J.D. Vance spoke to the nation for the first time as former President Donald Trump’s running mate on Wednesday, headlining the third night of the Republican National Convention.
Vance began his speech by praising Trump’s resilience following the assassination attempt against him on Saturday, suggesting as he did then that Democratic rhetoric was to blame for the shooting. “I want all Americans to go and watch the video of a would-be assassin coming a quarter of an inch from taking his life,” he said. “Consider the lies they told you about Donald Trump, and then look at that photo of him defiant.”
“Now consider what they said,” he continued. “They said he was a tyrant. They said he must be stopped at all costs. But how did he respond? He called for national unity, for national calm, literally right after an assassin nearly took his life.”
Trump may have told a few interviewers that he wants to unify the nation, but he’s since continued to attack Democrats as usual on Truth Social, bashing Biden and Democratic “witch hunts” and calling his opponents “Communists.” Trump will speak at the RNC on Thursday.
The rest of Vance’ speech was a mix of stories about his upbringing — which he chronicled in his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy — and standard-fare MAGA talking points. He bashed immigrants, claiming they’ve been stealing jobs from Americans; emphasized the need to bring manufacturing back to the United States; took a thinly veiled jab at NATO by saying “we will make our allies share in the burden of securing world peace”; and decried “deadly Chinese fentanyl” coming across the border.
“We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street,” said Vance. “We’ll commit to the working man.” He continued: “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and non union alike.”
Vance’s populist economic message was more refined than much of the gobbledygook that speakers offered during the RNC’s “Make America Wealthy Again” night on Monday.
This labor-friendly rhetoric may only go so far. An outside adviser who counsels Trump on economic issues recently told Rolling Stone that within the past several months, the former president has privately slammed the unusually pro-union Biden-era National Labor Relations Board, adding that Trump agrees the NLRB must be “pro-business” again like it was during his time in office.
Trump chose the first-term Ohio senator on Monday, bringing a close to months of speculation about whom the former president would tap to join him on the 2024 presidential ticket. Vance, 39, doesn’t have much political experience, but he has close ties to Silicon Valley while holding extreme right-wing views — particularly on abortion — that align with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy platform.
Vance may seem a strange choice to many because of his history of bashing Trump. He has called the former president “noxious,” an “idiot,” “cultural heroin,” and a “moral disaster” who could turn into “America’s Hitler.” He went full MAGA during his Senate run, however, landing Trump’s endorsement and winning the seat comfortably. He’s been one of Trump’s most ardent supporters ever since, and said that, unlike Mike Pence, he would have done whatever he could to stop the certification of the Electoral College on Jan. 6, 2021, if he were vice president at the time. Trump has now made him heir apparent to his perch atop the Republican Party.
Vance’s ascension has been widely praised by the right, while Democrats have warned that his place on the ticket confirms that Trump is ready and willing to implement the kind of far-right agenda outlined in Project 2025. “Trump looked for someone he knew would be a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on Wednesday. “Make no mistake: J.D. Vance will be loyal only to Trump, not to our country.” The Biden campaign responded to Vance’s speech on Wednesday by calling him “the poster boy for Project 2025.”
Vance becoming the vice presidential nominee also confirms a second Trump administration would be a disaster for women. The former president is attempting to campaign as a so-called “moderate” on abortion, despite appointing three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, ending federal protections for abortion rights and allowing states to ban the procedure. Instead of endorsing a national abortion ban during the 2024 campaign, Trump has instead declared that the issue should be left to the states.
As Rolling Stone reported Wednesday, Vance endorsed the idea of a national abortion ban when he was running for Senate in 2022. “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” he said, arguing that state-by-state regulations wouldn’t work.
“Let’s say Roe v. Wade is overruled,” Vance said on a podcast. “Ohio bans abortion … you know, in let’s say 2024. And then, every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.”
He subsequently called a proposed 15-week national abortion ban “totally reasonable.”
Vance didn’t mention abortion in his hour onstage on Wednesday.
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Elon Musk posts incessantly about protecting Western civilization.
How Saving Western Civilization Replaced Making America Great Again
“She’s a traitor to the West.”
Elon Musk posted this on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a “caricatured” image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed Musk, challenging his views on Europe, and confronting him for supporting far-right politicians and parties from Germany to the UK. Beddoes never questioned the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, separation of powers, equal protection under the law, or human rights. But in Musk’s mind, her pushing back on his caricature of Europe as a continent colonized by immigrant invaders proved enough to make her a “traitor to the West.”
The idea of “saving the West” isn’t limited to the feverish online posting of the world’s richest man. If one surveys the conservative media landscape on any given day, the call to “rescue Western civilization” appears ubiquitous. For example, on August 5, 2026, the day after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, the civilizationist discourse popped up in every corner of the American right. Podcaster Benny Johnson called for more politicians willing to “fight for Western civilization.” Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, released a podcast interview titled “The Battle Western Civilization.” Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, posted: “The Democratic Party is being taken over by anti-American candidates who hate the values that underpin Western civilization.”
Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, posted in response to a video montage of Abdul El-Sayed: “This race isn’t just about tax rates, or health care, or immigration enforcement. It’s about more than politics now. This is a fight over America and whether the enemies of Western civilization are right.”
None of this even touches the civilizationist outrage many on the American right — including Musk — expressed over the casting of Black actors in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Civilizationalist discourse isn’t a new summer trend. It’s surged since Trump’s second inauguration. In a July 2025 interview, Lara Trump even asked her father-in-law about his supposed nickname, the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”
I’ve spent the last two and a half years investigating the growing alliance among Protestant Reconstructionist Christians like Doug Wilson and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; radical traditional Catholics like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Vice President JD Vance; and Silicon Valley technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin. What’s become clear: “Saving Western civilization” is now the unifying rallying cry of the American right, surpassing Trump’s infamous “make America great again” slogan and even the Christian nationalist mantra of taking America back for God. There’s a reason for this change. As I argue in my new book American Caesar, the crusade to rescue Western civilization provides an umbrella discourse that unites tech reactionaries with traditional Catholics and extremist Protestants in a loose alliance against immigrants, non-Christians, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who criticizes the United States.
While extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree on issues related to AI, surveillance, and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like antifa, trans people, and feminists is the paramount issue of our time. Even though Elon Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threaten it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational, rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to “our way of life.”
As opposed to Christian nationalism or MAGA, civilizationalism also provides a horizontal plane that transcends the United States, including Europe in the effort to rescue civilization from both attacking barbarians and domestic enemies.
In many ways, the civilizationalist discourse emanating from every corner of the American right is an escalation of the Christian nationalist currents that have been center stage during the Trump era. As the scholars Yilmaz and Morieson argue, “Civilizationism is an idea which posits that the world and its peoples can be divided into several ‘civilizations’, most of them defined by religion.” Western civilizationalists render “Western” people as moral, rational, and outright superior to others based on their religious-cultural values. This escalates MAGA’s hallmark xenophobia and Christian nationalism because civilizationalist discourse posits that “non-Westerners” “belong to a foreign civilization with inferior values derived from an inferior religion.” In other words, they are inexorably less than “us” as a people, and therefore unassimilable. There’s no room here for legal migration, pluralism, or multiculturalism. Rather, we are left with a vision akin to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations model, wherein different people groups across the world hold competing values that can never be cohered. Moreover, American citizens who promote “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” or “anti-capitalist” views are suspected of being linked to either Islamist, or communist foreign networks. They are a foreign enemy cosplaying as real Americans. The goal of civilizationism is isolationist purity. The strategy to achieve it? Civilizational warfare.
Thus, we arrive at a startling truth: When Christian nationalists and technocrats rally to “save Western civilization,” their efforts are not meant to shore up democratic institutions, reinvigorate civic norms surrounding free and fair elections, protect free speech, or defend free thought. When a Texas A&M professor was told he couldn’t teach Plato — the pre-eminent philosopher of ancient Greece and perhaps all of Western civilization (outside of Jesus) — without permission, there was no uproar. When books are banned, the civilizationalists don’t blink.
Their retrieval of Western virtue is not focused on the merits of Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, much less the Enlightenment values of free choice, personal autonomy, or freedom from religious imposition and/or censorship. In this case, saving Western civilization doesn’t mean empowering We the People, it means rescuing the country from the “immoral elites” who have sold out our country to inferior foreigners; the domestic infidels who refuse to abide by the binary gender and sex norms that both technocrats like Musk and Christian nationalists like Vance and Hegseth prescribe.
If a pure society, rather than a free one, is what they are trying to save, we are left with an important question: Who is going to do the rescuing?
There has been plenty of extremism among Christian nationalists for decades. However, what we are witnessing now is frightening escalation to something more radical: the desire to replace We the People with an all-powerful leader to purify the United States — a Red Caesar, a Protestant Franco, an Appalachian Pinochet, an Unbound Executive, or a Tech Monarch. In other words, a second American Revolution, but this time to seat someone like a king, rather than to break away from one.
There is an abundance of evidence that Trump and his allies are trying to manifest something resonant with these models. Elon Musk’s implementation of DOGE early in Trump’s second term echoed the tech-dissident Curtis Yarvin’s notoriously monarchist ideals. When he took the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early in 2025, Musk began implementing a “hard reboot” of the government following Yarvin’s blueprint. Musk’s DOGE lieutenants openly claim Yarvin as their greatest philosophical inspiration for gutting federal agencies, laying off workers, and destroying the social safety net. One DOGE team member told The Washington Post that Yarvin represents “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE is trying to achieve. Another said that “it’s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,” and are using his authoritarian theory “to empower people on the ground to actually do stuff — even if they can’t admit it publicly.”
There is more evidence in the form of Trump’s defiance of the courts, particularly when it comes to his effort to rid the nation of the kind of external threats so often cited by Musk and his fellow guardians of civilization. An Associated Press review from May 2026 found that in 31 lawsuits his administration had “250 instances of noncompliance” in immigration cases, “from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.”
The list goes on: The Trump administration kidnapped and imprisoned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and took control of the country’s oil. Now, Marco Rubio is ruling the country from afar with no plan for elections any time soon. To date, Trump has not received congressional approval for the war with Iran, which has been ongoing since February. Trump tried to rename the Kennedy Center. He demolished the East Wing of the White House. And his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was just appointed head of the Department of Justice. Oh, lest I forget: Trump ignored the Constitution completely when he tried to deport U.S.-born Americans.
The move toward an American Caesar, in many respects, is no longer a Christian nationalist movement, at least not in the way we often think of it.
The dream of the right is no longer to restore a time when white Christianity went hand in hand with America; a restoration of the supposed pax Americana of the 1950s. The outlook now is more grim and more extreme.
In the face of demographic change, cultural progress, and global crises, Christian Reconstructionists, reactionary Catholics, and Silicon Valley magnates long to “save” Western civilization by replacing American democracy with a post-constitutional Caesar who will rule without the burden of checks and balances or the sharing of power in any meaningful way. Trump is doing everything he can to oblige them.
Bradley Onishi is author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, on sale September 15 via Macmillan Publishers.