‘A Deeply Anxious Personality’: Three Opinion Writers on JD Vance’s New Book

But I guess he really has become Catholic. I happen to like the line, but I found liberation in guilt. And so I said, "Hey, he's the real deal. Welcome, J.D. Right." I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times' opinion. And this week I am here with two of my favorite people, columnist Carlos Lazada, and contributing writer J.D. Young. Guys, it is so fantastic to see you. Thank you. Likewise. Good to be here. I bet you say that to all your favorite people. I cannot affirm nor deny. How many favorites can you really have? I'm not taking your abuse. I'm not. Take it all back. I hate you both. But while I hate you both, I am extremely excited to talk to you guys this week because we're going to dig in to Vice President J.D. Vance's new memoir Communion. It's all about Vance's faith journey, how he grew up evangelical, he lost his religion, eventually came around and embraced Catholicism. So we're going to talk about the book. We're going to talk about his relationship to faith and what all of it reveals about the man who may be the future of the MAGA movement. But first, I feel like we should do a little grounding. So I want us to go back 10 years to 2016 when Vance's breakout book, Bill Billy Elegy, was published. So at the time, he was a young graduate at Yale Law School. He was working for venture capitalist Peter Tio. And the book, which told the story of his extremely rocky upbringing, was welcomed as something of like the resetta stone for explaining to blue state Americans in particular, the class dynamics of the emerging Trump era. So I want from each of you to just kind of give me your thumbnail impression of Vance at that time based on that book. So I'd never heard of J.D. Vance before, Hillbilly Elegy. I'm assuming that was the case for a lot of people. And so my entire sort of view of him was mediated through the book. He seemed like a thoughtful person. He's a good writer. This Hillbilly Elegy is a much better written book than Communion. And he was trying to give flesh to those debates over clash and culture and economics that were emerging around the 2016 election. It was a Trump book that never really mentioned Donald Trump. My friend Jennifer senior who was at the time of book critic at the New York Times called the book a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election. And I think Vance fulfilled that role very well. E.J. I think that there are two things about this book that relate to that one. One, clearly this is the second book in a contract or was originally envisioned as the follow-up to a very successful book because he gives it away in the book where he says, you know, this original manuscript was done a long time ago. And I think what that does is two things. One, I think he's trying to clean up some of the impressions left by the first book. He's kind of kinder to his family, kinder to everybody here because he got some real criticism for how he treated Appalachia in that book. And secondly, he decided not to publish whatever he wrote in that first draft because he then suddenly became a senator and the vice presidential nominee and vice president. So this book has a feeling of several books at once. The sequel to Hillbilly Elegy, a story of his conversion to Catholicism. And then a lot of political stuff about how to understand him. So I think at times you could see the seams of these three or four projects as you read the book. Oh, definitely. It has a cobbled together feel. But Carlos, how do you think this new book kind of fits into or builds on the story? He was, he's been telling about himself. Yeah, I mean, everything with JD Vance is about transformations, right? It's about, it's about journeys that he's taking from one version of himself to another. You know, in Hillbilly Elegy, well, first, this is the story of his ancestors moving from, you know, the mountains of Kentucky to, you know, Southwest Ohio where he had a chaotic kind of abusive childhood. He makes it to the Marines, then to Ohio State, then Yale Law, right? And kind of like adapts and becomes a different person at each step. Communion, which is published almost exactly 10 years after Hillbilly Elegy is about a different passage. It's about his move from his early Christianity to atheism to Catholicism, somewhat so that, you know, he is even now engaging in, you know, political and doctrinal battles with the Pope. You know, it's, it's not bad for someone who was baptized less than, less than seven years ago. It's almost like he's filling in another side of the story that is happening at the same time as the, the action in, in Hillbilly Elegy, you know, and in fact, as, as EJ said, he started writing this book right after finishing that first one. By the way, it's funny that he has gotten into that fight with the Pope. At one point, he has a sentence, "My basic view is that too many American Catholics treat the Pope as a political figure and should instead keep a more respectful distance from Vatican politics." And I do think this book is going to be excavated quite a bit for sentences like that, that it would at least seem to me contradict some of his other behavior. Yeah, I think if we're looking for consistency or hypocrisy or, you know, there's, there's a lot to get into there. But as far as both of you have mentioned that he spent a lot of time in Hillbilly Elegy disparaging his background, his family, the culture he was raised in, and this is a much more conciliatory, almost apologetic tone. So what is your read on that? Is this some epiphany he's had? Is this more cynical kind of Carlos? You're first. I mean, you know, I, I think people do evolve over time, especially, you know, if the first, throughout, if you're, if you're sort of prominent or important or interesting enough to write multiple memoirs, Hillbilly Elegy was, you're right, very disparaging, I thought, I thought at the time and rereading it now of, of the world that he grew up in, right? He, you know, he talks about the hub of misery that he experienced in the 80s and the 90s and how it was almost always the fault of those who were suffering it. And he blamed the culture, right? He didn't blame, you know, big amorphous political or economic forces. It's very much a personal responsibility kind of book. Whereas in communion, he is far more understanding, his, his, his grandmother, his mama looms very large in both books. And the first book, she, you know, he quotes her as saying, you know, never be like those effing losers who think the deck is stacked against them. And the second book, she's kind of a softer presence, right? He says, she's the woman whose life has taught me the most about Christian love in virtue, right? She's still intense, but a little bit less so. Communion is less about the dysfunction of his early life and more about the faith that he drew out of that life. I'm not saying it's necessarily a contradiction. It's, it's a matter of, of emphasis, I think. See, I think if he did a trilogy, the third volume would be how I burned one bridge after another, because I think one of the striking things about him is this constant reinvention as Carlos suggested. So this book, he's trying to kind of put himself right with Appalachia after that insult, but then he goes and trashes his Yale Law School background. And again, some ironies in the book, he seems to trash the Ivy League's meritocratic structure, which is very odd for somebody who goes into law school. Silicon Valley makes a lot of money, runs for Senate, gets elected vice president. That looks pretty meritocratic upward mobile to me, but he trashes Yale Law School and wants to make himself a kind of a paladin of the people. You're not sure where he is going to land. And that's why I suspect to the third volume of the trilogy, if it comes, we're going to go to a different place again. I don't know if he's going to become his other Baptist again, but it just does not seem stable to me. Oh, I'd be there for that, you know, the lap Southern Baptist. I mean, communion does read to me like a book by man who is a deeply anxious personality, carries serious real scars from his childhood, and who doesn't really know who he is even now, and certainly doesn't know what he wants people to think about him. I mean, as you know, he denounces striverly elites, but he quotes them endlessly in this book and he surrounds himself with them in his life. He decries materialism, but he's a former venture capitalist, his mentor is Peter Teo. And it's very hard to even get a handle on what he wants as a Catholic from the church, and specifically the Pope in terms of involvement with worldly issues. Sometimes he wants less. Sometimes he wants more. His arguments about what he wants from society are also a little confused. I mean, he limits that work obsessed strivery dads don't get to spend time hanging out with their family anymore, you know, not to nitpick, but married dads today spend much more time taking care of their kids. kids than they did in the good old days. And he laments that professional couples, outsource chores that kind of keep you grounded in real life. OK, great. But the chores he lists are pretty much all what used to be done by full-time housewives, which is a model on bedding wouldn't fly in his own house. So when you boil it all down, he basically strikes me as someone who grew up with tremendous instability and he's constantly braced for disaster. And he thought that clawing his way out of poverty would solve not just his economic troubles, but like all of his existential angst. And then he wound up disappointed that the elite world he landed in had its own deep flaws, which, OK, duh. But the Catholic Church has given him structure and a sense of history and permanence. And now he seems upset that he can't find a way to map that onto the world outside of the church. And I think that's what I took away from this. It's just like somebody deeply still searching for something that's going to make him feel better and just kind of desperate to take what has worked for him and map it onto everything. Michelle, I think there is a one sentence proof of this, or at least an indicator of the truth of what you just said. The sentence that really hit me as the truest sentence in the book is when he writes, "I am permanently terrified that things will unravel." And it's quite clear that in the sort of solidity the long-term existence of the Roman Catholic Church, the complexity but sort of clarity of its theology clearly appeals to him. EJ, you mentioned the word unravel, right? That he's a man afraid of things coming apart of things unraveling. And that's actually a point of consistency with Hilba Leelogy, right? I was, when you said it, I started looking through my copy and because it rang a bell. And he says that when he was about nine years old, things began to unravel at home. And those things mark you as a child from the very beginning. This is a constant fear of his. I see what you mean, Michelle. When you think that this is a book that's sort of scattered, that it's a guy who doesn't really know who he is, what he wants. I don't disagree with that. My interpretation would also be both a little kinder but also just a bit more cynical at the same time. I think this is a book by a guy who has deep political aspirations. By the way, I think the guy who Hilba Leelogy also did. It's, when I finished that book at the time, I was like, this guy's going to run for something, you know? But I think that what he's trying to do in communion is to satisfy all sorts of different constituencies. And so what looks like sort of scatter shot kind of all over the place is him thinking like, okay, this is for this group, this is for that group. And that's what politicians, especially sitting politicians do, you know? Hilba Leelogy managed to have widespread bipartisan appeal, right? Because it confirmed the elite liberal suspicions about though, you know, working class pathologies of like the Trump voters, but also affirmed the, you know, up by your bootstraps, ethos of kind of conventional conservatism, right? So there's something for everyone, right? You know, here, the something for everyone approach doesn't work as well, because as EJ said, it's multiple books at once, you know? Like here's some religion, here's some stuff of why social media is bad, you know? Here's why those people at Yale Law School were too ambitious. You know, people read Hilba Leelogy in order to understand the, you know, the anger and the needs and the concerns of the white working class. Vance himself was just a vehicle for that understanding. He doesn't have that luxury anymore of that distance. We read a communion to understand JD Vance, right? And so not only is the book not as good, but it's a harder sell. - So the part that I really found most intriguing was what he is kind of peddling it as, which is his journey, his faith journey. I, you know, as noted, I grew up Southern Baptist. I, you know, kind of totally relate to his angsting about the Protestantism that he grew up in and all its emotion-based and the charisma and so much of it being based on whether you're having a very intense personal experience with God. And I totally get how he wound up drawn to Catholicism. But I'm coming at this as someone, obviously, who grew up in the Hellfire and Brimstone side of this. I want the take of you guys, 'cause you're cradle Catholics, right? Both of you? - Yeah. - I still am one. I want to say on that point, I said, I guess he really has become Catholic. And so I said, "Hey, he's the real deal." - Welcome, welcome, JD Vance, right? - Exactly. - And then he talks about guilt and forgiveness and the importance of forgiveness. That's all pretty conventional stuff. And there are moments when I'm reading this and I say, "Somebody with my views could have written "some of this, which surprises somebody like me "with JD Vance, his analysis of rarem novarum, "the great social and cyclical of Pope Leo XIII, "which has inspired the current Pope Leo. "Ritten when industrialism was on the rise, "in defense of workers' rights, "in defense of a decent society "where people earned a family wage. "Those pages are pretty damn good "as a description of all of that. "The problem is he has a really tough time "reconciling that with the policies "of the Trump administration, "with some of the basic policies of the Republican Party. "He picks a little bit here and a little bit there "to say, see where consistent with this. "But I think again, it's this conflict "between JD Vance who really wants to be sometimes "this sort of social justice Catholic "and at other times still needs to conform "to his role in the Republican Party. "Now, I suspect there's gonna be some nox "at some of what he says about business "from our friends over at the Wall Street Journal. "I'm very anxious to see how they deal with this part "of JD Vance, but he has a lot of trouble here. "The other thing that strikes me, "and Carlos and I talked a little bit about this before, "it's not exactly Christian nationalism, "but it may be Christian nationalism like, "because he's obsessed with the collapse "of Christian civilization. "And he gets really angry at Europe "for becoming more secular. "There's a moment when he goes into an empty church in France, "it turns out I think there was somebody in there, as he notes, and he says, "This is what's happened to the faith of Europe." And he wants to say that with Europe and the world have forgotten the virtue of Christian civilization, I guess without wanting to say that actually coming to terms with modernity for Catholicism, for Christianity, was actually a pretty good idea after the rise of Nazism and fascism. So on the one hand, there are moments where you say, this looks authentic, but then you're still left with some real questions about how does he really reconcile his actual politics with what he's writing here? - Carlos, do you want to get theological before we dig more into the politics of it all? - Sure, yeah. As a product of Catholic grade school, high school, and college. - Thank you. - I'll go for it, go Irish. - I'm trying it. - So the way in which he loses his initial faith early on is that he kind of gets bored by it. He says Christianity felt too wishy-washy. He became an atheist later in the military and in college, and certainly at aggressively secular Yale, but he really says that when he comes home from Iraq in 2006, he was no longer a Christian, right? And so what's interesting to me is that what draws him to Catholicism is not any kind of dark night of the soul, not some big transformational experience, though he does mention some moments, but it's really kind of the intellectual core of the faith. He thinks and reasons his way to Catholicism. He's asking himself the big questions. You know why it is an all-powerful and loving God, create a world with so much suffering in it. He thinks of his own upbringing. He says he suffered the mortal sin of despair, right? And he finds some solace in Catholic thought and theology on this, right? He's drawn to the sacraments, right? To the ongoing practice of the faith, of grace as a process, as a ritual, but he really seems brought to this more by his mind than his heart. And he even says this. He says, I am most comfortable engaging with the intellectual elements of the faith, right? He has to push himself to be more sacramental, not just intellectual, to pray, not just to reason. And I was wondering what you thought about this because in my experience, it doesn't seem like an uncommon path for adult converts to Catholicism, right? Since they're not born in the faith, they're not sort of immediately steeped in the sacramental traditions, they often drawn to it by that very deep intellectual tradition of the church, which of course is very appealing. I'm not saying one is a better route than the other, right? And my father's house, there are many mansions, right? But do you see this, you know, in sort of what appeals to converts to the faith? I feel that very much. I think that's a really good description of what he says here. And I think that sense of Catholicism as an intellectual faith really does appeal to a lot of people. And at this moment, I think the flow into the church is more from, if you will, conservative intellectuals, people who look at the long tradition of the church. It's really, I want the wisdom of the ancients and the early church. And so, yes, I think he's in that stream. And this is when I can sneak in my favorite theological innovation that was in his book. This is early on. And this is more of the hillbilly allergy part of the book, but you have the NRA theology of salvation here where he is arguing with his MoMA, his grandma, about, you know, if people die and are buried, how can they go to heaven? And then they go back and forth. And JD finally comes up with this great metaphor. I quote from the book, he quoting himself, so the soul is like the bullet and the body is like the casing and God shoots off the bullet to heaven, but the casing gets trapped here on earth. That was wonderful. I think probably we had some sermons on that when I was growing up. I think what struck me and obviously the intellectualism seems to be more what he's comfortable with. He does mention that he grew up and learned to be very suspicious of emotion-driven experiences. But also as the child of dysfunction and abuse and had alcoholism and substance abuse in his family and he saw all this kind of complete chaos, it makes very clear that he likes the structure of Catholicism, which is not, which is just yards beyond what the Protestants can ever come up with. Like the ritual that there is a program toward having your soul be ready for heaven. It's not just that it happens in a flash and I totally get this, I always found this a problem with the faith tradition that I grew up in and it's just, but it clearly was an issue for him as well and he talks about how it isn't just a one and done sort of thing. The Catholic Church kind of has a program and a ritual and some structure for everything. And for a kid who grew up with no structure and no sense of permanence, he clearly loves being able to track all of Catholic history going way, way, way, way, way back. But again, what disappoints me is that such a tiny fraction of what's in this book and he has to, obviously, because he is a sitting vice president with very deep political ambitions. He has to make it political. So I want to talk about that and get a little bit granular for here. He dails into his political views, but it is kind of notable that beyond lightly touching on immigration and tariffs, he mostly avoids talking about his boss and kind of what he's been asked to do in his current position. What do you guys make of that? Carlos, you want to start? Sure. I mean, he's in a tough spot with Trump. Trump essentially put Vance in the pole position to assume leadership of MAGA down the road when he picked Vance for BP. So he's bound to him in a way, but now that Trump's popularity has severely declined, Vance needs to find some ways to separate himself from the boss. Ironically, it sounds a lot like what happened to Kamala Harris, and that did not work out super, super well. It's not a great job, BP. Except, of course, you know, that Trump may not necessarily endorse Vance, right? The way Biden endorsed Harris. He might let Rubio and Vance duke it out. We can get into that later. So Vance needs to be both a MAGA man in this book, but also a different man, his own man. And in this case, what he decides on is to be kind of a faith man. So almost it's like putting Trump and Pence in a blender, you know, which is not necessarily the most like appetizing concoction that you get at the, at the end. I would say a Trump Pence and Vance walk into a bar. How do we finish that? But the political part of the book I found actually most disturbing of all, and I agree with you utterly, Michelle, it's remarkable how little Trump is in the book. There's just enough Trump so he can get by to the next day and the next month and the next year. And does he get attacked by Trump? But where he does go actually, Trumpy is really disturbing. There's, you know, a moment of Putin apology in the book. He holds on to the idea, which is in a way, oh, he's already been discredited by the facts that Ukraine can't win this war. And he actually talks about an argument he has with someone where he's saying that Putin is actually popular in Russia. It's not just oppression, every independent objective effort to measure Putin's popularity. He writes, had found high levels of support among rank and file Russians. So why does he want to still defend Putin in this book? I don't know. And then the last area where I think the politics is particularly disturbing. And it's who he is in his defense of nativism. He sort of goes, he says, well, I'm not really nativist. We have a right to control immigration, but the sort of the harsh moments in that party tries to say they're not harsh. But it's a very hard line look. So that is the clearest signaling to the old mega part of the party, which seems like his authentic view of the world. But I think political folks are going to focus a lot on that and say, I guess this is who he is politically. And maybe that's the most authentic part of the book. One thing if I'm interesting is he semi quasi apologizes for the, for the childless cat ladies comment, but he doesn't apologize for the reading the cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Right? So by the way, the lie that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Ohio and why one and not the other, right, because childless cat ladies was all on him, whereas, you know, just JD Vance to think he said to Tucker Carlson in 2021, the lie about about, about, you know, Haitian immigrants Trump embraced that, right? And so he, and so there's no way JD Vance is going to set that aside in the same way that he tries to set aside the childless cat ladies. And the lie about the Haitians fits in with his views on immigration. So he doesn't really want to do that, but he doesn't, he can't afford to alienate women in large numbers, older women, women without children. So he's got to kind of back away from that one for political reasons. Yeah, I did find the approach to women in this book, sort of fascinating. One area that I thought was particularly interesting was like his handling of his marriage. He's taken a lot of criticism in office for not standing up for his wife. She's been criticized as overly ambitious. He goes out of his way in this book to say that Usha has actually never been the kind of ambitious he's criticizing and that, you know, he didn't love her at all for that. And he talks about his just complete dependence on her and how fantastic he is. And I'm sure I have no doubt he loves his wife. I am not questioning whether they have a great marriage or not, but it is clearly also serving a political purpose in terms of trying to walk back some of his kind of jerky bro reputation and his, you know, snottiness about women. Although, you know, he is a he is a genuine natalist. He really, really wants everybody to go out there and have some babies. And no matter how hard he tries to, you know, soften the whole childless cat lady stuff or things like that, he can't help overstating his case. And it's just like you see where he comes from politically and that he just even when he's trying to soft pedal stuff and be gracious, he can't. So like at one point, he's like, well, of course, babies are downstream of romantic love. And a society without children is a society that, you know, loses that too or whatever. And I'm like, well, one, the idea that romantic love is the basis of marriage is a very modern one. So, you know, just like step back. to know that's also not true. Now you can get into like the difference in how parents behave versus non-parents and the family ties and stuff like that. But he's not content to do that. - Well, in fact, I think that is central to his argument and I'm glad you brought up natalism 'cause that's a really another important theme of this book. And he links this so closely to Christianity and religion in the book. He says the more religious the country is the better affairs and family formation. And then there's this really interesting sentence are abandonment of Christian culture has coincided with an apparent decline in our collective will to live. You know, because we're not having babies so we're not procreating, we're not creating the next generation. Now I'm sure intellectuals and conservative intellectuals can argue about that and they would probably agree with that. But that's a really remarkable statement for someone to make and it shows, you know, again, I think this is central to who he is. He talks a lot about being a dad and you know, I think that feels authentic to me. I want to give him all that. He really seems to take joy in the idea that having children has kind of saved him from some of the instability of his earlier life and you know, maybe I found some of that a bit more convincing than the rest of the book. But again, it's very hard to read this book without thinking it's a construction of some kind and which parts are mostly constructed and which parts are authentically him. - One of his great fears seems to be that he somehow, you know, condemned or faded to pass along the instability that he experienced to his children, that's something that feels very genuine in the book, it's this really recurring concern he has. And you know, one thing that feels a little less genuine sort of like in the category of kind of trying too hard is when he like makes these, you know, big declarative statements about like, what do you think's about, you know, the role of women in society, you know, and he says like, you know, speaking of being a dad and you know, in a husband, he's like, "Well, as it happens, I do think husbands ought to share the burdens of household labor with their wives." You know, it's the right thing to do, right? And it's like he wants a medal for that, you know? It's just a little odd. The last thing I'll bring up on the cat lady's thing, not to obsess over it, but like, it's interesting to me. - No, it's interesting to me that he brings it up here. Again, like five years after saying it, right? Like when he first did it, it was back in 2021 and, you know, he said, you know, we're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too, right? Then later when he's running for vice president, he goes on meet the press, talk to Kristen Welker, and he tries to say that it was a joke, right? That I was just being sarcastic, you know? But actually, if you continue with your original quote, you know, he's making a very specific, you know, substantive point, right? He's not, it's not sarcasm, it's not funny, it's not just owning the lives to own the lives. He's saying that, you know, it's just a basic fact. Look at Kamala Harris, people to judge, people to judge who has children, by the way, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it, right? That's how it connects to the natalism argument. It's somehow, you know, if you have children, then you actually really care about America. And therefore you, you have more of a stake in the future of the country and we should pay attention to you more than if you don't. Now, in this book, you know, it's clear that he, he knows this thing continues to haunt him, right? Because he brings it up again. And he doesn't really say he's sorry, but he goes a little bit more in the direction of regret. When he spoke to Kristen Welker, he said, you know, I regret that people took it the wrong way that Democrats lied about it, you know? I'm sorry that you got your feelings hurt by me being a judge. Yeah, the worst. But here he actually says, look, this was an error, it was a failure, it was bone-headed, right? It just, to me, just suggests that he realizes he's going to continue having a problem with female voters and that could really be a problem for him. There's one other tension here that really came out at the end of the book. He is very, was very close to Charlie Kirk and that seems like a real relationship. And he, this is a book about Catholicism. Charlie Kirk is not a Catholic, although I am told that Charlie Kirk had a kind of Catholic side and understood JD Vance's attraction to Catholicism. But he wants to tell evangelicals, even though I am a Catholic, I am still connected to you because guess what? Baptists and other evangelicals are an important part of the constituency he would need to put together. And so again, there is this kind of, I say this and I believe this, but don't worry, I'm also this other thing too. Maybe taking a fight with the Pope helps in that regard too. Yeah, maybe. Why do you gotta be that? Don't take a side with the Pope. But I do think he's signaling, I think this whole book is signaling to religious conservatives that I know you may be questioning where I've wound up and some of the things I've done, but I'm really am one of you, even when this administration, as it has disappointed a lot of religious conservatives of late on the pro-life issue. I think he is trying to create some space and reassert himself as, I think Carlos you said, he's the faith man, so. But looking ahead, Vance is gonna have a lot of competition for that magma mantle and the Republican nomination. He's gonna have a lot of his colleagues coming for him. And in a recent New Yorker cover, it featured a UFC cage match fight between him and Marco Rubio with President Trump kind of dosing in the audience, which seems about right. So if Rubio is his biggest rival and Trump doesn't seem to care, how well positioned do we think Vance still is to inherit the mantle? I mean, not that Rubio will be the only one. Ted Cruz, I'm sure, is coming far. I mean, we have these parlor games so we've been playing of latest to how many people are trying to throw JD Vance under the bus so that they're better positioned for 2028. But kind of, what do you guys think about his chances and where he stands right now? I have no idea myself what the Republican race for president will look like in 2028, assuming Donald Trump agrees to leave the White House. And I think there-- No, no, no, we're not going there. I think I had to say it. But I think that there are really two possibilities. The way we think of now is who is the successor to Trump who can get Trump supporters because they loom so large in the primaries. If this thing keeps going south, I think they'll be room for some other kind of Republican who will make a case-- it'll be tricky because there'll still be a lot of Trump as no matter what he does. But he'll say, you know, if we want to survive, we've got to move on. And so maybe it's wishful thinking for the Republican Party. But I am looking to stick with the theme of this book of the thing that is unseen, of the person that is currently unseen in that field. OK, Carlos. I share EJ's reluctance to try to predict what will unfold here. If there's anything we've learned in the, quote, unquote, Trump era is that things happen that you don't necessarily expect. As Trump likes to say, we'll see what happens. Vance, I think, is well positioned to capture the sort of mega mantle. I don't know if that will be enough to win the nomination, right? Or certainly to win the presidency. Rubio may have broader appeal among sort of more conventional Republicans, if those still exist, or certainly among sort of independent voters, especially in a country where people are tired of, you know, whether it's war or inflation, or, you know, a sense of winning. So many things. So much winning. The irony in the context of Vance's books is that, you know, the more things unravel, which is always JD Vance's fear, the harder it'll be for him to be the heir apparent. OK, and we'll let you have the last word. With that, we're just going to land this plane. Guys, thank you. As always. Thank you. Learn to laugh. Good to see you, guys. Bye. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]