J.D. Vance

"I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."

"I hate the police."

"Given the number of negative experiences I've had in the past few years, I can't imagine what a Black guy goes through."

"I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"

"Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office."

"Anger about the wars isn't the only reason voters support Mr. Trump. But his willingness to say what other G.O.P. candidates won't reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite. Because the last time Republican voters put a member of that elite in the White House, he sent their children on a bloody misadventure."

"What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine."

"“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us,” Vance recently told The American Conservative. “And if you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: You don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.”"

"I think there's a chance, if I feel like Trump has a really good chance of winning, that I might have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton."

"I think that I'm going to vote third party because I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place. And ultimately I just don't share Hillary Clinton's politics."

"Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us."

"Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us."

"[On NPR, August 2016] I can't stomach Trump"

"[Interviewed by Charlie Rose, October 2016] I'm a Never-Trump guy. I never liked him."

"I think this election is really having a negative effect especially on the white working class. What it’s doing is giving people an excuse to point the finger at someone else, point the finger at Mexican immigrants, or Chinese trade or the Democratic elites or whatever else."

"My God what an idiot."

"Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people and he encourages the worst in people."

"My fear with Trump was always that he didn't have great solutions."

"Donald Trump is frankly dangerous."

"My view is both that Trump is tapping into some racially ugly attitudes, but also that he is leading people to racially ugly attitudes."

"When people read Breitbart every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that."

"I don’t think that 60-70 percent of working-class white voters would have supported a Muslim ban before Donald Trump said something about a Muslim ban. I think that all you have to do is go back to the most recent Republican president and the way that George W. Bush encouraged us to think openly and supportively about our Muslim citizens. There is an element here where I think it’s not just that Trump is exploiting something but he’s also leading the white working class to a very dark place."

"President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we're not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren't. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we're lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn't be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it--not because we think she's wrong, but because we know she's right."

"I don't know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better."

"Even at my best, I'm a delayed explosion - I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It's not just that I've learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me."

"At a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams. For that, I'll miss him, and the example he set."

"In 4 years, I hope people remember that it was those of us who empathized with Trump's voters who fought him the most aggressively."

"I quickly realized that Trump's actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd."

"Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)"

"The next time that we get power, whether it's...President Trump round two in 2024...I think the thing that we have to take away from the last ten years is that we really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power."

"And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy."

"I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people, and when the courts - because you will get taken to court - and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: the Chief Justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it."

"If you're a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself."

"I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country."

"We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it's just a basic fact. If you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC — the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it? If we want a healthy ruling class in this country, we should invest more, we should vote more, we should support people who actually have kids, because those are the people who actually have a direct stake in the future of the country."

"Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country. [...] We can’t have people who don't have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions. We've allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths - they're invested in NOTHING because they're not invested in this country's children. Fighting back won't be easy - our childless opponents have a lot of free time. That's why I need YOU to stand with me."

"I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That's a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now."

"[On his opposition to abortion in cases involving incest or rape] It's not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society."

"The question to me is really about the baby [...] We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life."

"This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, "well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.""

"And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I'm skeptical. But it really didn't work out for the kids of those marriages. [...] And that's what I think all of us should be honest about, is we've run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that's making our kids unhappy."

"There's something comparable between abortion and slavery [...] and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society."

"So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement, in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country."

"The universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth."

"The simple fact is that our universities tell the powerful what they want to hear, and they couch it in ridiculous political rhetoric instead of dealing with the real consequences of progressive policy."

"Progressive politics, it’s not about uplifting minorities, it’s not about healing our planet, it’s not about looking after the poor. Progressive politics is a language, a language used by our new oligarchy to do two things: On the one hand to rob the American people blind, and on the second hand to tell them to shut the hell up about it if they dare complain. That is the purpose of American progressive politics."

"We are giving our children over to our enemies and it’s time we stop doing it."

"We have got to get out of the mindset that the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed, is to go to a four-year university, where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process."

"The professors are the enemy."

"We didn't not serve in the Marine Corps to go and fight Vladimir Putin because he didn't believe in transgender rights [...] Which is what the U.S. State Department is saying is a major problem with Russia."