There’s a moral vacuum at the core of JD Vance (Gerard Baker, April 16 2026, Times uk)
Everyone makes moral compromises but they are manageable because there is at least some essential identity, an irreducible core that is something more than the sum of our appetites and ambitions. But the uniquely strange trajectory of Vance’s career strongly suggests there is no identity there, only the appetites and ambitions to be served by whichever principles work best.
This is a man who has changed almost everything about himself to accommodate new realities. From his name (he was once James David Bowman) to his faith (he was once an evangelical Protestant) to his political allegiance (he once pondered fearfully whether Trump might be “America’s Hitler”). And he is still constantly changing his mind (in that New York Times story it was said that while he was at first against the war, he then argued for a limited war and then for an all-out war, all in the space of a fortnight). When you look, in other words, for Vance’s defining identity, the soul of his true self, there is nothing there, only a pile of receipts from a succession of useful transactions.
His entire life has been driven by the need to be loved by his newest father figure.