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In 2022, I wrote about three key figures at the nexus of right-wing politics and media: J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, and Tucker Carlson. At the time, Trump was theoretically in the political wilderness, and yet the political press was still watching his every muscle twitch for signs of ongoing political influence—including his endorsement of Vance for a US Senate seat in Ohio (even if Trump couldn’t quite remember Vance’s name). Despite this, a plausible case can be made that Carlson was the most influential of the figures at that moment: he was the king of Fox News, hosting what the New York Times had just described as perhaps “the most racist show in the history of cable news—and also, by some measures, the most successful.” At the very least, Carlson was reportedly influential in landing Vance the Trump endorsement in Ohio (with the aid, Rolling Stone reported, of a “‘disgusting’ sexual innuendo” about a rival). After winning the Republican primary, Vance gave Carlson a shout-out in his victory speech.
Fast-forward two years: Trump is the Republican presidential nominee and Vance is his running mate; Carlson, by contrast, is out at Fox and in his own theoretical wilderness. And yet the nexus is still nexusing. The New York Times reported this week that Carlson intervened to secure Vance’s place on Trump’s ticket, phoning Trump from a speaking tour in Australia to warn that if he overlooked Vance and instead went with a “neocon,” then US intelligence agencies would be incentivized to assassinate Trump and elevate that person to the Oval Office. Per the Times, Carlson also counseled Trump to ignore the advice of his former boss Rupert Murdoch, who reportedly wanted “anyone but J.D.” on the ticket. (“When your enemies are pushing a running mate on you,” Carlson told Trump, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”) This time, Vance didn’t thank Carlson in his acceptance speech, which he delivered last night, though Carlson still seems to be having “the time of his life” at the Republican National Convention, as the Washington Post put it yesterday. On Tuesday, he went behind enemy lines, dropping into the Fox greenroom. He is expected to speak from the stage tonight—right before Trump himself.
Interpersonally, the nexus between the three men has not been without its complications. Last year, messages released as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ massive defamation case against Fox revealed that Carlson privately referred to Trump as a “demonic force” whom he “passionately” hates. Vance, for his part, once called Trump “cultural heroin” and privately raised the possibility that he could be “America’s Hitler”—a track record that was excavated in detail during his 2022 Senate bid, and again after Trump picked him for the ticket this week. Back in 2022, I quoted from an insightful profile of Vance by Simon van Zuylen–Wood, in which the latter spoke of an “emerging canon of ‘what happened to J.D. Vance’ commentary.” Much of this week’s Vance coverage has read like a coda. After Trump picked him, one lead headline in the Times noted that he was “Once an Acerbic Trump Critic,” while another referenced the “cultural heroin” gibe. NPR considered Vance’s “political evolution”; the Post, his “journey.”
There has also been ample coverage of the ideological significance of the Trump-Vance alliance—just as there was back in 2022. In his profile, van Zuylen–Wood argued that the What happened to Vance? commentary missed the point; Vance’s new, Trumpian political identity wasn’t “so much a façade or a reversal as an expression of an alienated worldview that is, in fact, consistent with his life story,” and that had found a home within “an emergent populist-intellectual persuasion that tacks right on culture and left on economics.” (This has often been discussed under the banner of “national conservatism” or the “new right”; Carlson was seen at the time as a standard-bearer for this persuasion, all under the broader banner of Trumpism.) This week, these ideas have been discussed again, amid all the Hitler and heroin quotes, as has the meaning of Vance’s ascent for the orientation of the GOP, not least on foreign policy. Speaking on his Times podcast, Ezra Klein said that Vance has “done the most to turn Trump’s impulses, his rhetoric, his political and personal brand into a coherent governing philosophy,” including by embracing economic populism. “I find that a lot of liberals don’t want to admit this is happening,” Klein said. “But something is happening here.”
And—just as in 2022—there has been coverage pushing back on this type of coverage. In a different 2022 article about Carlson and Vance, Jason Zengerle wrote that “depending on your point of view,” national conservatives “are either attempting to add intellectual heft to Trumpism or trying to reverse-engineer an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s lizard-brain populism.” That debate has not gone away. In a smart newsletter this week, John Ganz agreed with commentary situating the Vance pick as evidence of “the full ascendancy of Trump’s GOP,” but also noted that the latter “was never about a coherent policy regime or even ideology; it’s a structure of feeling and Vance embodies that.” In his newsletter, Noah Berlatsky dismissed coverage depicting Vance as a “muscular, billionaire-frightening populist,” calling it credulous of a “shallow, cynical branding exercise.” Vance “has benefited throughout his career from the gullibility of the mainstream media, which never tires in its search for a white working-class whisperer,” Berlatsky added. “Vance, a venture capitalist, stopped being anything like working class long ago, and no one should be fooled by his transparent phoniness.”
Berlatsky was referencing the glowing mainstream media coverage that Vance enjoyed around the time of Trump’s first presidential run in 2016, when the release of his memoir—Hillbilly Elegy, a book about the scourge of opioids in his Ohio hometown and the broader plight of the white working class—coincided with many liberal journalists’ almost anthropological desperation to understand the roots of Trump’s appeal. That Vance was willing to slam Trump in the pages of The Atlantic and warn against “Breitbart and the worst impulses of the conservative media” aided his elite reception. As with his view of Trump, Vance has since appeared to perform a pivot on the media front, becoming a regular guest on Carlson’s Fox show and embracing other right-wing media fever swamps. ProPublica and Documented reported this week that Vance once compared the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s view of America favorably to that of Rachel Maddow. After Trump tapped him to join the ticket, Vance went on Fox and blamed the press for his past skepticism. “I bought into the media’s lies and distortions,” he said.
But if van Zuylen–Wood was right to say that coverage of Vance’s pro-Trump pivot masked aspects of continuity, similar could arguably be said of his media relations. As should be expected with Trump, it appears that one reason that Vance was picked for the ticket is that he’s good on TV. In part, this judgment is superficial; according to the Times, Trump has long thought Vance “smart and handsome,” with “beautiful blue eyes.” But Trump may also have picked Vance because elite media interlocutors often seem to take him seriously even when disagreeing with his ideas, a function of his polished, debate-meet affectations. This week, Trump’s son Don Jr. said that Vance is “better than almost any of our people” at prosecuting Trump’s case on “the most liberal TV shows.” On CNN on Monday, one right-wing talking head surmised that Vance had been picked to speak to low-engagement voters but another, Jonah Goldberg, disagreed. “JD Vance does not actually speak Bubba very well, I don’t believe; what he does very well is translate Bubba to intellectuals,” Goldberg said. “He’s good at talking to Anderson Cooper and explaining what the white working class thinks.” Not so different, then, from 2016.
This is not to invalidate the latest What happened to Vance? coverage. He did flip dramatically on Trump; perhaps more interestingly, as The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins argued following Vance’s acceptance speech last night, he also seems to have flipped from casting the white working class as complicit in its victimhood, in Hillbilly Elegy, to casting them purely as victims. (His only reference to the media in his speech last night was to castigate it, without a trace of self-reflection, for “looking down” on people in Appalachia.) Nor is it to invalidate coverage casting Vance—and Carlson, and others—as the vanguard of a distinctive ideological movement. As Klein noted on his podcast, something is happening here, even if he was right to also note that it’s too soon to know if the Republican Party will actually change. Taken together, these strains of Vance coverage create a befuddling impression: of a man who has deep and consequential principles but also holds none. But this isn’t necessarily a contradiction. There is a complex reality behind the media caricatures of Vance the zealot, Vance the convert, Vance the opportunist, Vance the phony. We need more reporting to tease it out.
Still, I can’t help but return to the conclusion I shared back in 2022: that while exploring the emerging intellectual terrain of the “new right” is an important exercise, the mainstream press has a tendency to over-intellectualize political trends that really aren’t that deep, in the name of understanding ideas that otherwise seem aberrant or incoherent or both. These have included the “great replacement” theory, a dangerous conspiracy that liberal elites are trying to consolidate their power by engineering demographic change, as well as Trump’s election denialism. In recent years, Vance has said that he would have gone along with Trump’s wishes if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021—a claim that has often been mentioned in coverage this week, but, as Media Matters for America’s Matt Gertz found, has generally been underplayed. (“The most important story surrounding Trump’s new running mate,” Gertz argued, is “why he needed a new one.”) So, too, has Vance’s call, last year, for the Justice Department to investigate the writer of a Post op-ed that warned of a Trump “dictatorship” and suggested ways to resist it. It’s hard to convene intellectual debates from prison.
Vance has been a beneficiary of the mainstream media’s instinct to appoint thought leaders in the past—riding it, arguably, all the way to a major presidential ticket. The Vance-Carlson-Trump nexus that I wrote about in 2022 has deep roots in the media of the political right, of course. But it didn’t grow in a silo. “Substantively, and this should never be forgotten, one of the main things Trump and Vance have in common is that they were promoted ceaselessly by the ostensibly liberal media and entertainment industry,” the journalist Osita Nwanevu wrote this week. “Talk yourself blue about Fox if you like, but that’s not where this started.”
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, having grown quieter following the attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend, the disquiet in the Democratic Party as to President Biden’s place on its ticket returned to top-story status, overshadowing Vance’s speech. First, Adam Schiff, the California congressman and Senate candidate, called on Biden to drop out of the race in a statement obtained by the LA Times; later, Politico reported that Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, quietly told Biden that he risks dragging the party down, while ABC scooped that Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, conveyed a similar message. In an exquisite non-denial denial, a spokesperson for Schumer said that unless ABC’s source was Schumer or Biden, “the reporting is idle speculation. Leader Schumer conveyed the views of his caucus directly to President Biden on Saturday.”
- Also yesterday, Selina Cheng, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, alleged that she was fired because she took up a role chairing a journalists’ association in Hong Kong, where press freedom has come under sharp attack from China-aligned rulers in recent years. A Journal editor said that staffers “should not be seen as advocating for press freedom in a place like Hong Kong” since doing so would “create a conflict” with the paper’s coverage of the issue, Cheng wrote in a statement, adding that she was “deeply shocked” by that stance in light of the Journal’s widely praised advocacy on behalf of Evan Gershkovich, its reporter jailed in Russia. The Journal declined to comment on a personnel matter but insisted that it remains a “fierce and vocal advocate” for press freedom in Hong Kong.
- This week, the German government banned Compact, an extreme-right magazine, and associated properties, accusing them of inciting hatred against Jews, immigrants, and parliamentary democracy. “Our message is very clear,” Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, said. “We will not allow ethnicity to define who belongs to Germany and who does not.” According to Le Monde, hundreds of police officers were mobilized to raid properties linked to the magazine and its collaborators. (Also shuttered: a linked online shop selling imitation Trump-branded coins.) Such bans are rare in Germany; per Le Monde, only three editors have been ordered to stop publishing in twenty years.
- In other European press-freedom news, a judge in the UK ruled that journalists can name a convicted rapist whose identity was shielded as part of a legal proceeding; the journalists had appealed on public interest grounds. Elsewhere, a journalist in Croatia reported being attacked by relatives of a local official after filming an illegal dump; a national journalists’ association described the incidents as “life-threatening” and urged the government to respond. And a court in Italy ordered a journalist to pay five thousand euros to Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, after she mocked Meloni’s height online.
- And Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen reports that you can now get news on your vape. “Vaping and doomscrolling are both addictive and both bad for you, so why not combine the two?” Hazard Owen wrote, pointing to a photo of news alerts appearing on a vape that was posted by the journalist Katie Notopoulos. The vape “has a 2.01-inch touchscreen and Bluetooth connection to sync with and deliver notifications from your smartphone,” Hazard Owen adds. (As her colleague Hanaa’ Tameez asked, “pivot to vape when”?)
ICYMI: The Trump assassination attempt, ‘BlueAnon,’ and the X factor
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