Will JD Vance be Trump’s vice presidential candidate? He could be the next Chris Christie.

The Republican National Convention begins on Monday, and the most talked-about vice presidential candidate right now is Senator JD Vance of Ohio. In recent months, he has made dozens of television appearances in support of Donald Trump and even agreed to an interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times. The Atlantic and New York Magazine are touting him not only as a possible Republican vice presidential candidate, but as the heir to the MAGA movement in general. His status as the favorite for the vice presidential election has reached the point that Republican donors who favor rival candidates Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum – Burgum is the wealthy governor of North Dakota – are anonymously denouncing Vance to the Daily Beast.

Vance is the guy, it seems… or, alternatively, he is about to become the Chris Christie of 2024, the ambitious self-promoter who has a timely change of heart about Trump that will move him forward Only far enough into the vice presidential candidacy to be humiliated to the maximum.

There are good, conventional reasons to think Trump might choose Vance. In a campaign that is (currently) heavily weighted towards age and verbal ability, he is young (39) and a good televised orator. He is from Ohio, which could theoretically make him a compelling liaison with voters in the neighboring swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania (though he actually underperformed other Republicans in the state in his 2022 Senate run, winning his race by a narrower margin than Trump did against Biden two years earlier). He is very popular with Silicon Valley’s growing right-wing ruling class, which could be useful for large-scale fundraising.

But consider the similarities between Vance and Christie. Vance grew up in the working class, as he described in his book Hillbilly Elegybut he attended Yale Law School and ran multi-billionaire venture capital firms; he rose to prominence as a public figure in the snobbish elite circles from which Trump was always excluded and whom he despised. During Trump’s first campaign – when Vance speculated to a friend that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” – he was a regular in the Times opinion column and at the Aspen Institute. Thanks to elegyBecause of his open criticism of the morals of the white working class, he enjoyed a reputation as an honest conservative among liberals and the centrist press.

Vance toned down his criticism of Trump around the time he began considering a run for the Senate. He seems to view Trump as usefully destructive, which clears the way for him to implement ideas that might otherwise only be speculated about in political theory courses and small-circulation journals. (One of Vance’s grand plans for a second Trump term is to fire all civil servants in order to purge liberalism from society. When he ran for the Senate in 2022, however, I traveled to Ohio to cover Vance, and found that in his personal life he had more in common with the cosmopolitans he publicly denounces than with the white working class with whom he claims tribal affiliation. His wife works for an elite law firm whose employees are frequent donors to the Democratic Party. The man’s relationship with the professional leadership class is complicated.)

Christie grew up in Livingston, New Jersey, the same affluent suburb where Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is from. He served as U.S. attorney and then governor of New Jersey. He seems more like a real American than Vance, publicly cheering on the Dallas Cowboys and once doing a few shifts as an anchor on New York’s famed sports-talk station WFAN. But when he was most successful – his popularity probably peaked in 2012 and 2013 during his first term as governor – his national reputation, too, was based on being an honest conservative that liberals could listen to. (Instead of rural poverty, Christie’s call-it-all issues were government spending and teachers’ unions.) He was a Republican, but one who felt at home in coastal and urban areas; he took moderate positions on abortion and gay rights. The Times’ David Brooks was a big fan.

But Christie timed his presidential bid well, and lost significant popularity when his New Jersey administration was caught causing traffic jams to exact political revenge on a small-town mayor. When he actually ran in 2016, he, like most other Republicans at the time, was disdainful and dismissive of Trump’s candidacy. But when he dropped out, he quickly tied himself to Trump by pledging his early support and taking on the role of campaign adviser/surrogate. Christie was led to believe that this activity could lead to a vice presidential nomination, and he also had plans to be nominated for attorney general. Ultimately, he was nominated for nothing.

This is usually the pattern among people who join Trump because they think they can use him to advance their own plans to reshape the world—Steve Bannon fits that description—or because he is a way to stay relevant. (In this category, one could put not only Christie, but also Rudy Giuliani and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham—the latter two were also, before they became MAGA, the kind of socially moderate, maverick Republicans the press loves. Frankly, I’m beginning to suspect that these people care more about attention than Really I don’t care how it is.) Trump may have poor judgment and a ruthless leadership style, but he seems to understand who is truly loyal to him and who is not. (This often works to his political disadvantage.) If you don’t Really one of his people, he screws you over and eventually cuts the thread. Bannon is in prison facing further prosecution for a money-making scheme he was involved in after being banished from the White House. Giuliani is bankrupt and has lost his law license, and Christie almost died because Trump (probably) infected him with COVID. Vance, who has Bannon’s grandiose dreams of reordering society And Given the chameleon-like political history of others, you may want to be cautious.

And then of course there is the question of whether Vance looks like a guy who would play a vice president on TV. Trump traditionally makes his appointments by deciding which candidate for a particular role looks most like he was sent for the job by “central hiring,” and the bearded, childlike Vance has less of that quality than the telegenic Rubio or Burgum, who looks like a cross between the Founding Fathers and an eagle. (The hype surrounding South Carolina Senator Tim Scott has died down recently, but he looks the part, too.) Trump has claims He likes Vance’s beard, and the RNC’s speech schedule also raised eyebrows, as the vice presidential candidate will be introduced by Donald Trump Jr., with whom Vance has often appeared at rallies and with whom he is reportedly friends.

Maybe it means something. But on the other hand, there is Nothing Trump loves more than the embarrassment of his son Donald Jr. Perhaps the humiliation of JD Vance will be a two for one.