JD Vance is a ‘heterodox’ thinker. How will he affect Trump?

On January 20, 2025By Littum

JD Vance has proclaimed himself the champion of the working class.

Some have called the vice president-elect “Trump more than Trump.”

Like President-elect Donald Trump, whose appeal with working-class voters got him elected twice as president, Vance has supported protectionism by stifling foreign competition on trade and immigration. This policy results in higher tariffs and other barriers to imported goods and restrictions on immigration.

But unlike Trump, the former Republican senator from Ohio has also supported traditionally liberal agenda favorites such as -one child tax credit and increase the minimum wage and opposed additional corporate tax relief. He has praised President Joe Biden’s leadership of the Federal Trade Commission for antitrust enforcement and embraced unions — toeing the line himself — a move that brings him closer to liberal lawmakers like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a longtime friend, says that as a senator, Vance was more populist and nationalist on economic issues than Trump.

“JD is strongly interested in improving wages for working-class Americans,” he said. “That seems to be a big focus for him, and I think it animates a lot of the specific political positions he takes.”

Vance has never been a darling of the traditional free-market conservatives who dominate the Republican Party. So will he be able to push economic-policy ideas alien to Republican orthodoxy, as well as those currently out of alignment with Trump? Will his two years in the US Senate give him an edge as he sells Trump’s economic agenda to congressional Republicans and even some Democrats?

Vance is widely seen as an heir apparent to Trump, as the 78-year-old president-elect is only eligible to serve one term. Experts and people close to Vance say that while he may have some influence on Trump’s thinking, his agenda will not diverge from his boss’s outlook. They also point out that Trump did not have a political director during his campaign and that he likes to oversee the financial portfolio himself.

Vance, 40, rose to fame as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir set in his hometown of Middletown that exposes the plight of white working-class Americans “in an Ohio steel town that has sapped jobs and hope.” The book was seen by many as a kind of explanation for Trump’s election victory in 2016 and a window into his voter base in the Rust Belt and elsewhere.

Strain expects Vance to be a major contributor to the administration’s priorities and policies — and he doesn’t expect the two to be at odds.

“At least not in public,” he said.

That’s no surprise to Doug Holtz-Eakin, who was chief economist for former President George HW Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office during former President George W. Bush’s tenure.

“Presidents’ agendas dominate, vice presidents align with the president’s agenda,” he said.

But Vance would have some opportunity to influence Trump through the force of his personality and reasoning, Holtz-Eakin said.

“But he will have to say it is in his political interest,” he said.

Trump is also “increasingly aware” of Vance being his successor and of the need to set him up to succeed, according to Holtz-Eakin. “And giving him a win on policy issues is one way to do that,” he said.

Vance, whose father walked out on the family when he was a toddler and whose mother dealt with drug addiction, was raised primarily by his working-class grandparents in Middletown, about 30 miles north of Cincinnati. Vance enlisted in the military straight out of high school, joining the Marines and working as a military journalist from 2003 to 2007. He graduated from Ohio State University and earned a law degree from Yale Law School.

Vance, who went on to pursue a career in the tech industry as a venture capitalist, has written and spoken passionately about the sense of hopelessness and the lack of economic opportunity among the white working class in the Rust Belt struggling with the shuttering of steel mills and mines.

He has described himself as a member of the “postliberal right”,” which rejects both the progressive left and its emphasis on individual rights as well as economic liberalism that favors a free market. The movement advocates economic nationalism, which is in sync with Trump’s America First policy.

Vance, an economic populist, has spoken out against free trade and foreign military intervention.

“Jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war,” he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July. “Our country was flooded with cheap Chinese goods, with cheap foreign labor … From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnant wages, the people who run this country have failed and failed again. “

After Vance was elected senator from Ohio in 2022, he distinguished himself with his willingness to work across the aisle. In 2023, he partnered with former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown to co-sponsor bipartisan rail safety legislation following the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment, and worked with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on a bill to get back executive salaries when banks go bankrupt.

“Vance is not an orthodoxy guy. He’s a heterodox thinker. He doesn’t have an intellectual paradigm,” Holtz-Eakin says. “It’s really a hodgepodge of economic policies that he supports, and that’s a trend on the Republican side right now.”

Newly minted Republican Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, who unseated Brown in the 2024 election, sees Vance’s time in the Senate as a major asset.

“What he brings to the vice presidency is a combination of a fresh set of eyes, a new way of thinking with a deep understanding of how the institution works,” Moreno says. “Because he was there, but he wasn’t there long enough to be destroyed by it.”

But to be clear, the captain of the ship and the person who steers the ship is Trump, Moreno said.

“JD is first mate,” he said. “Like Trump, he’s an outsider to the political world. So they’re not weighed down, to use a Kamala Harris line, by what has been.”

It’s a sentiment Holtz-Eakin agrees with. He pointed to the appointment of Andrew Ferguson to head the Federal Trade Commission. Ferguson is expected to be more lenient toward American companies when it comes to mergers and acquisitions than the current boss, Lina Khan, whom Vance had praised.

“Trump has already kind of gone the other way on the antitrust issue,” he said, offering it as evidence of the limited scope of influence anyone can have on Trump.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is the White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal