Next week, the Republican National Convention will choose Donald Trump as its nominee for the third consecutive presidential election cycle. Between then and now, Trump will also choose his vice president. No one knows for sure what Trump has in mind, but he is believed to have identified three finalists: Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and N.D. Governor Doug Burgum.
While the vice presidency is often derided as a relatively unimportant job, there’s reason to think Trump’s selection could have significant consequences down the road. When Trump finally exits politics, his most recent vice president will likely become a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in subsequent cycles. Vance, Rubio and Burgum all have certain similarities — they are all Republicans who strongly support Trump — but they are also people with distinct personalities and significant policy differences.
During his administration, Ronald Reagan used the metaphor of a three-legged stool to describe modern conservatism. The three legs were neoconservatism (foreign policy), religious conservatism (social issues), and libertarianism (economics). This triple alliance lasted during the George W. Bush administration but was shattered after Trump won the nomination and was elected president in 2016. Trump has also urged the party to abandon economic liberalism, at least on trade.
The battle for control of the ideological direction of the Republican Party continues, and Trump’s vice president and eventual successor may play a decisive role in that victory. (Trump himself is not particularly ideological.) For liberals who want to see the Republican Party adopt a more market-friendly platform whenever possible, the vice presidency has some stakes.
Unfortunately, then, Trump’s most likely choice — Vance — is also by far the least liberal.
Vance first attracted public attention after its publication Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about his adolescence in Appalachia. The book chronicles the decline of America’s Rust Belt and the resulting social instability of the working class, and it helps explain Trump’s appeal to blue-collar voters. But it is worth noting that Vance did not Agree the phenomenon he described. Actually, Hillbilly Elegy Largely avoids scapegoating market forces, instead asserting that struggling members of Vance’s community are wrong to blame their problems on sinister outsiders.
Unfortunately, avoiding demagoguery is not a successful strategy when seeking higher office. Today, Vance is a staunch populist who embraces tariffs and protectionism. He called on the federal government to break up Google. He even praised Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, a Joe Biden appointee who has launched a one-person campaign targeting big tech companies and, indirectly, their customers.
“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lena Khan … and they say, ‘Well, Lena Khan is kind of engaged in something fundamentally evil,'” Vance said earlier this year. “I guess I think Lena Khan is one of the few people in the Biden administration who is doing a good job.”
Khan’s entire plan is empowering federal bureaucrats to intervene in the operations of large companies like Amazon to efficiently and successfully meet human needs. Vance is a co-signer of the effort.
In fact, Vance liked progressive economic ideas of all kinds. Ross Douthat interviewed New York TimesVance demonstrated his love for the minimum wage, explicitly rejecting liberal arguments against it.
“You raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour, and sometimes you hear liberals say that’s a bad thing,” Vance said. “‘Well, isn’t McDonald’s going to replace some of its employees with kiosks?’ That’s a good thing because then the workers who remain will get higher wages.
Vance went on to argue that it is actually bad for cheap immigrant labor to outcompete American workers and that the federal government should prevent it. That’s Vance’s ideology in a nutshell: If American workers lose their jobs because government intervention has accelerated the process of automation, so be it. But if these workers suffer as a result of free market competition, the federal government should work to prevent that from happening.
Vance is arguably more committed to illiberal ideas than Trump himself. Trump’s rhetoric is often at odds with his actual policies, and he has the ability to make major policy shifts — such as supporting a ban on TikTok — and then backtrack significantly. When Trump’s former defense secretary floated the idea of mandatory national service, Trump called it a “ridiculous idea.” However, Vance said he supports some versions of the proposal. If Vance becomes vice president, he will be well-positioned to hone Trump’s populist instincts and align policy with rhetoric.
In contrast, Rubio is not a very sincere populist. He entered the Senate in 2011 as part of the Tea Party wave. His instincts at the time were traditional Republican, but he emphasized some limited government themes, such as reining in spending and opposing congressional earmarks. He also supports immigration reform and wants to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants living in the United States. Unlike other prominent Tea Party-supporting Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Rubio remains instinctively hawkish on foreign policy. When he ran for president in 2016, he was arguably the candidate most similar to former President George W. Bush — quite a feat considering Jeb Bush was also in the running.
One thing Rubio and Vance have in common is that once Trump completely conquered the Republican Party, both politicians completely changed their views on Trump. Rubio once called Trump a “liar artist” and “the vulgarest person who ever aspired to the presidency.” He now regularly defends Trump at all costs, even comparing criminal proceedings against him to “show trials” in countries like communist Cuba.
Rubio’s incoherent defense of Trump also led the senator to embrace bad policies he once opposed. as reasonEric Bohm pointed out that Rubio previously understood that raising tariffs on China would punish American consumers, those who buy related goods. He explained this briefly to Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary debate.
That said, Rubio is more ideologically flexible than Vance. He has betrayed liberal economic thought because the Republican Party’s current trajectory is far removed from that philosophy. If that changes, one suspects Rubio will change too.
That means Burgum is almost by default the least-worst choice for vice president. The North Dakota governor hasn’t been on the national political stage nearly as long as Vance or Rubio, instead emerging as an unlikely Republican presidential candidate during last year’s primaries. Although he attracted some positive attention for displaying the pocket constitution, he was not particularly visible in the debates.
According to largely sympathetic reviews of his tenure, Burgum governed in traditional conservative fashion: cutting taxes, improving the state’s business climate, supporting the Second Amendment, and more. He signed a very strict abortion ban that would have been impossible for Trump, who correctly guessed that the issue was currently Trump’s biggest obstacle to re-election. Burgum did take the position, however, that abortion was a state issue and should not be decided by the federal government.
Before entering politics, he was a self-made businessman, starting his own software company and selling it to Microsoft in 2001 for $1 billion. But Vance is a venture capitalist, and all of this – it’s kind of encouraging. Political candidates always ultimately disappoint liberals, but Burgum’s record as governor suggests he’s unlikely to abandon basic free-market principles easily.
Vance and Rubio, by contrast, have proven they’re happy to do so.
Unfortunately, none of Trump’s vice presidential candidates are particularly liberal. Yet Vance and Rubio are more than just illiberal—they move decisively in an illiberal direction on economic issues on which average Republicans might align themselves at least casually with liberalism. This is a good reason to hope Trump will exclude them from the list of candidates.
