Rod Dreher I voted for Trump, I support him, but he will always break your heart. Vance is the hope

Rod Dreher is an American writer and editor currently living in Budapest. His work deals with culture, politics and religion. His most well-known publication is probably Benedict's Choice, in which he calls on Christians to separate themselves to some degree from mainstream culture and to create a countercultural movement to preserve the fullness of the Christian faith. He is also the author of Live Not by Lies.

He is also a close friend of U.S. Vice President-elect JD Vance, and it was Dreher's interview with him for The American Conservative that spread awareness of this politician among conservatives. Dreher also played a significant role in Vance's conversion to Catholicism.

We talked about the outcome of the American presidential election, the personality of the next vice president, the moral reputation of Donald Trump, the future of the Republican Party, and the death of American right-wing fusionism. The interview was conducted on the occasion of the Conservative Summit in Bratislava.

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What was your first reaction when you saw the results of the United States presidential election? Were surprised by the outcome or not?

I was unbelievably relieved because if Trump had lost this, the days would have been very dark. The Harris administration would have continued the policies of Biden on gender ideology and everything else and we would not have been able to resist.

I wasn’t surprised. All the polls said it could go either way, but Trump had all the momentum.

Harris, at the end, with her allies started calling Trump Hitler. That’s always a sign of desperation. And so, the fact the Democrats threw every weapon they had at Trump, even calling him Hitler, and he still won, it was such a wonderful rejection of these lies.

America’s problems are so great that politics can’t solve them all, but at least now we have a chance. And I hope that the American people are inspired by Trump to stand up against wokeness, which is the cancer that makes it impossible for us to even talk about our problems without being called racist or sexist.

Were you at least surprised that he won all the swing states?

I was. I thought it would be closer than that. I mean, the race could go either way.

I thought maybe he would win the Electoral College, but not the popular vote. I’m so relieved that the Democrats had no way to deny him the legitimacy of his win.

On a more personal note, because we know that you are close friends with the vice president-elect JD Vance: When did you two last meet? Did he suspect anything about the Donald Trump’s list of potential VP picks?

It was in February of this year at the Munich Security Conference. Nobody at the conference would listen to him on Ukraine. He’s an important Senate critic of the Ukraine policy, but they didn’t want to hear it.

He was so frustrated. He said, I don’t want to go to the official dinner, let’s have dinner together. But we met again the next day for a casual lunch. We just had beer and sausage.

I said, hey, JD, do you think Trump will pick you as his running mate? He said, no, I don’t think about that. And now he is elected vice president.

I know that JD is a good man because I knew him before he got famous, and he’s sincere. He comes from a very poor and troubled background and he got to the heights of American elites when he went to Yale Law School and then went to work in Silicon Valley.

But he did not forget who he is. And that’s really what we need in America now. He can speak with confidence to both the high and the low.

Photo: Postoj/Jakub Lipták

And he’s quite young.

This is the key thing about him. He’s 40 years old. That means he does not have the burden of Reaganism in his mind. I mean, I’m not criticizing Ronald Reagan; he was great for his era. But that era ended a long time ago.

In the Republican Party, all the leadership class has been so captured by the ideology of Reaganism, they just couldn’t think beyond it. And they could not make the adjustments that conservatism needed to make in order to be relevant to the changing world.

That’s why we got Donald Trump. Because the Republicans were so intellectually stale. They kept repeating the same clichés.

Now with JD Vance, you have someone who has Trump’s politics, but he has something Trump doesn’t have. He has deep focus, and he’s an intellectual. I think that history will probably show that the second Trump presidency will be the gateway to the Vance era.

In his book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes of the religious life of his father when he was already separated from his mother. He found his way in some kind of Pentecostal church and Vance wrote that it changed him for the better. You witnessed the religious conversion of JD Vance. Did this religious conversion influence his worldview in any way?

I think so. JD told me back in 2018 that he wanted to become a Catholic, so I introduced him to a Dominican priest in Washington who did his initial instruction in the faith. Then he and his wife moved back to Ohio, so another Dominican finished it, and I went there. JD invited me to stand there when he was received into the Catholic Church.

What I think is amazing for American intellectual converts from Protestantism to Catholicism is that they have never imagined that being a Christian can evolve such deep thinking and philosophizing about the world.

I think what has happened with JD is that Catholicism gave him a way to deepen his intuitive understanding about the way society should work. Catholicism gave him the theoretical background for it, the Catholic social teaching.

That’s important because not only did it give him a deeper conceptual understanding of how this works, but it also added with it the authority of church teaching.

I think we’re going to see that. Probably not in the Trump administration as Trump’s not religious. But if Vance becomes president, I think we’re going to see it.

It will be more like the Christian Democrats in the old days in Europe, when they were still Christians. And I think that’s great. That’s the kind of conservatism that is mine, but it’s alien to the American conservative tradition which comes out of English classical liberalism.

I think we really need more of a European conservative sensibility, which means primarily Catholic conservatism.

A moment ago, you said that comparing Trump to Hitler is a sign of desperation. But it was Vance himself who privately compared Trump to Hitler in 2016. He also publicly called him a “total fraud, reprehensible, cultural heroin, just another opiate” and so on. Even in February 2020, so during Trump’s term, he said that “Trump has failed to deliver on his economic populism”. And now he will be his vice president. Do you think such a flip-flop is actually possible? Isn’t this just pure opportunism?

I think it’s easy to understand that people would see that as opportunism. What JD has said, and I think he’s serious about it, is that he was wrong about Trump in 2016, that he thought Trump would be a failure.

Trump wasn’t, in fact, a failure. He failed in many ways, but Trump did a lot better than people thought he would do.

And you must remember that when Trump became president, that’s when wokeness became totally weaponized and really, really shot up, and the left went crazy. And JD saw that, same as me.

I was not a Trump fan. I agreed with JD about Trump in 2016.

But I saw how utterly insane the left was, how they tried to destroy Trump and how they were more of a danger to our democracy and to our system of government than Trump was. And so, by the time 2020 came around, I voted for Trump. I never thought I would, but I did.

It didn’t matter in my state (Louisiana), because Trump was going to win there, but I said, you know what? I don’t like everything Trump did, but I can’t be a free rider, allow other people to vote for him, while I approve of his policies, but don’t want to get my hands dirty voting for him. And JD made that same switch.

I think that Trump forgave JD.  And I think JD was right about Trump and economic populism in 2020. Trump did fail in many ways, but I think that this is a second chance, and America is a land of second chances.

The fact that he has JD at his side now, who is much more focused, much more intellectual, and very loyal to him, I think that’s going to make a big difference.

Would you rather say that the lesser of two evils won this year or do you actually believe Trump is going to be a good president?

I would probably say the lesser of two evils won, not because I think Trump is evil, but because he’s not my ideal president. We all know Trump’s flaws, but it’s Trump’s policies that I care about.

The fact that Trump already said he will not bring those two neocons, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, back into his new administration, that’s a real change that tells me Trump has learned something about his failures.

After he got shot, I thought he would come out there at the Republican Convention a few days after and give a heartfelt and powerful speech. Instead, he spoke for 90 minutes, just rambling in that usual Trump way. I hate that stuff. Maybe a lot of people like it, but I hate it.

And this is the kind of thing that’s going to keep Trump from being truly great, but you could be a transformative president without being a great president.

Ronald Reagan was both great and transformative. I don’t think Trump has true greatness in him, in his character. He’s just too messy for that. But I think that, depending on how he governs and the people he appoints, he could be transformative.

I hope so. But look, I don’t want to put too much hope on him; I voted for him, I support him, but I think Trump will always break your heart.

After the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, have you still believed that Donald Trump deserved a second chance? Wasn’t the 2020 election his second chance that he blew?

I didn’t say everybody deserves a second chance, I said America is a land of second chances. If you get it, the Americans will forgive you and give you a chance to renew yourself.

I supported the second impeachment of Trump after January 6th. I thought his behaviour was bad that day, but again, you must ask yourself, what’s the alternative?

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris went as radically as they could go on gender ideology, war in Ukraine, race relations, using federal law to push institutions to being extremely woke and racist against people of European descent. All these things were so insane, the sort of things I wrote about in my book Live Not by Lies.

The choice I made for the Republican nominee was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I liked him. I think he would have been a really good president, but he didn’t win.

So if I have to choose between Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, oh hell yeah, I’m going to give him a second chance. When he chose JD Vance as his running mate, there was no question for me because I really believe in JD Vance, and I think he could become one day a great American president.

Photo: Postoj/Jakub Lipták

What do you think the face of the GOP after Donald Trump and potentially with JD Vance as its leader will be like? Do you think JD Vance will be able to change such a big party in the way he would like to?

Well, the face of the Republican Party with Trump and JD Vance is rock and roll.

The Republicans always had the reputation of being very stiff and formal, the party of business and all that. Trump totally changed that, and now it’s the Democrats who are the party of big business and wars and things like that, which is an amazing thing to happen.

Trump did these funny stunts like the garbage truck and the McDonald’s thing. Oh man, the media, the Democrats got so angry at him for McDonald’s. “He’s not really cooking fries”, they said. You stupid asses, of course he’s not!

I think the two iconic images of this campaign was that famous photo of Trump after he was shot, the blood coming down his face, going fight, fight, fight, because that reminded Americans of the famous photo of the US Marines raising the flag in Iwo Jima. It looked just like that, and that goes so deep in the American psyche.

Secondly, that image of Trump standing there at the drive-through window of McDonald’s waving, that’s so deeply American, no politician would have had the thought to do that but Trump, because everybody knows he really loves McDonald’s.

And JD has been doing a lot of interviews over the course of the campaign, in which he’s very sharp, not like Trump. JD also gives interviews to podcasters, like Joe Rogan and others, and shows that he’s able to talk on that level, as he is younger.

He grew up in a different media environment; he can talk like the Democrats can’t do. They’re the party of the uptight, wealthy elites. The fact that Trump got a lot of Hispanic voters and a lot of black men is really, really significant, because minorities just don’t vote for the Republican Party, now they do, and I think a lot of it has to do with Trump’s persona.

And what about JD Vance’ personality?

He’s a typical American Midwesterner, very optimistic. If you read Hillbilly Elegy, you see, he’s not sentimental, he talked in that book about how he loves the people, the hillbillies he comes from, but they also have a lot of problems that they cause to themselves, it’s not the fault of the government or the economy, it’s their own fault.

It was a very realistic book, because of his own background, because he was able to see how thanks to his tough grandmother who had a pistol and always smoked, thanks to the way she raised him, thanks to the US Marine Corps, and thanks to Yale University and the love of his wife, Usha, who helped him through Yale, he really became something great.

And this is a classic American success story, a poor boy from a broken family, his mother was a drug addict, and yet he rose with his own determination and went to discipline he learned in the Marine Corps to become great. That is something that it’s completely irresistible. If he were a Democrat, the media would be celebrating him all the time.

If you see these pictures of JD Vance, he’s a white man from the Midwest who’s married to a South Asian Indian woman, the daughter of immigrants from California. You see their multiracial family. That is America today, and it didn’t happen with the Democrats. It happened with the Republicans.

That’s part of his image too. It’s a new generation, a generation that is much more comfortable with these sorts of cross-racial relationships.

In 2019 you signed the letter Against the Dead Consensus together with, for example, Patrick Deneen, in which you basically call for the end of fusionism on American right. Do you think JD Vance’s victory with Donald Trump presents a dead blow to fusionism as we know it to the old GOP and will this be a change of direction? Will it be durable or is this Trump-Vance thing some kind of irregularity that we will return to the old neocon fusionist kind of Republicans?

I think fusionism is dead. And different factors killed it. One big sign: Dick Cheney, the neocon Darth Vader endorsed Kamala Harris. And it did no good, she still lost.

The fact is that Cheney is the embodiment of the old fusionist idea of the national security state. He’s gone. Another leg of fusionism was big business.

Big business was all on the side of the Democrats. The Financial Times recently did a graph showing that the CEOs of major corporations and the senior management started moving strongly to the left in 2010.

The Democrats are the party of big business now. So that’s out.

The other sign is social conservatives. Now, Trump is not really a social conservative in the classical sense. He made his shift on abortion this year, which really angered a lot of pro-lifers. I’m a pro-lifer myself but it was something that had to happen, because after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and all that did was send the abortion issue back to each state, we on the pro-life side found that most Americans do not agree with us.

What can pro-lifers do about that?

We have a lot of work to do there. But Trump knew that if he allowed the Democrats to say that you’re going to end abortion he would lose. And I think that Trump made a very common sense, realistic choice to say we’ll leave it to the states as the Supreme Court decided.

The social conservatism is falling apart in America as America becomes more and more post-Christian. So the basis for fusionism doesn’t exist anymore because the world and American Society has changed so much.

What Trump is doing though is trying to form some neocon diffusionism. I don’t know if he can succeed, but it seems like it’ll have foreign policy realism. Like America first realism. It will be an economic policy more orientated toward industrial policy, more protectionism, for the sake of building up the country itself.

And on social issues, it will be more liberal – but not in the woke sense. That’s what the left has, but it’ll be more classically liberal, less formed by Christianity.

But again, as a Christian, I hate that. But that’s where the country is now. Trump is only recognizing our country as it really is.

So there is no time for ideals. Won’t it discourage some of his supporters?

Activists are always like this. They hate politicians for not being pure enough. You see what’s happening now after Kamala Harris’s loss, all the activist class, they’re not stopping to think maybe we did wrong by trying to transgender children. Maybe we shouldn’t have pushed DEI as hard as we did, they’re not saying that.

They’re saying Americans are racist and transphobic. Well, similarly on our side, there are a lot of really angry pro lifers who feel like Trump has betrayed them.

However, you got to live in the real world. Trump is a politician; he’s not the Pope who has to be doctrinally consistent and pure.

Photo: Postoj/Jakub Lipták

What troubles us in Slovakia and maybe in Central Europe the most, is the question of safety. JD Vance said: “What America should be saying is if NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance, why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” – by which he meant the regulation of Elon Musk’s online platforms. Don’t you think that such blackmailing of Europe would eventually threaten the safety of the Europe and the world?

Blackmailing Europe? If European governments paid more of their fair share into NATO, they might have a stronger position. But we’ve seen that for years many European countries have not paid their NATO dues, and I think a lot of Europeans love believing that America will always take care of them. And it will in the case of fighting the Russians, right? I really think so.

I don’t agree with the Ukraine war policy, because Ukraine is not in a NATO. But otherwise, it’s an ironclad guarantee that a lot of Americans, the sort of Americans who voted for Trump and Vance, don’t want to feel that America is being exploited by Europeans and the Europeans can spend all their money on welfare state programs instead of defense, because Americans will pay for the defense.

As an American who lives in Europe now and who wants Europe to succeed, it bothers me that it is so dependent on the United States in so many ways and that the Europe feels it has to do what Washington wants.

JD is right, if you’re going to depend on the King’s pence, you better obey the King’s law. By which I mean I’m glad he’s standing up for Elon Musk and free speech because that ultimately helps my friends in Europe, the conservatives who stand to suffer under restrictive free speech guidelines.

For example, Ursula von der Leyen at the Davos leaving this year World Economic Forum said that the number one threat to Europe was not mass migration, not the war with Ukraine, not the economy – the number one threat is disinformation.

And she explained, because that keeps us, the governing class, from doing what we want to do. That was shocking to me. And that made me understand why free speech is so necessary. The same people like Ursula von der Leyen in the US want to do the same thing. So we have to keep free speech.

It’s not the right of America to impose its values on Europe, I’m for sovereignty. At the same time, though, Europe would have a stronger case to tell America to stay in its lane, so to speak, if it shouldered more of the economic burden, financial burden, of its own defense.

Sure, NATO states are obliged to spend at least 2% of their GDP for defense. But what I mean by blackmailing is that now the United States might want to condition their support for European countries with totally unrelated requests.

I live in Budapest, and I see how the European Union has tried the same thing on Hungary. And I think in some ways it hasn’t respected Hungarian sovereignty. In 2021 the Hungarian parliament passed the bill forbidding LGBT information to minors and students. The prime minister of the Netherlands said that Hungary should be thrown out of the EU. So I know what that feels like to be bullied, and I don’t like it.

I don’t want America to bully Europe as a general principle. At the same time, I see Elon Musk is a really significant figure of our time just in terms of free speech. If we don’t have free speech – and I don’t mean everybody could say whatever they want – then we give over our societies to the governance of these liberal oligarchs.

And I don’t think in the end that the American government would follow through on any, any real plan to punish Europe for opposing Elon Musk. But I still think as a general principle, it’s important for Europeans to recognize that this relationship with the US is the relationship of dependency is probably not healthy for Europe or for America.

It really bothered me to see how the Germans in particular were so willing to destroy their own economy to do what America wanted them to do with the Ukraine war. That’s not good for Europe, and it’s not good for America either. We Americans are not doing well for ourselves when we demand that our allies agree with us on everything.

I’m not giving you a clear answer here. I’m ambiguous about what JD said there.

I hate what the Europeans are doing to Elon Musk. I saw the Der Spiegel a month ago. They had a picture of Musk with a headline “public enemy number two”. Behind Donald Trump.

And I thought, my God, this is crazy. If it hadn’t been for X, this election could have gone a different way. Because the mainstream media were so much on the same story. On X, you could read about things that weren’t in your local newspapers but were true.

Do you mean something like when in October 2020 both Facebook and Twitter banned sharing of New York Post’s article about Hunter Biden laptop story? 

Exactly. And now it’s come out from Mark Zuckerberg who testified the FBI put pressure on all of those social media companies, Facebook and others to censor themselves. What the hell does the FBI have doing that? That’s insane. This is the thing that worries me, that the ruling class both in Europe and in the United States will use its power to censor information it doesn’t like.

We know that free speech is lifeblood of any free society. I don’t know what you think about Elon Musk, I hate his transhumanism so much but thank God for him and free speech.

Elon Musk is such a classic American figure. An immigrant who comes here and while our government is so busy having diversity day and they keep failing in space, Elon Musk is sending rocket after rocket up. He’s a heroic figure. Americans really want to be inspired by a heroic figure by a great man.

From the left, all we get is that the great men who settled this country were all bigots and they probably hated trans people back in the 1800s. It’s this constant self-hatred that it just at some point you just get sick.

I think this is what Ronald Reagan stood for too. One reason Reagan resonated so powerfully with the American people. We had just come out of the 1960s and the 1970s, which were a terrible time, a time of defeatism, time of chaos and loss of spirit, and Reagan gave us reason to believe in ourselves again.

It’s hard to see that Donald Trump will do that because he doesn’t have the sunny character of Reagan. But maybe the people Trump surrounds himself with, JD Vance and Elon Musk, maybe that’s their role. We’ll see.