As J.D. Vance Courts Ohio, His Fealty to Trump Proves Double-Edged
J.D. Vance, in his new novel Bright Rock, is a big-idea Republican governor, with a very particular vision of the future.
He’s all but convinced that global warming is a hoax. He’s a big-time climate-change denier. He’s got his own energy secretary in a climate-science denier. He’s spent the past few days trying to convince the world that he’s made a big life decision. As a result he’s trying to convince everyone that he’s not a guy who’s been up all night. He’s been working behind the scenes, though, with his team, to ensure that he doesn’t get in any more trouble.
“We’re not looking to turn this into a political scandal.”
But the past few days have been an embarrassment for Trump, and not just because Vance has just published a novel about how his own presidential agenda might have played out had he been allowed to run in 2016. The real reason for Trump’s embarrassing failure in the first two nights of his presidency is that the president is trying to make a big strategic move with regard to two of the biggest promises of his presidency.
The first is his commitment to deregulating America’s energy industry, which Vance has so deftly used to great effect in Bright Rock (the novel, not the movie). The second is his promise to bring jobs back to America by firing everyone who’s lost a job. Trump’s aides, both public and private, tried to make that second promise a central part of his 2016 campaign, and they have been working desperately to ensure that he gets a victory this year that would allow him to fulfill it.
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The way they’re trying to make that second promise successful is to make sure that the first promise doesn’t fail.
If Trump wanted to fulfill his campaign promise to clean up the energy sector, he could take the easy route and simply make appointments to make sure that no-one gets fired. For his part, Vance is telling people that having a bunch of friends and family in the administration is a good way to ensure that the president doesn
