administration has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war. The sooner Americans confront this truth, the sooner we can fix this mess and broker for peace.”
It should come as no surprise that Vance is not much of a fan of America’s 75-year-old alliance with Europe, either. This past February, he brusquely dismissed the efforts of NATO members to defend themselves: “America has provided a security blanket to Europe for far too long.” His recommendation: Learn how to “live with Russia.” Like a growing number of Republican politicians, especially in the House, Vance argues that an excessive preoccupation with Ukraine has weakened America’s ability to defend its interests in Asia. During a lengthy interview, he told Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, that “we’re sending all the damn weapons to Ukraine and not Taiwan.” Of course, Taiwan is supporting Ukraine with humanitarian aid and volunteer soldiers as it is well aware that simply allowing an embattled fellow democracy to be wiped off the map by a neighboring behemoth would set an insalubrious precedent.
As Ukraine battles Russia to a standstill, it might seem like an odd moment to advocate abandoning a fledgling democracy. But that is exactly what Trump and his new sidekick appear to have in mind. Hungary’s Orban, who left the NATO summit in Washington early to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago, says that if he wins in November, the Republican president-elect doesn’t plan to wait until Inauguration Day to implement a “detailed and well-founded” plan to establish peace in Ukraine.
Trump has big plans for America’s role in the world and Vance is integral to them. Trump isn’t just supporting the America First movement by choosing him as his heir. He’s doubling down on it. His selection echoes that of another 39-year-old Senate freshman—Richard Nixon, who shaped the anti-communist crusade that is now being firmly put to rest as the Ohioan ascends. Make no mistake: as McConnell, outgoing Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, 77, and other Republican establishment figures fade into the political twilight, Vance, barely at the cusp of middle age, may well determine the contours of the GOP’s battle against liberalism at home and abroad for decades to come.
