In naming the heir to his throne, Trump is setting up MAGA to fail

It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Donald Trump’s tentative endorsement of J.D. Vance as the heir to the MAGA movement. It is a relief that Trump didn’t respond to the question about succession planning by saying he might run for an unconstitutional third term, a regular suggestion he made most recently in March. Nor, thankfully, did the names Don Jnr, Eric or Ivanka come up. (Obviously Tiffany wasn’t mentioned. Tiffany is never mentioned.) Instead, when asked by a reporter, “Do you agree that the heir apparent to MAGA, is J.D. Vance?” Trump replied “Well, I think most likely, in all fairness. He’s the vice president … he’s doing a great job and would probably be favourite at this point.” So just when we were all busy firming up our opinions on Sydney Sweeney, we find ourselves considering a future in which J.D. Vance is the president of the free world.

Thinking about Vance is not something we’ve had to do lately. He has been comparatively quiet compared to the rest of the clown car cabinet, with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth polygraphing his colleagues, Transport Secretary Sean Duffy announcing plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon and Kash Patel sneaking in for a quiet dinner with Tony Burke.

Vance, trapped in the traditionally stultifying role of vice president, has barely made headlines except for the leaking of his Spotify Playlists. For someone who opposes gay marriage and trans rights, Vance’s playlists are mystifyingly stacked with boybands and gay anthems. It is tempting to think that one of his playlists was titled “Gold on the Ceiling” because that’s what Vance sees while lying on the floor of the Oval Office, as Trump walks over him. However, seeing Vance as solely under Trump’s heel, is a mistake. Vance’s fate will be decided by the voters in MAGA heartland, not Trump, when the time comes to choose the 2028 Republican presidential nominee.

One of the most remarkable twists in the MAGA story is that it’s Trump, the billionaire, who became the hero to a movement overwhelmingly supported by lower socio-economic Americans. Because if there is anyone who truly embodies the American Dream, it’s Vance – a real-life example of the rags-to-riches myth that is foundational to America’s cultural identity.

Vance grew up in impoverished communities in Kentucky and Ohio, where domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction and neglect were the mundane facts of daily life. He is the “hillbilly” who became a Marine, a Yale law graduate, a Silicone Valley venture capitalist, a senator and then vice-president of the United States. It is an extraordinary trajectory.

The D in J.D. originally stood for Donald, after his biological father. It was changed to David when he was six, with Vance writing in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that his mother changed it to erase any memory of his father’s existence. He’s had a similarly volatile relationship with the other Donald who has played a formative role in his life. Trump took a while to warm up to his eventual VP pick, which is unsurprising considering the vitriol that Vance had previously lobbed at his future boss.

Given Vance’s capitulation to Trump and MAGA, it is mind-bending to recall some of his past statements. The former self-proclaimed “Never-Trump guy” famously once referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler”. As a Christian, he was appalled by the Access Hollywood tapes in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women. In an essay for The Atlantic, Vance wrote: “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realise it.” He went on to declare his hope that one day in the future: “…the nation will trade the quick high of ‘Make America Great Again’ for real medicine”. Equating Trump to heroin was an intentionally devastating critique coming from Vance, who was traumatised as a child by his mother’s drug addiction.

Vance always went much further and deeper than other commentators, in his analysis of Trump’s unfitness to represent the people from the Rust Belt, who were now hailing the billionaire New York property developer as their saviour. He knew that Trump did not have the solutions that a white working class, devastated by both the opioids crisis and the endemic loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs, so desperately needed.

In a leaked 2020 message to an acquaintance, Vance wrote: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).” Vance was referring to the signature economic legislative achievement of Trump’s first administration, which delivered a tax cut that primarily benefited corporations and the wealthy. Fast forward to July 2025 and Vance cast the tie-breaking vote that saw Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill become law. That legislation will deliver another tax break to the wealthy, while gutting social safety nets, including health care for children and food assistance programmes. The people most likely to be adversely affected by its cuts are children and adults from low-income families. In other words, communities exactly like the ones Vance grew up with. Communities who, Vance told us in his memoir, believe that the gravest sin is class betrayal.

Vance has made it a core tenet that his political persona is informed by personal experience. But two examples of his actions in the arena of foreign policy demonstrate that lessons he learned in childhood seem to have been forgotten.

As Vice President, Vance has consistently enmeshed domestic culture war priorities with foreign policy objectives. He reportedly sought a commitment from the UK government to repeal hate speech laws that protect trans and other minority communities, as a condition for a US trade deal. But if you think that an anti-gay stance is a value universally embraced by the insular community from which Vance came, think again.

The section of his memoir, in which a young J.D. briefly questions his sexuality, has been endlessly quoted due to the memorable way in which his beloved grandmother made him realise that he probably wasn’t gay. Vance’s grandmother went on to tell him that even if he was gay, God would still love him. Vance wrote: “Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about.” The gulf between the compassion towards gay people that his grandmother tried to instil in him and the hostility towards the LGBQT+ community that Vance has fomented in his fellow Americans reveals just how far he has moved away from the beliefs of the people who raised him.

Vance’s contempt for Europe has been repeatedly revealed: through both leaked private Signal chats and a very public address to the Munich Security Conference in February, in which he railed against liberal European values and later met with the head of the neo-Nazi aligned AfD party. He has made clear his opposition to supporting Ukraine, most notably in the notorious February meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. The belligerence Vance displayed towards the courageous leader of a wartime nation is made even more incomprehensible, given the commonalities between the two men. In his book, Vance recounts how, as a 12-year-old boy, he once had to run for his life. Fleeing violence, fearing for his life, he was forced to beg for help and a place of safety from a stranger.

The durability of Vance’s electoral support among MAGA voters remains untested. In 2022 he won his seat by only a 6 per cent margin in his home state. His faltering campaign was ultimately saved, not by grassroots campaigning and multiple small donations from a community wanting to support one of their own, but by one donor, Vance’s former employer, the multibillionaire tech oligarch, Peter Thiel.

One clue that may explain Vance’s conversion to Trumpism is found in his memoir. He describes how as a child he initially ran away and hid from the violent arguments between the adults in his house, only to later creep closer to listen to the fighting, writing: “This thing that I had hated had become a sort of drug.” Hillbilly Elegy ends with Vance recounting a recurring nightmare he’s had since childhood in which he’s chased by a terrifying figure that constantly changes form. He wrote that: “Without fail, the dream provokes pure terror.” The book ends with the most recent version of the dream, in which Vance has become the monster that once terrified him.

Vance has long touted himself as an authentic spokesperson for the MAGA heartland, one who understands the struggles of the forgotten people that MAGA claims to represent. But the same holds true in reverse. MAGA voters know Vance and they will hold him to account by the standards, not of a politician, but as one of their own. Whether they choose to anoint him and follow where he leads, or instead see him as an unrecognisable monster, is another question entirely.

Melanie La’Brooy is an award-winning novelist who has lived in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and writes on politics and social justice issues.