The News
Donald Trump’s VP pick is a China hawk. And there ends his ideological overlap with the traditional low-tax, anti-regulation, centrist Republicans that run big American companies and investment firms.
In a short career in venture capital and an even shorter stint in Congress, JD Vance has embraced an economic worldview that is likely to alarm the ruling corporate class the more they learn about it. That’s especially true as Trump has historically outsourced economic policy to trusted lieutenants, including Peter Navarro, Larry Kudlow, and, for a time, Wall Street’s own Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin.
His selection threatens to alienate a Wall Street crowd that hoped for a more centrist running mate like Tim Scott or Doug Burgum. Republican megadonor Ken Griffin, who hasn’t yet given to the Trump campaign, actively lobbied against Vance, Politico reported, and has stepped up his donations to Republican congressional efforts.
But they have few palatable options. Even before last month’s debate, corporate support had waned for the Biden administration, after years of tighter regulation and campaign-trail discussion of corporate greed.
Vance, who overcame a troubled childhood and got a law degree from Yale, is a fan of steep tariffs and robust antitrust enforcement. He joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren on legislation to claw back bonuses from bank executives, and with another Senate Democrat, Sheldon Whitehouse, to end tax-free treatment for corporate mergers done via stock swaps. He was one of the most vocal critics of railroad Norfolk Southern after its 2023 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, his home state, and has called for treating university endowments — whose nonprofit status carries tax breaks for their wealthy donors — like corporations.
Rather than shrinking regulatory agencies, Vance wants to replace career staff with like-minded political appointees and redirect them toward big tech companies and billionaires, some of whom, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, he counts as friends and political allies. And his personal finances, revealed in Senate disclosures, reflect a millennial, tech-bro portfolio: startup investments, a Robinhood brokerage account, and bitcoin, alongside S&P 500 and oil ETFs.
“The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros,” Vance told The New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat last month. He shares their distrust of corporate power, a sign of just how sharply the two populist ends of the political spectrum bend toward each other, especially on economic issues.
“Good for Trump, very challenging for corporate America,” Samir Kapadia, a managing principal at Vogel Group, a Washington policy and lobbying shop, told Semafor.
“I don’t think the CEOs who are aligning with Trump realize how dangerous the economic populism will be,” said Milan Dalal, founder of DC consultancy Tiger Hill Partners and a former aide to Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat. “Right now, they think they’ll get more tax cuts. But many of these MAGA figures actually favor higher taxes, at least for individuals, and using the tax code and other elements of government to enact revenge against their ideological opponents.”
Liz’s view
In the generational framing of the 2024 election — a Silent Generation incumbent, resisting calls to hand the baton to a Gen X bencher, going up against an old Boomer — Vance is a millennial, and will be a bridge to a generation whose mistrust of financial institutions were shaped by the 2008 crisis and whose ideas for how to fix them were shaped by the venture boom that followed.
At the end of 2022, he had self-directed investment accounts at Robinhood and Schwab, not a laundry list of offshore vehicles and private-equity funds. (Vance requested an extension to file his 2023 financial disclosures, which are due by mid-August.) He opposed Biden’s efforts to cancel student debt, but backed a startup that allows employers to offer loan repayment as a perk. He owned stakes in a Catholic meditation app, right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble, Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, and Anduril, the defense-tech firm started by Silicon Valley libertarian entrepreneur Palmer Luckey, who claims he was pushed out of Meta for his political views.
Vance is a “Khanservative,” the name for Republicans who support the Federal Trade Commission’s merger-allergic chair, who he said in February was “doing a pretty good job.” He wants a more expansive antitrust regime that considers more than prices.
“We should care about a whole host of public goods, and should actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish some of those public goods,” he wrote in a 2019 article for First Things, a religious policy journal. He lamented that neuroscientists are paid more to work at tech companies, “where they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains,” than at research agencies working to cure Alzheimer’s disease — not exactly a Silicon Valley-friendly idea.