Why JD Vance Can't Ride Whiteness to the White House

He thinks naked white supremacy will make him president. He's almost certainly wrong.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

The battle for the future of the Republican Party is underway — or at least the battle to determine who will lead it in 2028. As vice president, JD Vance has the inside track, but he knows the field will not clear for him. So he is working hard to articulate a vision, to define himself and the country he wishes to lead. That vision, articulated in a series of speeches and interviews over the last year and a half, is one of naked white supremacy and ethnonationalism.

The good news is that Vance is a terrible messenger for this hateful ideology, and his chances of taking it to the Oval Office are extremely slim. The bad news is that there is clearly a sizable market for it within the Republican Party.

Speaking Sunday at the annual Turning Point USA conference known as “AmericaFest,” Vance had a message for the assembled herrenvolk: White pride is back, baby!

“I refuse to apologize for being white” has long been a mantra of segregationists and Klansmen, an outgrowth of the fear that any sort of equality for racial minorities — legal, economic, educational — by definition meant putting whites in a subservient position, forced to hang their heads and apologize. Equality is perceived to be a reversal of the racial hierarchy: If we’re not in a state of privilege, free to abuse our lessers, then it can only mean we are being abused.

So who exactly has been demanding that JD Vance apologize for being white? Has that ever happened to him, a single time? Of course not. But this is a key element of Trumpism, of which Vance would like to be the heir: You have been humiliated, it says, but I will let you stand tall again. You, white people — and especially white men — have been hounded and oppressed, but those days are finally over.

Vance is aping Trump not just in this message, but in stating it so explicitly. That was one of Trump’s most important political innovations, to take the subtext and make it text. This belief that whites are the only oppressed people is being expressed daily in administration policy and communication, from the remaking of the refugee program to serve only white South Africans to the social media filled with Aryan imagery to the administration-wide push to find injustices committed against whites:

Is JD Vance the man for this job?

Every vice president dreams of ascending to the top job, and most of them try. When they do, they have an excellent chance of getting their party’s nomination, and a fair shot at becoming president. In the nearly 50 years between the Ford presidency and the second Trump presidency, eight people served as vice president. All but Dick Cheney subsequently ran for president, and among those seven, five became their party’s nominee. (The exceptions were Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Must be something about Indiana.)

Vance no doubt understands that he won’t be able to clear the field the way a few of those VPs did; the contest for the Republican nomination in 2028 will be fierce and bitter. So he has been articulating a new vision for America, one that seeks to upend everything we thought we knew about Americanness. In particular, it rejects the conception of America as an idea and “American” as a status potentially open to anyone. Instead, Vance argues for a traditional blood-and-soil conception of national identity, familiar to ethnonationalist movements around the world.

He has been making this argument for a couple of years now, most notably in his convention speech in 2024, which used the rhetorical device of his family’s cemetery plot where multiple generations of true Americans are buried; if your family can’t similarly trace its lineage back to at least the Civil War, he implied, you can’t be truly American. And of late, Vance has been blaming every societal problem on immigrants, from high housing costs to limited health care access to antisemitism.

Not that he sees the rampant antisemitism inside the conservative movement as much of a problem. Commenting on the recent controversies around neo-Nazi right-wing influencer Nick Fuentes and the larger question of whether the GOP should be concerned that its ranks are overflowing with people just like him, Vance told a podcast, “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

That’s his recent innovation: While others on the right have been talking more and more about “heritage Americans,” and you don’t have to think too hard to figure out who is included and excluded from that category, Vance just comes out and says the word “white.”

That nasty little speech to Turning Point was full of dog-whistles and bullhorns. He brought up a candidate “for mayor Mogadishu — wait, I mean Minneapolis. Little Freudian slip there.” The audience cheered and laughed, of course — har har! For the record, people of Somali descent make up about 4% of the population of Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located (about 50,000 of the county’s 1.3 million residents). The majority of them are native-born Americans, while most of the rest are naturalized American citizens. But for Vance, a city with a significant population of people who came, or whose ancestors came, from the wrong country can not be truly American. And we all know which countries are which; you won’t catch him complaining about, for instance, the German presence in the Texas Hill Country.

Vance wasn’t done after the Mogadishu crack. He said about Rep. Jasmine Crockett, “She wants to be a senator, though her street girl persona is about as real as her nails.” Street girl? Hmm, what could that mean?

He went on to say that “The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God we always will be, a Christian nation.” (Cue frenzied screaming and extended standing ovation.) He did throw non-Christians a bone, however: “I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American. I’m saying something simpler and truer: Christianity is America’s creed.” In other words: We real Americans will let you stay here, but only if you pay fealty to OUR religion.

I have noted often that when they searched for a leader for their party in 2016, Republicans decided that they would rally behind literally the worst human being in America, the walking collection of character flaws known as Donald Trump. Dishonest, ignorant, cruel, petty, narcissistic, bigoted, a tax cheat and a con man and a sexual abuser — how could they have done worse? But in some ways, JD Vance is worse, for one reason. Trump was born this way; Vance decided to become a monster. After going through a series of personal reinventions and name changes, he settled on the most repulsive version of himself, believing that it would bring him the power he has long sought.

There are some problems, however. The first is that his ethnonationalist, exclusionary vision of America runs against everything we’ve been telling ourselves America is about for all our lives. That doesn’t mean it contradicts what America has often been in many ways, but the ideal of America as a place of inclusion holds extraordinary power. And what Vance is offering is therefore deeply un-American. It says that everything that has made our country dynamic and successful ought to be rejected, and it’s just hard to imagine a majority of American voters going for that.

Even more fundamentally, they won’t go for him. Vance is a black hole of charisma, just a personally unappealing figure. It’s a testament to his smarts, his opportunism, and his burning ambition that he has gotten this far. But you can’t become president when people instinctively recoil from you. And if anything, his increasing focus on whiteness will make him even more repellent.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.