W e live in a cynical age, and politics is an inherently cynical business. So it is easy to assume these days that whenever a publicity-hungry junior Republican politician seeks an extended interview, the reason is either to advance in the ranks of Trumpism or announce the sudden and scandalous end of his career. (See, for example, Nancy Mace — liable to do both — whose emotional register by her own private confession is forever set to “Notice me, senpai!”)

Although summer 2024 seems like suspicious timing for his in-depth interview, it has always felt as though Ohio senator J. D. Vance is cut from a different cloth than most in the world of MAGA-friendly politics, and it is not just because of his (admittedly impressive) personal biography. It is because he is a manifestly intelligent and self-reflective person — his memoir alone demonstrated that — something that gets lost in his halting attempts at retail politicking but might come through in extended conversation. Hence last week’s lengthy sit-down, with none other than the Gray Lady herself, the New York Times, which I unreservedly recommend that you take the time to read regardless of your opinion of Vance, Donald Trump, or the current state of the Republican Party writ large.

Vance deserves real credit; he impresses during most of the interview and speaks with a level of visceral engagement rare in today’s “TikTok buzzclip” facsimile of traditional politics. Vance’s grip-and-grin retail skills have always felt lacking precisely because his natural affect is better suited to the faculty lounge than to the speaker’s podium, to the handshake line, or to dialing donors for dollars. But he is very much in his element during a discussion with Times columnist (and NR contributor) Ross Douthat. Vance could not have chosen a better interlocutor for his interview, and I don’t say that just because I am biased in favor of those who share our masthead.

Douthat does a superb job of letting Vance speak for himself, prompting him intelligently with occasional follow-ups without inserting his own opinions but always seeking clear answers rather than evasions. And Vance transparently feels more comfortable than usual when talking to someone who natively speaks conservatism’s lingua franca. One of the funnier and more relatable aspects of the interview is Vance’s comfort with dropping phrases such as “Trigger the libs” (well deployed, too) but also admitting that he’s trying to put things in ways that won’t immediately send the typical Times reader running for the hills as if he’s seen a Tom Cotton op-ed hovering into view.

Once again, I recommend the interview to all. Some of his points may surprise you (for example, his anecdote about Trump’s generals refusing to obey his troop-drawdown orders in Syria, guaranteed to fortify all your priors about the insolence of office). All else aside, it is an interesting window into how lawmakers have accommodated themselves to the Trump era — made all the more noteworthy by Vance’s native intelligence and way of talking through his arguments, which is more considered than that of most of his colleagues. That consideration can sometimes be a double-edged sword, of course. When discussing Vance’s economic populism (he strongly favors both trade protectionism and keeping our current entitlement system intact without structural reform), Douthat manages to pull lines out of him that the senator may one day yet rue:

Ross Douthat: The populist move has been to rule out the idea of cutting entitlement spending. But can populists ever raise taxes?

J. D. Vance: Well, as the libertarians always say, a tariff is a tax. [Laughs]

That’s an answer.

We’ll see how that answer — the esoteric, Straussian version of Walter Mondale’s 1984 election pitch, “I promise to raise your taxes” — plays in the real world. (Thankfully nobody actually votes on pocketbook issues in America, so I expect the damage to be limited: Observe how, for example, the Biden administration has so effortlessly shrugged off its inflation record as it cruises to reelection.)

I was far more interested in Vance’s response, near the end of the interview, to Douthat’s questioning on the matter of January 6. For this is where he visibly hiccups, betraying an intellectual gag reflex that makes the witting intellectual compromises he’s cramming down that much more difficult for him to swallow. He argues that Trump’s railing about a stolen election was justified because the 2020 election really was rigged by the media and the deep state: “The argument is basically that there were a host of institutional actors, technology companies, various forms of censorship, that mobilized in 2020 in a way that they hadn’t in 2016. . . . That was a way in which the basic democratic will of America was obstructed.” Douthat presses him further: Yes, the media playing field was tilted, so whine all you want and feel like it was stolen, but what about the actual attempts to overturn the election? The votes themselves were valid and properly counted, so why cross the Rubicon? The legal filings in court, the internal pressure campaign on Mike Pence to get him to reject electoral slates?

Vance’s answer is so shockingly unconvincing that, after reading an entire interview during which he has successfully humanized himself, readers will suddenly feel that ice-cold chill of recognition, the moment when you can see someone counterfeiting himself in public:

The vice-presidential thing — look, here’s what this would’ve looked like if you really wanted to do this. You would’ve actually tried to go to the states that had problems; you would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876. And then you have to actually prosecute that case; you have to make an argument to the American people. . . .

I think the entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country. Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably. But at least we would have had a debate. And instead what we had was the Jenna Ellis legal clown show and no real debate about the election. And now every time we bring it up, it’s like, “Well, yeah, they litigated all these things.” No, you can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically. And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.

There is much more — again, read it. Vance, if I understand him correctly, advances the theory that because Trump pursued his plans to overturn the election stupidly, it doesn’t “really count” — incompetence as a defense. (“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: This man hired both Sidney Powell and Lin Wood to represent him. He had Jeffrey Clark running his inside game. Does that count as a serious attempt to overturn the election? Really, now?”)

But we have litigated this matter, politically, in 2022: when Joe Biden — already sagging under the weight of massive unpopularity — nevertheless led Democrats to a midterm result so unexpectedly strong that it ironically enough became the “monkey’s-paw wish,” encouraging him to run for reelection. In state after state, the American public resoundingly rejected election-truthers, delivering verdicts that sometimes stunned. (Kari Lake’s frittering away the Arizona governor’s race will not be forgotten soon.) Vance’s attempt at a fig leaf covers nothing at all.

For this is the part of the interview that perhaps reveals too much. Left unspoken during this discussion is an ugly home truth: Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick will be required to agree, often and in public, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Vance cannot quite bring himself to do this, at least not in a way that violates his sense of reality. And yet his ambition to be an avatar of this movement is palpable; this is the decision point for him. So, perversely, Vance treads down a blind alley into esoteric denialism: a way to intellectually sustain a premise built on a nonexistent foundation. As Vance himself reluctantly concedes, all the votes were properly counted and Joe Biden did win, but he insists that Trump deserved his polity-shattering temper tantrum nonetheless because the people wanted it.

At that point Vance, doubling down, gets more than a little grotesque: “Even under a circumstance where the alternative-electors thing works, and he’s president again, he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf.” Trump wouldn’t have become dictator for life, Vance reassures us — he merely would have illegally retained, for four years, a power that the American people, with their legitimately recorded votes, chose to deny him. I suppose it would have seemed less of a scandal if you treat the American republic’s democratic norms as mere shadow play and see the world (and operate in it) purely in terms of Carl Schmitt’s rule of political engagement: power above all.

I fear Vance does. It was telling that, at the beginning of his interview with Douthat, Vance made it a point to reference Schmitt — a Nazi political philosopher in vogue among those who intellectually fancy themselves the “New Right.” Vance is clear about how he thinks progressives operate: “I really don’t believe this is about some deep principle; this is about power.” In that he is not wrong; it is in fact a key insight critical to understanding the hypocrisies of the Left. Does he propose to meet them with the hypocrisies of the Right? Is he merely a Schmittian cynic himself? Or is this one more imposture, an eloquent attempt to simulate conviction for political advancement? I know not, but, for those paying attention, Vance’s interview has raised more questions than it has answered.