Can J. D. Vance Serve Both God and Donald Trump?

Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Most Sundays, as J. D. Vance tells it in his new memoir, “Communion,” he and his wife, Usha, take their three children to Mass. “Sometimes we arrive late, trailed by an army of Secret Service agents, and heads turn away from the service to stare at us. I quietly apologize, wondering if the other parishioners can tell that we didn’t brush our daughter’s hair.” This past Sunday, though, Vice-President Vance was in Lucerne, Switzerland, playing peacemaker—tasked with working out the details of the Administration’s vague memorandum of understanding with Iran, which is meant to put an end to President Donald Trump’s war of choice against that nation. Before Vance set out, Trump had made his sense of the stakes clear: “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t, I’m blaming J.D.” So it was that a few days after sitting for interviews about a book recounting his conversion to Catholicism—a press tour seen as a soft opening for his likely 2028 Presidential campaign—the self-styled “devout Christian” found himself the public face of a war that he had once privately been reluctant to support, trying to negotiate a truce on behalf of his profane and immoral boss. How, then, does his faith shape his approach to matters of war and peace? You might expect to find out from “Communion,” which is subtitled “Finding My Way Back to Faith,” but much of the book focusses on Vance’s life before politics, and it doesn’t touch much on this subject.

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“Communion” is a clunky mix of memoir, dad monologue, starchy Catholic disquisition, apologia, and broadside about the perilous state of the world. It was nearly a decade in the making, but it has the hasty quality of writing done by a father of three who works for an overbearing man and who gets his best downtime aboard Air Force Two. Styled as a confessional, it’s more like a humblebrag—the story of a man’s search for self-knowledge that winds up conveying his robust self-regard. And yet the book’s muddled character is revealing. “Communion” has been published amid circumstances that were hardly conceivable when Vance began writing it, not long after he finished his début memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016. The candidate about whom, in a note to a friend that year, he had worried might be “America’s Hitler,” Donald Trump, is now serving a nonconsecutive second term in the White House, and Vance is now his Vice-President. The Pope, Leo XIV, is an American from Chicago’s bungalow belt, and, after him, the second most prominent American Catholic is Vance himself—a youngish convert from small-town evangelical Protestantism, a Marine veteran, and an alumnus of Ohio State and Yale Law. He worked in venture capital, for a time at a firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire (and lecturer on the Antichrist) co-founder of PayPal; briefly served in the Senate; and is apparently setting up a bid for the Presidency with a book about what he calls his “search for a relevant faith.”