• Former President Donald Trump chose Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate on Monday, just as Republicans kicked off their national convention in Milwaukee. Vance, who rose to fame in 2016 with his memoir ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ has undergone a radical political transformation in the years since. Once an outspoken critic of Trump, Vance is now one of the former president’s biggest supporters in Congress. Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent for Vox and author of the new book “The Reactionary Spirit,” explains why Vance was a logical pick for Trump.
• And in headlines: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the assassination attempt against former president Trump at the weekend rally was a security “failure,” Special Counsel Jack Smith says he’ll appeal a federal judge’s decision to dismiss Trump’s classified documents case, and President Biden reiterated his plans to stay in the presidential race during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt.

• Read Zack Beauchamp’s article, “What J.D. Vance really believes” https://tinyurl.com/3me4cftx
• What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
• Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/

TRANSCRIPT

Josie Duffy Rice: It’s Tuesday, July 16th. I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And I’m Tre’vell Andersen. And this is What a Day. The show where we’re hate watching the RNC so you don’t have to. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I will always tune into footage of a large crowd booing Mitch McConnell. Just tell me the time and place. I’ll stream it. [laughter] [music break]

Tre’vell Anderson: On today’s show, former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case is thrown out. Plus, the judge in rapper Young Thug’s never ending racketeering trial is officially removed. 

Josie Duffy Rice: But first, the Republican National Convention kicked off on Monday with the official nomination of Donald Trump as the party’s presidential nominee. Delegates participated in the roll call tradition, announcing their support for the former President. 

[clip of unidentified RNC announcer] Donald J. Trump. 

[clip of New York delegate to the RNC] On behalf of the 91 New York delegates to the Republican National Convention. We proudly cast all 91 votes for President Donald J. Trump. [cheers and applause]

[clip of New Hampshire delegate to the RNC] New Hampshire proudly casts all 22 votes for my good friend, the 45th and soon to be 47th president of the United States, Donald John Trump. [cheers]

[clip of Wyoming  delegate to the RNC] Wyoming the Cowboy State casts all of its 29 delegates for President Donald J. Trump. [cheers]

[clip of RNC crowd chanting] Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight.

Josie Duffy Rice: Ooh, brutal. Trump’s son Eric pledged the delegates from Florida, which officially gave Trump enough delegate votes to make him the party’s presidential nominee. 

[clip of Eric Trump] On behalf of our entire family. And on behalf of the 125 delegates in the unbelievable state of Florida, we hereby nominate every single one of them for the greatest president that’s ever lived and that’s Donald J. Trump. [cheers and applause] Hereby declaring him the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America. 

Josie Duffy Rice: My kids also think I’m the greatest president that’s ever lived. [laughter] That’s the nice thing about having kids, you know? And after months of anticipation, Trump finally announced Ohio Senator JD Vance as his vice presidential pick for the 2024 presidential election. Vance and his wife appeared on the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday evening, where he formally received the VP nomination. 

[clip of unidentified RNC announcer 2] The question is on the motion that Senator JD Vance be nominated by acclamation. All those in favor signify by saying aye. All those opposed signify by saying no. In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it and the motion is adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Vance, a former Trump skeptic turned loyal ally, has long been a frontrunner for the VP position. He’s a marine corps veteran, a Yale Law grad who was first known for his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy. And at 39, Vance is the first millennial on a presidential ticket. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Mmm. History, look at that. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Mmm. 

Tre’vell Anderson: [laughing] Josie, you said that JD Vance is a former Trump skeptic. What exactly does that mean here? 

Josie Duffy Rice: So Vance was openly disdainful of Trump for years, saying publicly that Trump was a, quote, “idiot” and quote, “reprehensible” and privately referring to him as, quote, “America’s Hitler.” Just the thing I want my VP pick saying about me. But in the years since, especially when he decided to run for Senate, Vance has become one of Trump’s most vocal fanboys. He has also gotten more substantively conservative in that time, and has expressed support for some of Trump’s more extreme policy proposals. And he has even stated that had he been vice president in January of 2021, he would have refused to certify the election, unlike former VP Mike Pence. 

Tre’vell Anderson: So we have a guy here who is obviously willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Whatever he wants. That is exactly right. So to talk more about what JD Vance’s promotion to VP candidate means for the election, for the Republican Party and for the country, I talked to Zack Beauchamp, a senior correspondent for Vox and the author of a new book on right wing authoritarianism called The Reactionary Spirit: How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. That book comes out today. I started by asking him what Vance adds to the Republican ticket. 

Zack Beauchamp: JD Vance is the most intellectually in tune with the Republican, what’s called the post liberal movement maybe or perhaps a, more appropriately, an authoritarian movement inside the sort of general conservative world. I mean, he’s openly stated his admiration for Viktor Orban as the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary. He learns from Curtis Yarvin, who is a neo monarchist blogger in Silicon Valley, where Vance has links. He’s explicitly cited Garvin as an influence on his ideas. Uh. And you could go on through the list, but Vance is, you know, he’s taken a lot of positions that are not just extreme. They’re actually really on the authoritarian end of the Republican Party spectrum. Right? If the Republican Party has become an authoritarian party in the Trump era. Vance is from its authoritarian wing. 

Josie Duffy Rice: His political views have changed a lot since he kind of made a national name for himself as the author of Hillbilly Elegy in 2016. You know, back then, he was calling Trump things like cultural heroin. He wrote a New York Times op ed criticizing him, and now he’s truly one of Trump’s biggest, most loyal supporters in Congress. So how does his transformation emblematic of the Republican Party writ large? 

Zack Beauchamp: It’s very interesting. He gets famous, right, because of the book Hillbilly Elegy, which all of us heard, that came out around the time that Trump was rising and was taken as the like this explains Trump for liberals book. Um. And in Hillbilly Elegy, Vance takes this very classic conservative position about welfare that he just applies to white people. That’s sort of his innovation, right, poor whites in Appalachia, where he says that the welfare state is a corrosive influence. These people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and the government is making them lazy and helping fuel their drug addictions. And that needs to get stopped, right? It’s very normal movement conservative stuff. And he bills himself as the kind of highbrow intellectual appalled by Trumpism. But he’s abandoned every aspect of that, as has much of the Republican Party, incidentally. And what Vance has really done is climb on board with Trump’s cultural and kind of systemic preoccupations, this idea that Washington is rigged against the true people of America. This idea that Trump has been cheated out of winning reelection. But yeah, really, when I think JD Vance now versus JD Vance then, I think a transformation from a relatively normal mainstream conservative to the physical incarnation of Trumpism in some ways more aggressive about the policy and the ideology that’s been built around it than Trump himself. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So you wrote in your most recent piece that Vance’s worldview is, quote, “fundamentally incompatible with the basic principles of American democracy.” So talk to us a little bit more about that. How is that kind of reflected in the movement in the party right now? 

Zack Beauchamp: Vance’s fundamental belief at this point, based on, you know, what you can see from his public comments, is that the American government is rigged against the Republican Party in a variety of different ways. He believes in some version of the theory of the deep state, of there being operatives who are uh, devoted to basically Democratic Party ideas seated throughout the federal government who are working to undermine Trump. He believes that the electoral system is rigged against Trump, and he wants a thorough going reform to bring various different aspects of the system closer in line to what he thinks would be fair or controlled by a Republican president. That means cleaning house, right? What it means is taking a system that’s built around nonpartisan expertise and controlled administration of government rules, which is how our civil service works. And Vance wants to turn it all into an instrument of Donald Trump’s will. And that’s just not that’s not the way American democracy works. It’s not the way any democracy is supposed to work. 

Josie Duffy Rice: To your point, this is kind of the strain of Trumpism, right? It’s very much the mindset of Donald Trump. I guess the question is, do you see JD Vance bringing anyone new into the Republican Party or to the ballot box? Like, is he going to get Trump a new bunch of voters that maybe wouldn’t have supported him before? Or what do we think his value add is on that level? If you weren’t for Trump already, why would you now be for him because JD Vance is on the ticket?

Zack Beauchamp: Honestly, I’m not sure what the answer is. One thing I’ll say to begin with is that vice presidential choices don’t matter very much historically. If you were selecting a vice president because you think they will bring in a new political constituency, you’re doing it wrong, right? That’s not the right way to think about it, the right way to think about it, based on what we know is that a vice president could be president, especially when the president’s quite old, when the president was almost killed this weekend in an attack, it really should hammer home how serious a decision this is, that you’re one heartbeat away from the presidency. If I were the Trump team, I would say my substantive reason for doing this is that I think JD Vance will be a good executor of Donald Trump’s will and in power, he will do what Trump needs him to do in order to enact his major plans for reshaping the American government. And so substantively, if what you want is to institutionalize Trumpism, then he’s a very good pick. 

Josie Duffy Rice: So now we know who’s on the GOP ticket. Trump is heading into the RNC. You know, he’s kind of a messiah figure right now. He’s survived this assassination attempt over the weekend. And the party is obviously pretty unified around him already. Like many of his most vocal critics have either left the party or more likely have just gotten in line, just like Vance, right? So what principles would you say bind the modern Republican Party right now? Like what are they driving home at the RNC? What are they kind of saying to the public as their principles beyond just Trump has been wronged? Or is there anything beyond that? 

Zack Beauchamp: It’s that Democrats are bad and their policies are hurting our country. The Republican Party is much less unified on where it should be going forward. There are certain policy issues where Trump has succeeded in imposing as well. They really want to curtail immigration. They really want to deport lots of people. They want to raise tariffs. I mean, some of these are anathema to the old Republican Party, but they are what the party stands for now in specific policy areas. But they don’t really hang together without the overarching connective tissue of Trump’s narrative of you are being screwed, and I am the one who can save you from it and specifically from them. Now, who is them or they? Right. You hear that a lot in conservative rhetoric nowadays, and it’s just designed to conjure up the sense of an amorphous, all powerful enemy operating through the Democratic Party who’s trying to destroy their way of life. They’re in this case being, you know, Republicans and their supporters and that that narrative, the opposition of us versus them, that is the heart of the Republican Party. There’s a common pro-Trump meme that you may have seen. It’s a picture of Trump’s face, and it says they’re not trying to get me. They’re trying to get you. I’m just standing in the way. That, to me, is what Trumpism is right now. 

Josie Duffy Rice: According to recent polls, this iteration of the party seems to be resonating with more Americans, or at least more Americans than the Democratic Party is currently resonating with, depending on how you see polls. But–

Zack Beauchamp: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. 

Josie Duffy Rice: –let’s just say that it’s at least on the table. 

Zack Beauchamp: Now it’s not going well for the Democrats right now. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. 

Zack Beauchamp: I think that’s pretty clear. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. And you have a book out today that’s all about this kind of reactionary spirit in American politics that tries to undermine strides towards democracy. Would you say that this is an example of that? Is that what you’re seeing right now? 

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. I think JD Vance is the physical embodiment of what I call in the book the reactionary spirit. You know, someone who is opposed to social change. Sees it happening to the democratic system. They’re put in a position to choose, right? Either they fight through the system and, you know, if they lose an election or they a policy they don’t like gets enacted, say, well, that’s democracy, and try to do what they can to fix it, or they make the other choice and they say, no, we care so much about preserving certain elements of the existing social order. We’re willing to wreck the system itself in order to save them and attack them. And that is basically what JD Vance’s political persona has become. He is the avatar for the people who say America is changing in a way that makes us feel alienated, feel like strangers in our own home as the sociologist Arlie Hochschild put it. And that logic authorizes really extreme anti-democratic choices, right? Theres’s a wonderful study by two political scientists that shows that when people are really polarized, when they believe the stakes are really high in an election, they’re much more likely to condone anti-democratic behavior by candidates in their parties because they see that as a means to accomplish the ends that they want. And that’s what’s happening right now. That’s the reactionary spirit. J.D. Vance is that. I read what he says about politics, the way that he talks about sometimes the needing to do some really wild stuff in order to stop the Democrats. And I think, yeah, you are what I’m writing about in the book. 

Josie Duffy Rice: That was my conversation with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent for Vox and author of the new book, The Reactionary Spirit. That book comes out today. That’s the latest for now. We will get to some headlines in a moment, but if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and tell your friends. [music break]

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Tre’vell Anderson: Let’s get to some headlines. 

[sung] Headlines. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Monday that his department is investigating the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. Mayorkas made the remarks at Monday’s White House press briefing. He called Saturday’s shooting a, quote, “failure” by the Secret Service. Take a listen. 

[clip of Alejandro Mayorkas] We unequivocally condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence our nation witnessed that day. Such acts are unacceptable in our country and in our democracy. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Mayorkas’s comments came after Biden ordered an independent review of the security at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he was shot at by a lone gunman. The secretary said Trump’s Secret Service detail has been, quote, “enhanced” since Saturday, along with President Biden’s. 

Josie Duffy Rice: A federal judge dismissed former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday and cited the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith as her reasoning. This is the case involving the classified documents that were found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to prosecute the case, but Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the case, said on Monday that Smith’s appointment violates a clause in the Constitution that requires the Senate to confirm appointees, and the case should be thrown out entirely. Cannon’s ruling hands another huge win to Trump in his efforts to delay the pending criminal trials against him. A spokesperson for Smith said on Monday that he will appeal the decision. Did we mention that Judge Cannon was appointed to the federal bench by Trump? He really got his money’s worth out of that one. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Mm mmm mm mm mm. President Biden sat down with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt for an interview that aired on Monday evening. Holt questioned Biden about the language he used to describe his opponent, former President Donald Trump, during the campaign. Trump’s newly named VP, JD Vance, said that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric, quote, “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” 

[clip of Lester Holt] You called your opponent an existential threat on a call a week ago. You said it’s time to put Trump in the bullseye. There’s some dispute about the context, but I think you appreciate that wording matters. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] I didn’t say crosshairs. I was talking about focus on. Look, the truth of the matter was what I guess I was talking about it at the time was there was very little focus on Trump’s agenda. 

[clip of Lester Holt] Yeah. The term was bullseye. 

[clip of President Joe Biden] It was a it was a mistake to use the word. I didn’t mean I didn’t say crosshairs. I meant bullseye, I meant focus on him. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Uh oh. This interview is part of a seemingly concerted effort by the campaign to get Biden in the public eye more and demonstrate the president’s acuity to Dems who doubt he can beat Donald Trump in November. Is it working? Y’all tell me. 

Josie Duffy Rice: And finally, the judge overseeing the high profile racketeering case against rapper Young Thug and his crew has been dismissed from the case here in Atlanta. Young Thug’s lawyers filed a motion to remove Judge Ural Glanville from the trial after he held a private meeting with prosecutors and a witness without the defense’s knowledge. The court said he should be removed to preserve, quote, “the public’s confidence in the judicial system.” The high profile trial has faced multiple delays since it began in January of 2023, and jury selection alone lasted ten months. The trial has now been assigned to another judge in Fulton County’s Superior Court, Judge Shakura Ingram. It is unclear if they will have to retry the case from the beginning. Young Thug and his co-defendants are being prosecuted by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and have been charged under Georgia’s Rico statute. Just like former President Donald Trump. Look, this case is going to last longer than Biden, Trump’s ten years combined at this rate. So he could get it moving.

Tre’vell Anderson: Fani Willis can’t you know something’s going on over there in the water in Atlanta? Josie, what’s going on? 

Josie Duffy Rice: Well it’s Atlanta. We’re historically a mess. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Valid point. 

Josie Duffy Rice: But we’re so charming. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Valid point. 

Josie Duffy Rice: And those are the headlines. 

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Josie Duffy Rice: That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, Protect your Peace by turning off the RNC when you have to and tell your friends to listen. 

Tre’vell Anderson: And if you are into reading and not just Judge Aileen Cannon’s batshit interpretation of federal law like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Tre’vell Anderson. 

Josie Duffy Rice: I’m Josie Duffy Rice. 

[spoken together] And booing Mitch McConnell is for everyone. 

Josie Duffy Rice: This is a true bipartisan tradition. 

Tre’vell Anderson: Listen. Finally, something we can agree on. 

Josie Duffy Rice: Yeah. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Bill Lancz. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Natalie Bettendorf. We had production help today from Michell Eloy, Greg Walters, and Julia Claire. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison and our executive producer is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. 

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