[1andrew1]

Every cloud...poor old Vance is having to belatedly defend his boss's war despite being elected on an anti-war platform.

In January 2023, then-Senator JD Vance took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to announce his early support for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. The primary reason for his support, he claimed, was that Trump “started no wars.”

Meanwhile, other restrainers who were counting on Vance to behave as a true believer are starting to question the sincerity of his views. “This is a guy who has converted from atheism to Catholicism, the guy who called Trump ‘Hitler’ who is now his vice president,” said the nonprofit leader. “Am I confident that he is entirely moored or tethered to any one perspective or worldview? No.”

The anger directed at Vance stems not only from the fact that he failed to prevent a potentially costly war but also that, in the process, he has done lasting damage to the anti-interventionists’ long-term project of convincing war-weary voters to embrace the GOP as their political home.

For Vance, who is widely expected to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2028, that represents an electoral problem as well as an ideological one. “He wants to build a grand coalition on the right, and I think it’s going to be impossible to build a grand coalition by just ignoring the anti-war right,” Mills said. “I think he’s going to have to win back some of that support.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...1-bea349fbd349