The Critical Role JD Vance Plays on the American Right

The following is a preview of Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin’s interview with author Frank DeVito on “The Signal Sitdown.” The full interview premieres on The Daily Signal’s YouTube page at 6:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 27.

Vice President JD Vance’s life has taken him from the hollowed out town of Middletown, Ohio to the halls of power. Between his challenging upbringing, his service in the Marine Corps, his stint in Silicon Valley, his Senate tenure, and now his vice presidency, it’s easy to lose sight of the two short days leading up to President Donald Trump picking Vance as his running mate.

Reflect on those two days in the middle of July and you’ll see the distillation of a long career arc for such a young man. 

Author Frank DeVito joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss his new book on the vice president, titled “JD Vance and the Future of the Republican Party,” and the role Vance was born to play in American political life.

Trump came millimeters from death on the campaign trail in Butler, Pennsylvania, when an assassin’s bullet grazed the former president’s right ear on July 13, 2025. The Left had not been shy about their violent Trump fantasies, but the Butler assassination attempt proved some were deadly serious about killing Trump.

With the Republican National Convention starting that Monday, Trump was in the final stages of choosing a running mate. But that debate now took on new meaning: What if our worst nightmare came true and they killed the president? The answer, as the president cried from the stage in Butler swarmed by Secret Service Agents, was to “fight, fight, fight.”

But who could step into the ring? Who could maintain the coalition Trump built? Who could keep the MAGA movement alive?

Trump’s near-death experience triggered an around-the-clock debate among the right’s most powerful players on who could fill that role. On July 15, 2025, Trump chose Vance.

Vance, DeVito told The Daily Signal, is “the heir apparent to the Republican party at a really interesting time.”

Trump has overseen “a complete overhaul of the Republican party’s views on everything from foreign policy interventionism to trade and labor policy,” DeVito explained. “Everything is shifting. Different demographics are coming in and going out of the Republican party. So, it’s a unique time of change in the party and Trump was uniquely the presider over all of that.”

But “it’s been one man at the helm, a uniquely charismatic man, for over a decade,” DeVito added.

Trump has had “so much power, so much influence over the last decade that there’s a unique question of who comes next that you don’t always have when you have a presidential changeover.”

Over the course of the 2024 campaign, Trump built a broad electoral coalition that included the Teamsters and tech giants from Silicon Valley, disaffected liberals and social conservatives, health nuts and Hispanics, and nationalists and libertarians.

All arrows in that coalition point to Vance, DeVito explains.

“So I think the reason he’s so able to be kind of at the center of this, um, this coalition is, well, two things,” he said.

“You have usually these dichotomies of the intellectuals and the people who do stuff in politics, right?”

Some of intellectuals, DeVito says, “are just really not good at understanding how their theories play out in practical coalitional politics.”

“On the other side, you have plenty of people who are involved in politics who don’t read or think very deeply about much of anything,” DeVito continued.

“The unique thing about Vance, I think, is he’s very good at both,” DeVito suggested.

“When you have somebody who’s that good at navigating coalitional politics and getting elected to office, but who can also tell you the theoretical differences between a West Coast Straussian and a Catholic integralist,” DeVito continued, “I think it’s a really unique mixture of political acumen and intellectual depth in the conservative movement that not a lot of people have.”

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