JD Vance Scares Me More Than Trump
A shape-shifting chameleon awaits his opportunity to hurt us all
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Great news (and huge loss for Putin, Trump & Vance) just before I hit publish on this newsletter: Viktor Orban has conceded defeat in Hungary after 16 years as polls show dramatic swing to opposition party. I write below:
If Orban loses the election, that will be a good thing for the world; that he lost after Vance showed up to interfere in a foreign election would be a bonus.
Please note that Peter Magyar is not some Obama-like liberal savior guy. He’s more like Liz Cheney or something like that. He’s definitely right-of-center, especially by European standards. But, at this point, I’d take Liz Cheney as President. Wouldn’t you?
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TWO YEARS AGO, I wrote the following:
Now with six years of thinking about JD Vance, I have some updated thoughts for you (hope you will go back and read that post, too, which explains why you shouldn’t be impressed by Hillbilly Elegy or anything else about his mythology).
Donald Trump should not be in office for a minute longer. But if he’s removed from office via the 25th Amendment, or by some other means, we should be very reticent to breathe anything like a sigh of relief.
Vance is a vacuous shape-shifter of a politician. He’s absolutely craven, deeply tied to Peter Thiel and other right-wing Silicon Valley tech nihilists, and he has no real beliefs about anything. His ideology is opportunism, and his constituency is whatever the worst elements of high society happen to be at any given moment.
His more ardent critics say Vance is dumb, but I don’t believe that. We should assume he is cold, calculating, and politically ruthless until we see evidence to the contrary. He was a Marine, he has a J.D. from Yale Law School, and he is a Senator-turned-Vice President—stupidity doesn’t get you that far, malleability does. The malleability counts because he is one of the least charismatic politicians I’ve ever seen.
Vance projects a gutter-dwelling belief of white male Christian domination that pervades everything he says and does. I’ll get to his more high-profile (and often cringe-worthy) awfulness, but this short clip perfectly encapsulates Vance’s worldview:
The message here may be subtle, but it’s undeniable. If I declare something “mine”, then it is mine and I have dominion over it. It could be a country, it could be an agency, it could be my wife—it doesn’t matter what it is, it matters that I say it’s mine and it must capitulate to me when I say it must.
As I write this, Vance’s team is on its way back from failed negotiations with his Iranian counterparts in Pakistan. I expected little from these talks going in, mainly because Trump and his cadre of hangers-on-cum-financiers would need a lane to personally profit, and a deal where he could do so with Iran is a long shot.
That is the only outcome Trump will abide, and Vance is the last person who will be able to convince him otherwise. Trump is clearly heavily invested in the talks, as shown by his attendance at the UFC fight in Miami with his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vanilla Ice, U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, and Joe Rogan. These are serious times and the President and his top diplomat want you to know that (for more on this theme, read my March post, “The Tragedy of Unserious People in Serious Jobs”).
Vance’s pit stop in Budapest on the way to Pakistan is also notable. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s wanna-be dictator and Vladimir Putin’s chief errand boy within the EU, is the model of the sort of administrative authoritarianism that the architects of Trump II have praised and are trying to emulate. If Orban loses the election, that will be a good thing for the world; that he lost after Vance showed up to interfere in a foreign election would be a bonus. Worth noting as writer Mary C. Curtis reminded me on this morning’s NYT Readalong with Neil Parekh: If Orban survives by underhanded methods, Trump & co will use similar tactics to ruin the midterms.
Contrast this administration’s treatment of Hungary and Ukraine and you’ll get the perfect encapsulation of what we’re facing in America. If you’re interested in going a bit deeper on Orban and how he has hollowed out Hungary’s economy and turned it into a pariah in Europe, read Anne Applebaum:
In actual reality, the news for Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, is not good. After 16 years in office, plus an earlier three-year term, Orbán has made his country the most corrupt in the European Union, one of the poorest, and certainly the least free. His political party, Fidesz, now controls most universities, the civil service, the high courts, and, through a network of oligarchs, almost all newspapers and broadcasters, as well as about a fifth of the economy, according to independent economists. General paranoia about Fidesz spies means that Budapest, once again, has become a city where people lower their voices when talking about politics in public.
Vance is trying to bolster his foreign policy bona fides, and Trump is putting him front-and-center to give him a shot at doing just that. And he’s doing it in the place where his vision of a crony network of tech oligarchs, replete with their version of nihilistic libertarianism, has been tried. For a few people in Hungary, it’s worked out incredibly well. For many many more people, it has not. This is the Vance camp’s vision of America. Take heed.
This is also where the fundamental differences between Trump and Vance really emerge. Trump is chaotic, treacherous, and declining, but his goal is always the same—personal gain in front of as many eyeballs as possible. He is an empty vessel on the ideological side, more than willing to agree with whomever about whatever if he can “win” from it. What happens in-between is typically awful, but he is laser-focused and personal gain for a public audience.
Vance is not this. And he cannot gain power the way Trump did based on cult-of-personality—he doesn’t have one. His way forward is far more sinister. It’s a return to the sort of backroom-ification of the electioneering that Trump does blatantly in public whenever he can. Vance owes his political life and personal wealth to Thiel, whose Palantir will become a trillion-dollar company before long, mostly on the back of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts—all of which are in support of harvesting, collating, and standardizing every piece of data about everyone. I wrote about how Thiel has hurt America here, here and here.
There is no doubt in my mind that Vance would weaponize his connections in the tech world to tip the scales in his favor and to his whims. Trump openly cares about what people think of him, Vance does too, but Vance happens to have the charisma of cardboard cutout of JD Vance.
This is where Thiel comes in. It should be said that Thiel is not the only man—they are all white men, all of them—who operates as a Vance lever-puller, but he is certainly the most important one. In July 2025, Luke Munn, a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, wrote a comprehensive, but very accessible, essay on Thiel’s ever-expanding role of GOP king-maker. It sort of kicks into gear with Thiel’s $15 million contribution to put Vance in the Senate, and his influence is only growing.
Thiel is rich, powerful, and he has his man, his former employee, a burgers-and-diet-Coke diet heartbeat from the Oval Office. The man is a techno-fascist by any measure, and his latest and easily most profitable investment to date has been the one he made in Vance. It was Thiel who brokered the first in-person meeting between Vance and Trump, a meeting that ultimately led to Vance becoming Trump’s running mate in 2024 (despite Vance calling Trump “America’s Hitler.”)
Here’s Thiel in his own words, from his essay “The Education of a Libertarian” in 2009:
I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.”
But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
He continues:
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”
These are the core beliefs of the man to whom the sitting Vice President owes his entire political and professional life.
Trump does his corruption in broad daylight most of the time, pretty much with impunity, and look how bad that is. With Vance, it will be dark, it will be behind closed doors, and it will make your life worse.
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FYI: 28% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 72%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.
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In 1956 the Soviet Union sent their tanks into Hungary to crush the uprising. I cannot get Mark Twain's line, "history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes," out of my head.
Vance had a terrible week. He's such a loser. Trump will start toying with him like a cat with a captive mouse.