Head-on | Why JD Vance could be Trump’s MAGA heir

US President Donald Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate surprised the Republican faithful. Who exactly was JD Vance?

They found out soon enough. Vance had written a bestselling book in 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis that caught Trump’s eye. It was about the White American underclass left out of the American dream.

The book touched a raw nerve in a demographic disdained by the New York and Silicon Valley elite as rustic hillbillies. It’s this demographic that helped lift Trump to a 312-226 landslide victory over Kamala Harris on November 5. Vance is the demographic’s poster boy.

What happens now? Trump is busy building his transition team. He meets outgoing President Joe Biden on Wednesday, November 13, to smoothen the handover of power on January 20, 2025, when Trump officially takes office as the 47th president of the US.

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Trump isn’t wasting any time though. He has ruled out giving Nikki Haley a position in his new administration. Haley endorsed Trump during his campaign but had criticised him sharply during the Republican primary debates which Trump boycotted. Trump never forgets a slight.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer had sent 100 Labour party strategists to the US to help Kamala’s campaign, angering Republicans. Starmer was quick to try and repair the damage by phoning Trump after his landslide win, emphasising the US-UK special relationship.

None of this impressed Vance. During the election campaign he mocked Britain as “the world’s first truly Islamist state with nuclear weapons”.

Trump will be 82 when the next US presidential election rolls along in November 2028. He can’t run for president again. The US Constitution limits presidential terms to two.

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While a vengeful Trump will spend part of his second term sacking the anti-Trump bureaucracy in the administration and placing ideologues in key positions in his cabinet, Vance will be the man to watch.

By 2026 the Republican party will start looking for Trump’s potential successor in the 2028 presidential election. Campaigning for that will begin as early as November 2026 when the next round of Congressional midterm elections is over.

While Republicans have several presidential aspirants, Vance is clearly among the favourites. At 40, he is young. He has a charismatic Indian wife, Usha Chilukuri. At 38, she is a respected attorney.

Racist gene

Trump’s victory has, however, unleashed the racist gene in America. The Washington Post reported the outpouring of racist invective: “The FBI and authorities in several states are investigating racist text messages sent to Black people nationwide this week saying they would be brought to plantations to work as enslaved people and pick cotton. People in at least a dozen states and Washington have received the messages, according to authorities and local news media.

“Alyse McCall, a Black freshman attending the University of Alabama, received a racist text as she was returning from class. She said, ‘I received a message saying that I’m going to be picked up in a brown van and I’m going to be sent to the nearest plantation.’ The message told McCall that she was ‘selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation’ and to gather her belongings and to prepare to be picked up in the afternoon by ‘Executive Slaves’.

“Black people throughout the country reported receiving similar messages, which varied in wording but all ordered their recipients to report to a plantation and work in slavery. Some messages appeared to imitate the character of an enslaved person, according to Fox 5 in Atlanta. Other texts claimed they were addressed from Trump supporters.”

Is this the America Trump and Vance want to create? The new Trump cabinet will seek to be cosmetically inclusive with several Indian-American faces in senior positions. Tulsi Gabbard, a former lawmaker who is a practising Hindu, may get an important portfolio.

But it is Vance who bears watching. A passage from his book Hillbilly Elegy written eight years ago when he was 32 years old reflects his troubled background:

“And this was it. We had nothing now. My mom had disappeared again, and it was just Mamaw and me, near starving. But I was determined to make a choice about my future – not just sit here and die. So I took the one rifle we had off the rack and searched the drawers for ammo. One bullet was all I could find.

“‘What is it, J.D.?’ Mamaw asked as she sat in her rocking chair.

“‘We’re going to eat tonight,’ I told her, keeping back my tears.

“So I went out onto our barren land, hoping to find something – anything – to keep us going.

“And there it was. A lone rabbit sitting in a field. So I took that rifle and aimed, lining up what was literally the last shot for me and my family.”

America’s underclass

Many in the American underclass believe they have been sidelined by mainstream America. They fear that the US is changing colour more quickly than most people realise.

They are original White US immigrants themselves but rage against new immigrants, especially Hispanics and Asians. They don’t differentiate between legal immigrants who bring skill and value to America and illegal immigrants who they say are a burden on American taxpayers.

Whites today make up around 65 per cent of the US population. The ratio is falling by roughly one per cent a year due to a lower fertility rate among White families and a surge in coloured immigration.

At this pace, Whites will be a minority in the US by as early as 2040. That will turn American politics on its head.

Opponents of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity) like Tesla founder Elon Musk and hedge fund activist-billionaire Bill Ackman say DEI discounts merit. They promote an alternative framework dubbed MEI (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence). This is seen by coloured Americans as code for exclusion and racism.

Trump himself is a transactional politician. As one Trump team member quipped, you can negotiate anything with him.

Vance isn’t transactional. He has strong views born out of his background. In 2026, when Republican contenders for the 2028 presidential election start lining up, Vance could see a few Indian faces like Vivek Ramaswamy (another Trump favourite) ranged against him.

Vance vs Vivek for the 2028 Republican nomination? One is a self-made Indian-American millionaire. The other has risen from the harsh realities of underclass America to the US vice presidency.

America in the future will be a very different country from the nation Biden and Trump leave behind.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.