More than most recent vice presidents, JD Vance seems to be locked out of the room where it happens.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, is by most accounts the president’s point person on mass deportation and immigration enforcement. Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, leads the effort to terrorize federal employees, bring the federal bureaucracy to heel and seize the power of the purse from Congress. The Department of Government Efficiency, formerly run by Elon Musk, is busy dismantling the nation’s research capacity and working to centralize government data on Americans.
Vance might have been on the ballot in November, but you’d be hard-pressed to find him anywhere in this triumvirate. He holds no particular portfolio of issues or items to pursue and he appears to have no special relationship with the president. On occasion, you’ll see Vance engaged in the sorts of civic activities that vice presidents are often made to perform — those events where it is important that someone from the high end of the administration makes an appearance, but not so important that you would send the president or the secretary of state. Even then, however, Vance seems to do less of this than past vice presidents. This is perhaps because, unlike his predecessors, President Trump is less interested in governing than he is in playing the role of head of state.
As Trump himself will tell you, he tends not to know what his deputies are doing with their time. He professes to be ignorant of the actions of his government. Asked, for example, if his administration was planning to send migrants to Libya, he replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the Department of Homeland Security.” He saves his attention and enthusiasm for the pomp and circumstance of the presidency. He’s eager to host other heads of state, to attend celebrations and to speak to crowds of supporters. He also spends a lot of his time at his clubs and resorts, golfing, gossiping and glad-handing with passers-by and hangers-on.
With Trump consumed with the responsibilities of a typical vice president and other members of the administration doing the work of running the country, JD Vance is left largely on the sidelines, away from the action. Why does the vice president of the United States spend so much time writing posts on social media, preening for his allies or tussling with his ideological opponents? Well, why does anyone?
In fairness to the vice president, his online presence speaks to the main role he does seem to have in the White House: something akin to the president’s official fanboy. And in addition to acting as cheer captain for his boss, Vance also works to give the administration a veneer of intellectualism to cover its cruelty, corruption and incompetence — a spokesman for the president’s brand of national populism.
In February, for example, he spoke at a high-profile security conference in Germany, where he chastised European leaders for allowing significant immigration, fighting election interference and opposing the far right in their countries. In March, he touted the administration’s plans — thus far unrealized — to reinvigorate American manufacturing with tariffs. And earlier this month, he met with the right-wing Claremont Institute to collect an award for statesmanship as well as speak on citizenship, in an address that built on key ideas from his acceptance speech last summer for the Republican vice-presidential nomination.
“America is not just an idea,” Vance declared. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And although he did not say it explicitly, Vance seemed to suggest — in recounting his personal connection to the heritage of the United States — that American identity was less about our national ideals than it was attachment to “a homeland.”
At Claremont, Vance made his meaning clear: “If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time,” the vice president said, taking aim at traditional American creedal nationalism. “What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.”
If the egalitarian values of the Declaration would lead you to see millions of people around the world as potential Americans, then for Vance they would also lead you to exclude those Americans who reject those ideals, even if they had deep roots in the nation. “That answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists,” he said — referring, without explanation, to the Anti-Defamation League — “even those very Americans [who] had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.” For Vance, this is simply unacceptable. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Now, the vice president did not completely exclude more recent arrivals from the national political community. He took care to praise the contributions of immigrants. But he conditioned his acceptance of new citizens on their gratitude, condemning those who would criticize or critique the United States as ungrateful. To make this point, Vance went after Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, for the latter’s Independence Day message describing America as “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.”
“Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?” Vance said. “Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Vance and Mamdani are equal citizens under the law, but the vice president seems to believe that his heritage entitles him to speak in ways that Mamdani can’t. There are tiers of belonging, according to Vance, one for those who can trace their lineage to one of the nation’s two founding revolutions and another for those who can’t.
For Vance, this is something close to common sense. And for some Americans it was, before the Civil War.
The chief issue in Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided in 1857, was whether Scott, the plaintiff, could sue in federal court as a citizen. He had been enslaved in Missouri but brought to both Illinois and the northern territories of the Louisiana Purchase, where slavery was illegal. Upon returning to Missouri, he sued for his freedom, on the grounds that he was emancipated after his extended time on free soil. The defendant, John Sandford — brother-in-law to Scott’s former owner — charged that Scott lacked citizenship and could not sue, “because he is a Negro of African descent; his ancestors were of pure African blood, and were brought into this country and sold as Negro slaves.”
In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice Roger Taney agreed. Blacks could never be citizens, he argued, because the founders had never intended it. Blacks were considered, he insisted, “a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race.” Neither Scott nor any Black American, Taney said, could root himself in the nation’s history of freedom. Their heritage made them subjects. And because, in his view, the Constitution spoke “not only in the same words, but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers,” Black Americans could never be citizens either. Their status was fixed.
But what about the Declaration of Independence and its promise of egalitarian freedom? “The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood,” Taney wrote. “But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.”
For the chief justice, too, the words of the Declaration were overinclusive. They conferred citizenship and belonging to more people than the framers could have possibly meant. And so, Taney concluded, we must look to other sources — in his case, slavery and racial prejudice — to find the truth, which is that American citizenship was a closed door and the United States was a tiered society of rigid hierarchies.
It was against this view that the first generation of Republican politicians defined themselves and their movement. Abraham Lincoln was, as you would expect, especially clear on this point. Here’s what he said on July 10, 1858, in a speech on “popular sovereignty,” the Dred Scott ruling and the expansion of slavery.
We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
At one point in his speech, when he’s scolding Mamdani for his ingratitude, Vance asks whether Mamdani has “ever read the letters from boy soldiers in the Union Army to parents and sweethearts that they’d never see again?” It is striking that the vice president invokes the Civil War to make his point.
The great ideological victory of that conflict was to establish the United States as a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” When, at Gettysburg, Lincoln pronounced a “new birth of freedom,” consecrated by those who “gave the last full measure of devotion,” he meant the egalitarian freedom that Taney and others like him sought to deny.
If Vance knows this — and it’s clear he does, as Claremont, where he gave this particular speech, was founded by students of a prominent Lincoln admirer — then he must also know that he is rejecting one of the key outcomes of the Civil War, that he’s cutting the “electric cord” of the Declaration and treating Appomattox as a dead letter.
Vance sees the egalitarian ideals of our founding documents but says, like Taney, that we must look elsewhere for our vision of American citizenship. And that elsewhere is your heritage — your connection to the soil and to the dead.
It’s here that Vance truly speaks for Trump, who entered American politics as a demagogue decrying the nation’s first Black president as a foreign usurper. And it’s here that we see the logic of Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which wrote the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution itself.
Trump and Vance envision a world of tiered citizenship, each in his own way, where entry depends on heritage and status rests on obedience. The best traditions of our country make this difficult. And so they have found refuge in our worst.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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