Well,

I think the dominant, I mean, the most important fact about him is the fact that he has transformed himself into this natural, perfect acolyte of Trump. I mean, if you go back to 2016, when he published Hillbilly Elegy, he was actually pretty eloquent in his denunciations of Trump. I mean, he was calling himself a never Trump guy, calling, you know, saying Trump was cultural heroine and so on. And then he goes, he graduates, and he has this essentially this kind of financial and personal and philosophical transformation. He gets inspired, which is to say, ultimately funded by Peter Thiel, who goes, gives a speech at Yale when he was there. And he comes out of there sort of listening to and reading different things. Most importantly, he also gets more religious. Teal is religious. It's a fact that a lot of people don't sort of pay a lot of attention to. J .D. Vance got baptized, interestingly enough, in 2019. And along the way, of course, he starts getting a huge pot of money to begin to invest, because from Teal and other tech billionaires. And so you get this period where he's becoming increasingly obsequious and admiring of Trump. And Trump at one point when Vance was running for Senate said, this guy is kissing my ass, you wouldn't believe how much he's doing it. And so that ultimately became this really powerful ingredient because when he was sort of choosing these different figures, and so ends up he's kind of the son's favorite, Don Jr. and Eric's favorite, but really most importantly what he had demonstrated was this ferocious willingness to debase himself in service of Trump, and that is something that just asked Mike Pence is something that is very important to Donald

Well, I think what is the biggest difference between Mike Pence and JD Vance, right, Evan, it's that JD Vance said, absolutely, I would go along with Donald Trump's attack on the 2020 election, and I would have voted to somehow seek these alternate slates of electors. that was something that Marco Rubio didn't do. He voted to certify Joe Biden's election. Some of the other candidates weren't sufficiently there. That's the litmus test for Donald Trump. And, you know, Katie Vance literally wrote in a text message to his former roommate that Donald Trump was America's Hitler. And, you know, when he was running in 2016,

the old JD Vance. Yeah,

exactly. I mean, this is like, if it were for all the other mind blowing things that have happened this week, I think the fact that Donald Trump picked a running mate who compared him to Hitler and that's not the lead story tells you like everything the insanity of this moment. Jane,

what did you make of him? I mean you pay a lot of attention to these kinds of guys.

I mean I think the shape -shifting aspect of J .D. Vance certainly makes you wonder if his inner core is simply opportunism. Since he has basically flipped the script on hillbilly Elegy and he's gone from criticizing the culture that he grew up in and even the values of his own family to now championing their values and saying that really it's all Joe Biden's fault and the liberal government's fault that's created the problems that he grew up with. So he seems willing to just completely reinterpret things as is useful. I do think he's an interesting choice though in terms of the future of the Republican Party because he's been very much allied with this kind of younger intellectual movement within the party that is kind of sometimes called National It's isolationist unlike the sort of Reagan Republican Party. It's protectionist. It is culturally reactionary. I mean as you said, he converted to a very sort of conservative form of Catholicism that I guess Peter Thiel has as well. I mean in fact Peter Thiel's, the priest who really was important to Peter Thiel at Stanford when he was there, was an Opus Dei priest. And so you're talking about the very, the far kind of right -wing fringe of the Catholic religion. And it's an interesting and a niche intellectually within the conservative movement that is appealing to a lot of younger members of the movement. And he's, J .D. Vance is seen as something of a rock star to them. He's had a kind of a meteoric rise to them. But what was also interesting to me was watching during his speech, I was expecting something more charismatic maybe. I didn't think he was a particularly effective speaker. And the audience, they loved the parts that had to do with God and guns in his biography that he talked about. They did not seem moved particularly about the sort of NatCon, National Conservatism agenda when he touched on that, sort of slamming big business. They looked a little uncomfortable with this.

Well, I think it's important to point out that he is literally 40 years younger, just about than Donald Trump, 39 years old, perhaps the most inexperienced national candidate, practically that we've ever had, a first term senator, he didn't come across as somebody that this audience here at the Republican Convention really knew that much about or connected with. You know, there was a lot of surprise it seemed to me and the response by some of the hard right figures here. Vance's wife, who is a daughter of Indian American immigrants whom he met at Yale Law School, clerked for various conservative justices, including on the Supreme Court. I thought she gave an excellent introduction of her husband on stage. It's not a life she clearly had planned for herself in politics, but there are couples that's still making a pivot. And I didn't think that the Republican Party, you know, they seemed willing to go along with him because he was Donald Trump's choice. But it's kind of shocking. I mean, with Trump being 78 years old already, there is a, you know, quite a high chance that if he if he went to another term in office, Vance could come from almost nowhere to the presidency in an extraordinarily short amount of time. And I just, I thought that he's really amazingly young. I mean, and it's been a long time since we've had a president in his 40s. But also

he's to the right of Trump at this point, another way to say this about what this national conservatism and its nationalist, but it's also incredibly reactionary in terms of social issues and he's taken a position before he was chosen as vice president just in 2022 saying he would like to see abortion banned nationally in our country. It's a very hard -right, Catholic position. And that, in many ways, it is to the right of Trump, who is at this point somewhat discomfited about what the court that he appointed has wrought in terms of overturning Roe.

I think they're the most anti -woman ticket ever to be running. J .D. Vance, he's against exceptions for victims of rape and incest to get abortions. He is one of the most retrograde figures in terms of his stated views about women that you could possibly imagine.