J.D. Vance Got Into Politics Over a Rotten Tomatoes Review. Now He Might Be Vice President.

For months now, former President Trump has teased a winner in the Republican Party’s 2024 veepstakes. And on Monday, after a small weekend brush with death, the New York Times reported Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) will join Trump's ticket as the vice presidential nominee, making Vance one bullet away from the presidency should Trump win in November.   It’s not exactly a surprising choice. Trump exclusively opts to work with sycophants and Vance, despite criticisms of the former president years ago, is famously one of his top ass-kissers who will surely never pull off a Mike Pence-esque betrayal. In fact, at a September 2022 rally for Vance’s Senate campaign, Trump introduced Vance to the crowd and said, “J.D. is kissing my ass.” Welp, that’s one way to welcome your new running mate! Trump probably felt the need to flaunt Vance’s total submission to him due to Vance once privately comparing Trump to Hitler, and also due to a few 2016 tweets, where Vance criticized Trump’s xenophobia and Islamophobia: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” Vance wrote in a since-deleted tweet, for which he apologized profusely in 2021. Awkward! lol pic.twitter.com/HsPQnbs90I — Anthony Michael Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) July 15, 2024 Vance, like Trump, shares Trump’s semi-unlikely path to politics. Both come from elitist and privileged backgrounds, and both still posture as common men with deep, intimate connections to the working class. They also share remarkably fragile egos: Where Trump was allegedly motivated to run for president by President Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner jokes mocking him in 2012, Vance allegedly decided to run for Senate after Hillbilly Elegy, based on his memoir, flopped on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2022, the Washington Post reported that, according to a friend of Vance’s who attended Yale Law School with him, negative reviews from “snobby critics” were the “last straw” for Vance, compelling him to get in the race.  And since getting into politics following the success of his memoir about life in Appalachia, Vance has been giving women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized communities hell. In 2021, Vance disturbingly argued against rape and incest exceptions for abortion bans: “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. Months later, he spewed the wildly racist conspiracy theory that Democratic donor George Soros would send private jets “to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.” He went on to say that he supported “some federal response to prevent it from happening,” implying support for federal laws to prohibit or police interstate abortion-related travel. Also in 2022, Vance advocated for nationwide abortion criminalization and expressed support for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) proposed national 15-week abortion ban. Somehow, it gets worse: Vance is also on record basically opposing no-fault divorce in disturbing remarks from 2022, all but calling for women to be entrapped in abusive marriages. No-fault divorce allows people to obtain a divorce without requiring them to prove abuse, desertion, or other mistreatment, even as the legal system famously makes “proving” abuse difficult if not impossible for victims. Vance suggested even domestic violence victims should stay with their spouses for the good of their kids: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy.' ... Maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical, but it really didn’t work out for the kids of those…