In the Senate, Vance’s right-wing drift led him to associate with the Heritage Foundation, a reactionary think tank responsible for “Project 2025,” a 922-page anti-worker and pro-business document listing far-right proposals that corporate and neo-fascist forces aim to implement following the presidential election.

Among some of its recommendations are the elimination of government agencies like the Department of Education and the privatization of Medicare and Social Security, cutting Medicaid, promoting, even indoctrinating children with a hard-right world view, banning abortions and restricting some contraceptives. Its program includes mass detentions, deportations and family separations of immigrants. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has called Vance a “leading voice for the conservative movement.” (ABC, July 15)

During a 2021 podcast, Vance stated that if he could offer Trump one piece of advice, it would be to “Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with ‘our’ people.” (Vox, July 18) One of Project 2025’s most controversial proposals is to fire and replace thousands of federal civil service workers with far-right “loyalists.”

Since Project 2025 is unpopular among most voters, Trump has tried to distance himself from it on social media. But his pick for vice president epitomizes the project.

Peter Thiel is rumored to be the person who introduced Trump to Vance. According to various media reports, the three attended a $300,000-a-person dinner of crypto-currency billionaires in San Francisco in May.

Vance is full of contradictions. While claiming to oppose funding to the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine on the one hand, he embraces the genocide in Palestine on the other. He criticizes Joe Biden for backing the U.S. occupation of Iraq—which is true—but omits that a Republican administration planned and executed the war.

Vance cannot be a genuine defender of one segment of the working class while attacking and degrading the rest of our class. In many ways, Vance is Trump’s demagogic “mini me.”