Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Dr. Jemar Tisby’s Footnotes Substack. Tisby is a Good Faith Media Contributing Correspondent.
On the first day of the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump announced Ohio Senator, J.D. Vance, as his choice for a running mate.The implications of this selection are as dire as they are important.
Vance made a national name for himself with his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” a massive bestselling book that was also made into a 2020 movie starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams among others.
He started his political career by announcing his bid for the U.S. Senate in 2021 and he won a competitive primary with an endorsement from Trump. That was a sharp turn from the 2016 presidential election season when Vance said Trump was either an “a-hole” who might prove useful or he was “America’s Hitler.” Now Vance, once a never-Trumper, is in line to be the Vice President if his ticket wins the election.
Vance as Trump’s running mate means a few things.
First, if Trump wins the 2024 election, there is no end of MAGA in sight after his term ends. Assuming Trump even honors the term limits of presidents, he is setting up a MAGA dynasty. In addition to the nepotism of appointing his relatives to key positions in the government, J.D. Vance promises to continue and perhaps extend Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic MAGA policies.
Vance will be just 40 years old, one of the youngest vice presidents ever, by the time Trump takes office if he wins. Time enough for a long and destructive political career.
With comprehensive and ominous plans such as Project 2025 already in place, the prospects of going back to a once-familiar democratic landscape were dim. Now with J.D. Vance as Trump’s pick for VP, that possibility is nearly nonexistent.
Second, Vance as VP signals that the GOP is wholly given over to the MAGA movement. This was hardly a question before the RNC, but now it is officially a done deal.
So-called moderate Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, and even Nikki Haley— who ran against Trump in the primaries and lasted longer than most but now support him— are not going to pull the GOP closer to the center. Of our two main political parties, one of them has been subsumed by operatives intent on installing minority rule, disregarding “we the people” and setting up a fascistic theocratic government by virtually any means.
Finally, J.D. Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate means that white Christian nationalism has a stranglehold on the Republican ticket. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019. He said, “When I looked at the people who meant the most to me, they were Catholic.”
When we speak of white Christian nationalism, most of the time the focus is on Protestants of various denominations and traditions. But Vance represents one of the “Catholic cousins” of white Christian nationalism.
RNS journalist, Jack Jenkins, wrote:
Indeed, for all their differences, integralism shares many of the same policy goals as popular forms of Christian nationalism. Referring to Christian nationalism as “bargain store integralism,” Vallier said the two movements generally find common cause when it comes to opposition to abortion and support for blasphemy laws, blue laws and banning pornography.
The political resemblances between white Christian nationalism and Vance-style Catholic integralism converge in their support for Trump and opposition to “the Left.”
“There is a sense that, ‘OK, can Catholics and Protestants be on the same side?’ Because even if, you know, they’re going to end up battling one another eventually under integralism, at least, they’re going to ask to kind of band together against the left”
This form of Catholicism is already deeply embedded in the Supreme Court.
Ultra-conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett are all Catholic and their rulings express support for integralism.
J.D. Vance has supported Trump’s views on abortion— that it should be left up to individual states and access to the abortion pill Mifepristone. These views go against official Catholic church teaching. But Vance will not stand in the way of the broader white Christian nationalist aims to enforce fundamentalist religious views on all Americans through the force of law.
Any potential running mate who had a chance on Trump’s ticket would have been bad news for democracy, but the selection of J.D. Vance as a young, extreme-right politician who jettisons his morals at the chance for a promotion is a grim portent of this nation’s political future.
