In picking Vance, Trump takes another step away from Ukraine

In May 2017, just one day after Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating his many ties to Russia, the then-president hosted Russian Ambassador Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for an Oval Office photo-op—and, famously, the off-script revelation of some highly classified information. Less famously, Vice President Mike Pence took a meeting with Ukraine’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin the same day. This was no coincidence, according to a Ukrainian embassy worker and two members of Pence’s staff. After the meeting with the Russians ended, Pence personally led Klimkin into the Oval Office to ensure that Trump was photographed with the Ukrainian.

Trump himself bore witness to the meeting the following day, issuing a tweet that contained photos from both meetings and the words “Lets [sic] Make Peace!” 

Peace did not win out.

Russia, of course, had launched its war on Ukraine three years earlier, seizing Crimea and bankrolling a separatist movement in the country’s east. Two years later, Trump would improperly block U.S. military aid to Kyiv in a bid to extort dirt on his political opponent. And three years after that, Russian invasion forces would drive into Ukraine, supercharging a conflict on European soil that has since taken the lives of more than 31,000 Ukrainian troops and more than 10,000 civilians. 

If you watched Mike Pence’s public appearances during the first year of the Trump administration—say, in Poland, or before the Atlantic Council—you would detect three acts in his prepared remarks. In act one, the vice president would reassure the audience that the United States loved and appreciated them. He would go on to cast Donald Trump as a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, a stalwart ally of Western governments facing undemocratic barbarians. Finally, he would attempt to blend both into a single coherent fabric, to reassure the audience that whatever they might have heard about Trump, he was a reliable friend to all who allied themselves with America’s interests. 

In Pence’s formulation, that meant standing proudly by Ukraine and naming Russian leader Vladimir Putin as an adversary of American–and democratic–values and ideals. 

On Monday, on the first day of the Republican National Convention, Trump formally selected Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his new presidential running mate. The contrast between the two VP picks shows how quickly and dramatically conservatism can change. If Pence was a predictable artifact of the Republican party’s ties to Reagan, then Vance—at least in his current incarnation—is very much a creature of Trump’s GOP. 

His fast-rising political career finds its support in a three-legged stool. The first leg is Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s best-selling-book-turned-movie. It paints a portrait of an intellectually vibrant but economically disenfranchised rural American working-class family whose simple and true ways are held in contempt by the country’s corrupt social elites. Elegy is a romanticized version of poor white America, ever humble and hardworking as their rightful inheritance slips away, a theme at the core of Trump’s political appeal to his base and how this base views itself. 

Vance’s second pillar: Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who helped bankroll his Senate campaign as part of a widening effort to influence the makeup and operations of the U.S. government. Influence to what end? Only Thiel knows, but his well-documented techno-libertarian ethos stands much in contrast to democratic norms and ideals. 

The third pillar of Vance’s political identity is his opposition to U.S. aid to Ukraine. NATO’s recent pledge to (eventually) invite Kyiv to join the alliance? Vance hates the idea.

What to make of the stark contrast between Trump’s VP picks? Quite simply: should the former president return to office, allies of Ukraine and fans of a U.S. foreign policy that privileges the defense of democracy won’t have the West Wing voice they once did.