A Catholic Vice President. In a surprise announcement on the first day of the Republican party’s convention in Milwaukee, Donald Trump, the Grand Old Party’s 2024 candidate for the White House, unveiled his new running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. If the voters choose the Grand Old Party in November, he would become the second Catholic to be elected Vice President in the history of the United States. Joe Biden was the first Catholic to serve as Vice President during Obama’s two terms in office.
J.D. Vance is a first-term senator and the second youngest. He gained notoriety in 2016 with his memoir, ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, which delves into the author’s own upbringing in a white, working-class Appalachian family struggling with poverty and drug addiction. He was an outspoken critic of the former president, comparing him to Hitler in various public speeches, calling him an idiot and describing himself as “never a Trumper”. However, during the 2022 midterm elections, Vance changed his mind and retracted many of his statements, aligning himself with the former president’s positions and becoming one of the leading proponents of so-called ‘national conservatism’. Seen as the intellectual version of Trumpism, this theory advocates a populist realignment of the GOP – moving it away from free markets and interventionist foreign policy.
Republicans hope to demonstrate with Vance that there are people who may not have liked Trump at one point in his presidency, but who could be persuaded to like him now. Moreover, the young senator is a perfect example of a working-class person who has been abandoned by the elites, but who succeeded in emerging and thriving by rejecting the very elites he once belonged to, having studied at Yale and worked at a venture capital firm in California.
Vance joined the Catholic Church as an adult in 2019, when he was baptised and chose St Augustine as his patron saint. A father of three, he is married to a Hindu woman who has served as a trial lawyer to several Supreme Court justices. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Vance was raised by Christian parents who did not attend church services. Vance is associated with an ideology known as ‘Catholic integralism’, an intellectual movement that advocates a ‘soft power’ approach for exerting Christian influence on society. Thinkers in the movement, including its leader Adrian Vermeule of Harvard University, see Trump as reminiscent of the figure of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity.
On abortion and immigration, the potential vice-president’s stance is highly controversial. In fact he favours access to mifepristone, a drug typically used in medical abortions before 10 weeks of pregnancy, along with misoprostol. Moreover, in a fundraising message for Trump’s campaign, Vance called for the mass deportation of immigrants without legal status, an agenda broadly outlined in the Republican Party’s political platform and vehemently opposed by the US bishops.
In congratulating his running mate, Trump said that Vance “will focus strongly on the people he has fought so brilliantly for, the American workers and farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and far beyond”, the working class who no longer identify with the Democratic Party and who have found their representative in the Conservative Party, or more precisely in its Trumpian branch.
