From George Will, one of the few actual conservative intellectuals deserving of the name, on what he thinks of JD Vance:
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President JD Vance? More slogging through a sewer of odious politics.
Temperate Americans of all political stripes should unite to stymie the vice president’s ambitions.
November 6, 2026
George Will
With an urgency commensurate with the stakes, temperate Americans of all political persuasions, but especially conservatives, should act together to implement this proposition: JD Vance’s ambitions must be stymied.
His 2026 campaigning, frenetic and futile, lowered the tone everywhere, left wreckage in his wake and underscored this: He represents a potential four-year prolongation of the nation’s slog through a sewer of scabrous rhetoric serving odious politics. His removal from politics is a necessary precondition for beginning to affirmatively answer two inseparable questions:
Will America have a conservative party? And will there be a continuing national revulsion against what the formerly conservative party dispensed this year?
Consider Vance on Vivek Ramaswamy’s repellent ad. It featured Ramaswamy’s opponent’s estranged mother implying that her daughter lies about having been sexually molested at age 12 by her stepfather. Her brother says she is truthful.
By joining the bipartisan denunciations of this, Vance could have demonstrated limits to his plasticity and indecency. Evidently there are none. He was “disgusted,” but by Republicans “whining” about an ad that “calls it out like it is.” His blinkered partisanship (he celebrated Ramaswamy’s “audacity” in running the ad) reinforced his chest-thumping roughneck persona (politics, he said, is a “tough business”).
Of course he did. Although he knew the 2024 tales of Haitian immigrants eating Ohio pets were lies, he spread them because such “stories” serve the virtuous purpose of calling attention to “the suffering of the American people.” He has taken Plato’s concept of a “noble lie” — one that harms no one and serves some good — and emptied out the nobility. Lies that serve Vance’s politics are sanctified.
Speaking of his aversion to actual nobility: He says Tucker Carlson (Putin fanboy, Hitler apologist, Churchill disparager, megaphone for Holocaust denial) is his friend, therefore Carlson belongs in the conservative movement. Vance said he will not throw Carlson “under the bus,” because a Vance virtue is acknowledgment of his debts: Carlson ardently lobbied Donald Trump to make Vance his running mate.
With canine devotion, Vance laces his rhetoric with profanities like his master’s. Trump on Norway (because he has not been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize): “Norway sucks. Norway has become a shithouse country.” Today’s column will not further the coarsening of politics by repeating here similar Vance vulgarities it has hitherto reported.
Vance’s full disclosure of himself has given 2028 voters an avalanche of pertinent information about his temperament. And about his policy formulations. They belong in fortune cookies for simpletons: “A million cheap, knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single American manufacturing job.”
The inability to be embarrassed is an awesome political asset. Vance the campaigner illustrated this by invoking the specter of Democrats’ “socialism” while representing an administration that has taken equity stakes in (by the Cato Institute’s count) 41 companies, so far.
The parameters of conservatism are, in any era, contestable. There are, however, fixed points: limited government, the rule of law, largely free enterprise. And, always, this:
A president’s character counts because the nation cannot count on the sufficiency of the Constitution’s Madisonian ingenuity. The separation of powers, congressional primacy (if Congress will assert it) and judicial review will not constrain a president who can act more quickly and nimbly than those who would restrain him, and who lacks a constitutional conscience.
Speaking of that, this year, Vance, who was born 10 years after Richard M. Nixon’s presidency collapsed, scoffed at the seriousness of Watergate. The burglary and its aftermath, the lying and cover-ups, would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.
Beneath such adolescent naughtiness, his attempted edginess reveals a grotesque integrity: He refuses to bend beneath the weight of facts. We have been warned. President Vance would consider suborning perjury and attempting to enlist the FBI and CIA in obstructing justice, mere boys-will-be-boys peccadillos.
If Vance is the Republicans’ 2028 presidential nominee, for 12 years the party will have been led by people uninterested in, and inimical to, the policies and manners of conservatism, intelligently understood. If you think America would be fine without a truly conservative party, look around. We are there.
Trump’s deepening weirdness (e.g., repeatedly proclaiming his admiration for various men’s and women’s body parts) suggests he is residing in the suburbs of dotage. Vance has no such excuse. The Constitution guarantees that the president will soon be just a fragrant memory. Scrubbing Vance’s stain from the nation’s life is for citizens to do — a unifying project for beginning to end this age of acrimony.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/11/06/jd-vance-presidential-ambitions-must-be-stymied-by-temperate-americans/