JD Vance and the #NeverTrump Counter-Revolution

The only good thing about bad blood is letting it slide.

Jul 22, 2024

I have only ever voted for one person in my life. In 2016, I pulled the lever for Donald Trump. I was convinced by The Flight 93 Election.1

As a libertarian since Ron Paul 2008, one group of people I could never sympathize with were the #NeverTrumpers. These were some of the worst human beings on the planet, and I knew it well back then. Max Boot, Colin Powell, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol.

These were all neoconservatives. All warmongers. At a certain point, I began to question what side I was on.

Trump was the peace candidate, that was obvious. Hillary was the mother of ISIS. He wanted us out of the Middle East. Out of NATO. He was going to drain the swamp. Law and Order. Ally with Russia. Make America safe for industrialists, not just financiers. And of course, he was going to build a wall at Mexico’s expense.

I wasn’t in favor of all of those things, but it didn’t matter, because he didn’t do any of them.

What last week’s RNC proves is that these neoconservative #NeverTrumpers are back behind the wheel.

Project 2025

For months if not years, Project 2025 was the primary cope for people trying to tell me why a second Trump administration wouldn’t be a disappointing betrayal like the first. They’re going to ban porn and “abortion pills”! They’re going to take birth control and transgender hormones off of Obamacare!2 They were going to abolish the National Weather Service! Were any of those in any way related to the promises that got Trump elected in 2016? Apparently, nobody cares!

Sure, it was ultimately a project of the Heritage Foundation, but these were Trump loyalists who had been with him from the beginning. They had plans for Trump to purge every single government agency and put Patriots In Control. Stephen Miller was part of it! So was Mark Meadows and Jim Demint and Russ Vought!

Well, turns out that was all for nothing, because a week before the convention, Trump claimed that he had never heard of Project 2025, but whatever it was, he was against it. Stephen Miller took the hint and also disavowed Project 2025 a few days after Trump did.3

JD Vance

A week later, Trump got shot at. You probably already know this.

Two days after that was the first day of the RNC, when Trump finally announced his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance.

Let’s just get the obvious out of the way. JD Vance is a Thiel man. After being involved in That Whole Yale Thing, Vance worked for Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital. Thiel then financially backed Vance's own fund, Narya Capital. Thiel donated $15 million to Vance4, and introduced him to David Sacks, who has fundraised $12 Million for Trump. He was one of three Thiel-backed candidates in the 2022 midterms, alongside Blake Masters and Josh Hawley. Masters lost his election because he was edgeposting during his campaign about supporting the Unabomber and gutting social security while running in an Arizona statewide election. Josh Hawley has taken bold steps against the Washington Neoliberal Consensus by calling to redirect funds from Ukraine to Israel and to ban TikTok in order to silence criticism of Israel.

Vance was also a nonresident fellow of the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, with such luminaries on the board of directors as Dick Cheney and Dick DeVos (husband to Betsy), and such notable senior fellows as pathological warmonger John Bolton, “Counter-Jihad” Somali Feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bush II alumni Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, PNAC founder Eliot Cohen, and finally the literal Godmother of Neoconservatism, Gertrude Himmelfarb.

After publishing his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” he joined the ranks of David Frum, Peter Beinart, and Margaret Hoover as token conservatives on CNN.

But let’s say none of that matters. Up until he needed Trump’s endorsement for his Senate race, JD Vance was a #NeverTrumper!

In 2016, he supported CIA-candidate Evan McMullin.

Vance has tried to distance himself from his neoconservative past, claiming that his about-face on Trump was because of his own evolving views on the Iraq War.

Leaked texts revealed that Vance is of the view that “If the GOP listened to Bibi we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq.”

This is a complete inversion of reality. Benjamin Netanyahu personally testified before Congress in support of toppling Saddam.

And whatever lessons Vance learned, he didn’t learn them very well. This is what Vance told Sean Hannity on the first day of the convention, after being confirmed as the Trump’s running mate:

"A lot of people recognize that we need to do something with Iran—but not these weak little bombing runs. If you're going to punch the Iranians, you punch them hard, and that’s what he did when he took out Soleimani. By the way, that action, people said it would lead to broader war. It actually brought peace, and checked the Iranians and slowed them down a little bit.
“Maybe the most important diplomatic breakthrough in the Trump administration was the Abraham Accords. If you want to check Iran, the way to do it is to, one, withdraw their oil money, which of course Joe Biden’s been bad about. But you’ve also gotta enable the Israelis and the Sunni Arab states to work together and actually provide counterbalance to Iran. Joe Biden has done nothing. You have the infrastructure there, sitting there, to weaken Iran, to strengthen our ally, Israel. Joe Biden’s done nothing with it. Donald Trump would reinvigorate it."

First, Soleimani was the Georgy Zhukov of the fight against Salafi-Jihadism in Syria and Iraq. He was murdered while conducting peace negotiations with the Saudis.5 Second, this idea of a Sunni-Israel alliance against Iran is bad comedy. Hamas killed the Abraham Accords on October 7th. Israel has spent the past year in Gaza tying the arms and legs and pouring the cement shoes. The Yemeni Ansar Allah have thrown its corpse into the Bab-el-Mandeb.

Not to mention that this sort of hostile expansion of a contrived “defensive alliance” 8,000 miles away is how we got the Ukraine War.

There is a push to reinvent “America First.” The subtle way is to turn it into a Sinophobic war party. This is your Tulsi Gabbard, your Gateway Pundit, your Scott Adams, your Tucker Carlson, and your Vivek Ramaswamy. “You working class Whites are tired of fighting Israel’s geostrategic enemies, yes, but have you considered fighting India’s instead?”

But then there are those rare few with the chutzpah to make America First about supporting Israel. JD Vance has that chutzpah.

Inexplicably, the Democratic Majority for Israel accused Vance of tacitly supporting Hamas, but thankfully Yoram Hazony is here set the record straight:

Trump’s Party

This year’s Republican National Convention was a gem.

We had porn stars. We had (legal) Nicaraguans. We had prayers to “Wahegru, our one true god.” We had Pro-Trump Rap. We had Brian Kelley playing country music backed up by a choral harem of Black Conservatives. We had Shabbos Kestenbaum.

Take note: that tweet is from July 9th. Not even two weeks ago.

After that clown show, the copes were flying in hot and heavy from Twitter’s MAGA-Shill ecosystem.

This is complete nonsense. This is not “The Party Without Trump.” This is the party with Trump! “Boomerism and its consequences?” Donald Trump was born in 1946, he is a Boomer!

In March of 2024, Bloomberg reported on Trumpist purge of the RNC leadership. Donald Trump “handpicked the organization’s leadership.”

Trump’s own daughter in law, Lara Trump6, was voted Co-Chair, alongside Michael Whatley. Whatley was originally chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, and was one of the few Republican officials to keep his mouth shut after January 6th and pound the drum on voter fraud for months after.

This is Trump’s third time being confirmed as nominee by the party. This is Trump’s Republican party. What happened on that stage was as much his unfiltered will as The Phantom Menace was that of of George Lucas.

And this is the party that the MAGA movement wants. To quote Academic Agent:

This way of thinking about the current predicament gives rise to some strange thoughts. For example, and I voiced this on my appearance on the Alexandria podcast, what if life under the populists is even more intolerably degenerate than life under the Regime? Afterall, MAGA is probably the most genuinely non-racist, pro-black, pro-LGBT, ‘easy going’ and ‘true 90s liberal’ movement ever to exist (aside from, possibly, the British Tory party since Boris Johnson). ‘We have won our country back!’ cry a right-wing led exclusively by people like Kari Lake and Caitlyn Jenner as the black Zoomer in the MAGA hat posts a video of himself drinking Coca-Cola to a Libs of Tik-Tok video to 100k+ likes on twitter. This is really what MAGA is in its core essence. Jerry Springer passed away recently, but his real legacy was MAGA, in all its gauche, loud American awfulness. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

People have this idea that if they are “based,” and then they cheer on something that is not based, then the non-based thing will want to become “based” in order to secure their approval… which they are already getting.7

El Salvador

One of the more disgusting displays out of the convention was Trump’s inexplicable attack on Nayib Bukele, accusing him of lowering El Salvador’s crime rates not by mass incarceration, but by exiling criminals to the US. This accusation is simply false. If flooding the US with members of MS-13 made El Salvador safer, it would have been the safest country in Latin America twenty years ago.

There are only two possible explanations for it. The first is that Trump was simply envious. Bukele is universally beloved on the American Right (myself included), and Trump is not. His supporters praise Bukele for actually fulfilling the promises that Trump himself flagrantly violated.

The other explanation is far more ominous. Someone on Trump’s inner circle, or at least his speechwriting team, has it out for Bukele. It’s not a backward-looking critique, but a pre-emptive disavowal of any demands that he follow the Bukele model. “Don’t ask me to put people in prison like Bukele, because Bukele is only pretending to put people in prison.” In point of fact, Trump’s stance on incarceration is the exact opposite of Bukele’s, releasing thousands on thousands of federal inmates under laws like the First-Step Act, and refusing to pardon Julian Assange in favor of Lil Wayne, Kodak Black, and some other people.8

Bukele’s response has been muted.

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Of Vance’s senior staff, the vast majority are men under 40, almost all are 6 feet tall (with the notable exception of his chief of staff, Jacob Reses, who walks around like Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians) and a significant percentage of them ingest some form of nicotine on a regular basis. “My Senate office probably has the highest ratio of smokers of anybody in the U.S. Senate,” Vance, who does not himself smoke, told Business Insider in January. (Source)

Who is Jacob Reese, this “notable exception?” His Chief of Staff, who decided around whom Vance will be surrounded?

Let’s check his bio at the Tikvah Fund.

Since graduating with high honors from Princeton in 2013, Jacob has forged an impressive career in public policy, and was named to Forbes Magazine’s list of “30 Under 30” for Law and Policy in 2018. While in college, he interned for the late Charles Krauthammer and the Senate Budget Committee, and also led the Princeton College Republicans. He has served as director for strategic initiatives at Heritage Action for America, as chief of staff for author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, and most recently, as a senior policy advisor for U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. He is in Stanford Law School. Last summer, Jacob interned for the Solicitor General of Mississippi, Scott Stewart.

What is the Tikvah Fund?

Tikvah is a think tank and educational institution focused on the foundational ideas of Jewish civilization; the great challenges facing the Jewish people and the State of Israel; and the political, moral, and economic traditions of Western civilization and American democracy. Tikvah runs a wide range of programs in the United States, Israel, and around the world, including educational initiatives and fellowships, publications and websites, conferences, and policy research.
Our main interest is challenging exceptional students—from middle school to high school, from gap year to college, from graduate students to emerging professionals—to become Jewish leaders and Jewish citizens. We seek to expose them to the most important ideas—in Jewish thought, Zionist history, political philosophy, economics, and strategy—and to inculcate a sense of responsibility for Jewish, Western, and American civilization. We also work closely with the alumni of our various programs, and we encourage our students to think about their time with us as the gateway to a larger Tikvah community.

Who is Chairman of the Tikvah Fund?

Elliott Abrams is the chairman of the Tikvah Fund, as well as chairman of the Vandenberg Coalition and Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.. He served as Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for the Near East and North Africa in the first term of George W. Bush, and as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor in the second term. In the Trump administration he served in the State Department as Special Representative for Iran and for Venezuela. He is the author of Undue Process, Security and Sacrifice, and Faith or Fear, and writes widely on U.S. foreign policy with special focus on the Middle East and the issues of democracy and human rights. His most recent book is Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring.

Elliott Abrams is also the very first signatory to both the Project for a New American Century’s Statement of Principles and its Open Letter to Bill Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein. Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, originally wanted Abrams for Assistant Secretary of State, but Trump rejected him on the basic that Abrams was a #NeverTrumper. Yet, in 2019, Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was able to appoint Abrams as US Special Representative for both Venezuela and Iran!

This is who JD Vance’s Chief of Staff got his start working for. But hey, at least all of the other staff members are nicotinepilled heightchads!

Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles

Trump Campaign has two managers: Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles.

LaCivita originally worked for both Jeb and George W. Bush, Paul Ryan, and Charlie Crist. That is, he is a veteran of the GOP establishment. Furthermore, he was so incensed with outrage by the MAGA movement’s unsanctioned tour of the Capitol Building that he called to invoke the 25th Amendment against Trump.

Furthermore, Chris LaCivita is a passionate opponent of Project2025.

But Trump senior adviser Chris LaCivita said it’s “complete and utter bullshit” for any reporter to suggest those individuals or policies will be appointed or adopted in a second Trump administration.
"They're a pain in the ass," he said of Project 2025 in an interview at the CNN-POLITICO Grill on Thursday.

Chris doesn’t like the Jan 6ers. He doesn’t like Project 2025, and he doesn’t like Vivek Ramaswamy, either.

If you are loyal to Trump and the MAGA movement, Trump’s campaign manager really doesn’t like you!

And what about his other campaign manager, Susie Wiles? Well, her career started working with George HW Bush.

How does she feel about Trump’s normal voter base? In her own words:

As we stood chatting, I remembered something that one of Trump’s allies had told me months earlier—a sentiment that has since been popularized and described in different ways: “For every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique.” Wiles nodded in approval.
“That’s a fact. I believe it. And I so believe we’re realigning the party,” she told me.
Wiles paused. “And I don’t think we’re gonna lose all the Karens, either. They buy eggs. They buy gas. They know. They may not tell their neighbor, or their carpool line, but they know.”

What else from Wiles?

I wanted to know if Wiles had changed. She boasted to me, during one conversation, that she had been somewhat successful in getting her boss to cut back on the rigged-election talk on the campaign trail. (“People want to have hope, they want to be inspired, they want to look forward,” she said.) But in that same conversation, Wiles could not answer the question of whether the 2020 election had actually been stolen. “I’m not sure,” she said, repeating the phrase three times.
And her boss?
“He thinks he knows,” Wiles said.
She paused, seeming to catch herself. “But we know,” Wiles added, “that it can’t happen again.”

Wiles was also allegedly a big pusher of Vance as running mate:

One of Trump’s co-campaign managers is perceived among the donor crowd as playing favorites with Vance, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
“The person who’s had some outside influence here is Susie Wiles,” the same GOP strategist said, based on conversions with donors, “and she certainly wants Vance. Vance is like her little pet.”
Vance’s team did not return a request for comment, nor did Wiles, a Palm Beach-based GOP political operative exiled by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2019 who has been widely credited within Trumpworld for the 2024 campaign’s more buttoned-up tactical approach.

Larry Fink

Just as I was finishing this article, I read the most amazing story.

Sure, Trump likes to tout JPMorgan super-banker CEO Jamie Dimon as a possible Treasury secretary (more later why it ain’t happening) but it’s really Fink whom he likes, respects and speaks with, I am told.
The feeling is mutual, and it’s a relationship I explain in my upcoming book “Go Woke, Go Broke.”
During the Trump presidency, Fink was all in on Environmental Social Governance investing, yet somehow he was appointed to Trump’s business advisory council.

As the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink is the primary activist investor behind Environmental Social Governance and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. To quote Fink in a New York Times interview:

"Behaviors are gonna have to change and this is one thing were asking companies. You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors," the CEO said.
Fink, whose firm owns shares in everyday companies such as Amazon, Apple, MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, Walmart and Walt Disney Co., touted adding "4 more points of diverse employment" that year.
"What we're doing internally is if you don't achieve these levels of impact, your compensation could be impacted," Fink said, before AmEx's former CEO admitted the company was "doing the same thing."
"You have to force behaviors. If you don't force behaviors, whether it's gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you're going to be impacted. That not just recruiting, it's development," Fink said. "We're gonna have to force change."

Are you all getting tired of winning, yet?

Thanks for reading. My hope is that this article functions as a comprehensive breakdown of all of the Trump-Vance points relevant to the last week. Anyone who has heard some of these points mentioned on podcasts or read some of these in tweets should be able to use this article to see it all laid out in writing. I thank you for sharing it far and wide.

And of course, please hit the subscribe button!

Originally written pseudonymously, the author was later revealed to be Michael Anton. Aside from being the Managing Director of Investment for Blackrock, Anton is also a fellow at Claremont, under the direct instruction of Harry V. Jaffa. Anton and Jaffa are both devotees of Leo Strauss, a founding neoconservative.

Notice the inherent capitulation. Talk about critiquing the excesses while reifying the premises!

There was no other place to put it in the article, but two weeks before this, Trump came out in favor of Stapling Green Cards to Diplomas.

The largest amount ever given by a single entity to a single Senate candidate ever.

Trump is not opposed to political assassinations.

Wife of Eric.

This same impulse is at play with youthful converts to Traditionalist Catholicism.

That last one, Eliyahu Weinstein, was pardoned thanks to lobbying by Epstein lawyer Alan Dershowitz, alongside the Tzedek Assocation. It wasn’t long after his pardon from Trump that Weinstein perpetrated another ponzi scheme. Here’s a video of Vance and some other senators attending a Tzedek Association “Appreciation Event.”

Bias Confirmations