I have to be honest. I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other. This is what Republican politician JD Vance said in February 2022, just before the big Russian invasion. He announced this in the War Room program of Steve Bannon, far-right propagandist and former adviser to ex-president Donald Trump.
Trump Purge?
Ohio Senator Vance (39) became the Republican nominee for vice president on Monday. He was chosen by Trump (78), whose party officially sent him into the race for the White House at the convention in Milwaukee. The US presidential election takes place on November 5. The Trump/Vance duo will face the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris tandem in them, if the Democrats do not agree on other nominees.
In the past, Vance, who has only served in the Senate since January 2023, publicly called Trump an idiot and even privately compared him to Adolf Hitler. He said that he would not vote for him and spoke of him as a moral disaster. Now he claims that he was pushed into it by the media, which spread what they say was unfounded panic that Trump was a threat to American democracy.
“What does JD Vance really believe?” he asks in the analysis for Vox.com Zack Beauchamp. “I met him in the summer of 2022. He was friendly, thoughtful and intelligent – much smarter than the average politician I interview. However, his worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy,” Beauchamp wrote, recalling how Vance preaches that when Trumpists come to power, they should fire all bureaucrats from the top to middle management and replace them with loyal people. And if the courts ruled that it was illegal, the president should ignore those verdicts.
Vance opposes abortion and criticizes divorce, suggesting in the past that women should stay married for the sake of children even when their partners hurt them. (Obviously, the criticism of divorce does not apply to Trump, who is married for the third time.) An Ohio politician is standing up for the people who stormed Congress on January 6, 2021 to prevent the approval of the results of the presidential election.
In November 2020, Biden won them, but Trump still conspires that the victory was stolen from him. Vance says that if he had been vice president at the time, he would not have certified the results. Trump’s number two, Mike Pence, confirmed them in 2021, for which she earned death threats from extremists.
For now, it looks like Vance will only contribute to the further polarization of American society after the shooting of Trump on Saturday.
“By choosing him, the Republican Party has made it clear that they will base their presidential campaign on the anger of white men. Frankly, it’s not a bad strategy. Trump is a convicted felon and his vice president has very little experience in politics. But emotions drive voters more than logic ,” responded Shannon O’Brien, an expert on American politics from the University of Texas at Austin. According to her, it also looks like the Republicans wanted to balance out the old Trump with the young Vance. “He should try to get support in the states of the American Midwest, as he is Ohio. In many of them, the presidential elections are close, and Trump will try to claim victory in them,” said O’Brien.
Support for Kyiv
And what will happen to support for Kiev in its fight against Russian invasion if Trump and Vance come to power?
“Trump considers Ukrainian President Zelensky a thorn in his side, but admires Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin. He probably won’t help Ukraine, and he won’t let anyone else either. The MAGA movement (Make America Great Again, editor’s note) shows no signs of wanting to forgive To Zelensky, he rejected Trump’s request to find some dirt on the Biden family. Trumpists consider it impudence that the Ukrainian president stood up to Putin. And Vance decided that the MAGA movement is his ticket to power,” Kurk, an expert on American foreign policy, told Pravda. Dorsey of the University of New Hampshire.
“The choice of Vance signals that Trump is serious about withdrawing from US global commitments. The ex-president could have reached for someone to balance his America First position, but instead he will carry an ideological copy. If Trump was elected, his vice president will not give him another foreign policy perspective to consider, so many of the closest allies of the US are already expressing concern that if Trump returns to the White House, they will be able to rely on America less. political scientist Mark Rozell from George Mason University in Virginia explained to Pravda.
Rozell’s colleague and head of the Center for the Study of Social Change, Institutions and Politics, Jack Goldstone, points out that when Trump as president decides to stop helping Kiev, no one will move.
“I don’t know if Vance is really indifferent to the fate of Ukraine. But he basically says he’ll support anything Trump wants to do. I am convinced that the ex-president does not care what happens to Ukraine, he is angry with President Zelensky for not bowing to him, and he wants to gain Putin’s favor. So I expect that Trump, with Vance’s full support, will try to force a peace deal on Ukraine that suits the Kremlin boss, and will do so by threatening to withdraw US aid. There was a time when Congress could bind the president to supply arms to allies, but those days are gone. The Supreme Court has now essentially ruled that the head of the White House is not subject to the law in the performance of his official duties, which include commanding the armed forces. So, even if Congress voted to provide aid to Ukraine, Trump can simply tell the US military not to supply any weapons to Kiev,” Goldstone explained to Pravda.
However, Eastern Europe expert Stephen Bittner from Sonoma University in California is a bit more optimistic. “With a second Trump administration, it doesn’t look like the future for Ukraine is exactly rosy. But I can point out that Vance was more ambiguous than he has been in the past on this topic in a recent interview with Ross Douthat in the New York Times. He indicated that he is not in America’s interest in handing over Ukraine to Putin and that he is open to supporting it in its defense position. But it is clear that any talk of Kyiv joining NATO would end. However, the Biden government is much more lukewarm about the possibility of Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Alliance. allies,” Bittner told Pravda.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
