Frank DeVito's "Future of the Republican Party."

The best hope for the post-Trump Republican Party that knows what time it is, and that is ready to continue the fight.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily align with those of The American Postliberal.

This essay is adapted from an excerpt of Frank DeVito’s new book, JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party.

For a decade, President Trump has presided over a Republican Party that has seen a massive realignment in both its voters and its policy priorities. Now that the Trump era is coming to an end, perhaps the most important political question on the Right is who will succeed Trump.

JD Vance is the heir apparent, the most likely candidate for the Republican nomination in 2028, and thus the natural leader of the post-Trump GOP. This makes the political priorities of Vice President Vance a most interesting and important analysis for conservatives in American politics today.

Who is Vance and what does he think about the issues that we care about most While there are many different ways to go about answering these questions (the reason for and topic of my new book), there is one fascinating question worth focusing on, one that sheds light on the divide over MAGA in today’s Republican Party: how did JD Vance go from being “a Never-Trump guy” to a Trump ally, apologist, presumed heir to the MAGA movement?

Many claim cynically that Vance simply shifted with the political winds, but there is a much more convincing and enlightening answer.

Accusations that Vance is simply a political opportunist fail to take into account that Vance has spoken candidly, and quite convincingly, about why his stance on President Trump changed so dramatically.

In 2016, Vance thought that American institutions were in decent shape and that therefore Trump’s position and rhetoric were unjustified and unhelpful, even dangerous.

So what changed?

Vance gives a very insightful summary of how he came around to President Trump’s position within the GOP in a conversation on the New York Times Podcast in October 2024.

The evolution of Vance was not primarily about core political beliefs but about his view of the state of American institutions: “if you believe the American political culture is fundamentally healthy but may be biased toward the Left, then Donald Trump is not the right solution to that problem.”

As Vance continued to observe political and cultural realities, he “slowly developed a viewpoint that the American political culture was…deeply diseased and the American media conversation had become so deranged that it couldn’t even process the frustrations of a large share, maybe even a…majority of the country.”

If things are this bad, the rhetoric and changes in priority that Trump brought to the GOP make more sense.

Many disagreements on the Right are perhaps less about the proper role of government or the policy issues to be emphasized and more about the health of America and its institutions. Where are we as a nation? Is the country simply going through a normal cycle, an excessively liberal time that will likely swing back to a saner, more moderate culture in the coming years?

Is it that most of the nation’s institutions—its government agencies, media outlets, universities, and corporations—been captured not merely by Liberals but by radical, un-American Leftists who want to destroy America as we know it?

The answer to this drastic question will shape an American conservative’s views on Donald Trump and the direction of the Republican Party.

The divide in the Republican Party may be better explained by one’s view of the health of the nation then by “neocon vs. MAGA” policy disagreements. If America remains a more or less healthy nation that happens to be guided by more progressive influences at the moment, then the MAGA movement is not the right remedy for what ails us.

Why engage in fiery, demonize the opposition party, call for the abolition of entire federal agencies, and so on, if all we need is better, more principled leadership in the next election cycle?

One does not need a firehose to put out a candle.

But if the latter view is correct, if we are truly in the grip of advanced cultural decay and even on the brink of national collapse, then Trump and the MAGA shift within the Republican Party are not only understandable but necessary.

If partisan operatives run the Department of Justice and the FBI, prosecuting political enemies rather than administering justice, if career bureaucrats are actually impeding the will of the people and their elected leaders, if the media and the universities are trying to manipulate people to hate America and destroy it, and if the current leadership and government policies are not only misguided but are intentionally destroying American families and the American economy, then perhaps Republicans in the past several decades have not been the fierce fighters they are called to be in this critical moment in American history.

This distinction explains Vance’s shift on Trump. Unlike many politicians who mysteriously changed their priorities and quickly came around to Trump when it became politically expedient to do so, Vance’s account of his Trumpian evolution is reasonable.

From 2016 to the present, Vance may have grown and become more mature and articulate on certain policies, but he has essentially cared about the same things. He has observed drugs, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and broken, dysfunctional families destroying American communities and he remains committed to prioritizing political solutions to these problems.

The big change in Vance is that, over the last few years, he has come to believe that American institutions are much more corrupt and dysfunctional, themselves much more a part of the problem, than he once thought. This change in Vance’s view of America justifies a much more favorable view of Trump’s policy priorities, his rhetoric, and his fighting spirit.

Trump’s policy priorities and take-no-prisoners style is not a crutch for disaffected Americans but actually a needed part of the solution to what ails the nation.

Vance’s change in stance toward Donald Trump results from a change in his view of the health of America. Vance has been consistently skeptical of Libertarianism, concerned about the plight of the American family, the opioid crisis, and a lack of good, blue-collar manufacturing jobs, both before and after his support of Trump.

What has changed is that Vance once thought Trump’s rhetoric about the state of America was excessively pessimistic and bombastic, but he has now come to believe that American institutions are indeed as bad as Trump and his political allies have been saying for years. Vance’s diagnosis of the problems and solutions in American life have not changed much. What has changed drastically is his diagnosis of the institutions that are necessary to effect changes and implement solutions.

Vance should be admired for his humility. Many politicians have flipped from anti-Trump to MAGA for political expediency, leaving old views and political positions behind as if they were never held. Vance’s move toward Trump does not involve the hypocrisy of pretending that he was never really anti-Trump, nor does it involve a flip-flop on core principles.

Vance cared about the same problems in America in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And he admits that he changed. Just as his view of the health of America shifted, so too did his view of what it would take to fix things.

So what is the takeaway? Vance is clear and humble about the shift. His views on American society have changed: Trump was right and, in a way, Vance was wrong in 2016. Vance is consistent in his views about the problems that any serious conservative politics needs to address, but he has evolved to realize that the problems are much more deeply embedded in American institutions than he thought.

This shift is perhaps the best way to distinguish between those on the Right who have embraced MAGA and those who remain virulently anti-Trump. The former realize that our national institutions– government agencies, media outlets, corporations, school systems and universities– are not simply leaning left. Liberals have marched through American institutions for decades.

Some may be able to be recaptured, but many (think Ivy League universities and mainstream media outlets) are so decayed that they must likely be replaced rather than saved. To understand this is necessarily to reject the weak, right-liberal version of Republican Party politics that dominated in the years preceding Trump.

The “Never-Trump” crowd doesn’t seem to realize the extent to which globalized liberalism has deeply (de)formed the world in which we live.

Tax cuts and modest deregulation are not proper medicine for what ails us. Vance is the best hope for a post-Trump Republican Party that knows what time it is and that is ready to continue the fight.

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