BREAKING: JD Vance Privately Advised Hillary Clinton's Campaign in 2016 (w/ Chris Whipple)

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1:00Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the book. And I am pleased to be joined by Chris Whipple, prolific author, chronicler of Washington, DC politics. You may know him from his great coverage of chiefs of staff at the White House. He had a great story about Susie Wiles and he's got a new story that's out on Vanity Fair by JD Vance in his time at Yale. It's titled God in Vance at Yale to play off in Buckley, obviously. And Chris is now on Substack. Welcome to the club, buddy. It's great. You can get him at Chris Whipple on Substack. Go follow him there. He's going to be posting a lot there. Chris, I was intrigued by the story both as a native new havener because there's little bread crumbs about Yale culture there that I recognize and I'll get to that in a little bit. So you get a lot of coverage of JD Vance and you read a lot about JD Vance. But you don't always find out stuff new about JD Vance and I thought you pinpointed a period of his life that was formative as college and law school in this case is for a lot

2:04of people. But also says a lot about the guy. So as you started talking to people who knew him at Yale Law, what did you discover that you didn't know? Well, thanks for having me Sam. I mean, Suzy Wiles was obviously a wild ride for me at Vanity Fair. But the story of JD Vance is equally amazing, I think. And maybe the stakes are higher because he's the two of Pinot Mane. But I went to Yale Law School where Vance began this incredible journey from Appalachian Hillbilly and X Marine just back from Iraq to Vice President. And in the beginning, I got to tell you, nobody at Yale wanted to talk about Vance. I mean, he's radioactive politically from both the left and the right for reasons we can talk about. But I got my big break in the form of a rare interview with Amy Chua.

3:05She's better known as the Tiger Mother for the book. Because of the book, she wrote the sensational book, which was a kind of tough love manual for raising superstar children back in the day. But she's a Yale Law professor. And she became a close friend and mentor to young JD Vance. She really shaped him in some ways. She really helped to create him. There would have been, I think, no Hillbilly-Ellogy without Amy Chua, who kind of coaxed it out of him, maybe dragged it out of him. It's an amazing story that we can talk about. Yeah. It's interesting because he comes into Yale and we know at the back, so not because of Hillbilly-Ellogy. But the portrait you paint is of this guy who seems really aggrieved and angry. I think someone described him as a drama queen. He's constantly threatening to leave Yale Law. He thinks it's all elites.

4:07He doesn't really understand. He doesn't quite fit in. Obviously, he finds Usha and that matters deeply for everything, really. But he's an outsider at Yale Law and yet he ends up becoming kind of the sensation there. So how does that happen? Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I mean, it begins on day one in a contracts class, maybe the most boring class at Yale Law School, but everybody was there. How dare you, Chris? Because Amy Chua was running the class and she was known as someone who could make a clerkship with a Supreme Court judge happen with her good friend Brett Kavanaugh and others that she knew. So that day sitting in the front row is this dark-haired Indian woman girl, attentively taking notes. And in a very back row is this disheveled kind of beefy ex-marine, who nobody thought would

5:07be a lawyer, much less vice president, guess who? JD Vance. Well, they ended up in a small 16 student class. They did moot court together and Amy Chua said that Usha was about 50 billion times better than Vance at that. She was the breakout star. She was the person. She was the Hillary Clinton, if you will, of that class. Hillary, by the way, was Yale Law class 74. But they obviously, he fell head over heels for her. But as you say, he was a guy who was known for being angry about the Iraq war. He would knock back beers with fellow veterans, some of whom were in his class, ran a new haven bars, and he would rail against the Iraq war. Which bar by any chance?

6:08Rudy's? Yeah, Rudy's one of them. Rudy's one of them. So yeah, your new haven, native. I was an undergraduate. I was there before Vance. And they didn't go to the snooty places like Mouris, the private eating establishment. Yeah. I'm an analyst, he's guy, R&P. You're not a psychologist, but I do want you to play the role for a little bit. It strikes me that Vance, throughout his biography, his chronology, whatever you want to call it, is just in constant search of some sort of paternal figure. And obviously, he writes about that and is upbringing. But Amy Chua obviously plays that role for him. And then he gets beyond that and Peter Tiel plays that role for him. And then he gets beyond that. And Donald Trump plays that role for him. Can you speak to that sort of need for someone to be his guidepost? Well, again, he was searching for something when he was at Yale Law School.

7:11Well, that's something versus someone. Well, something and maybe someone, but the something, I think, was some kind of, he'd lost his, you know, he'd had often on church going in his troubled youth, obviously, in Middletown and in Appalachia. He was an atheist when he was in Iraq, but he was searching for some kind of meaning, he says, when he was at Yale Law. That's what you call the peace god and Vance at Yale. You play on the Buckley book, obviously Buckley famously thought that Yale was hostile to both conservative ideas and religious faith. Vance shared that feeling except he Buckley attributed that to a leftist faculty and Vance thought it was deeper than that. But anyway, he was, he was clearly in search of something. He may still be in search of something as far as I can tell, Vance has no coherence, you

8:13know, post-Maga ideological worldview. It's all over the place. But he's, he would certainly say that he was searching for meaning and, and when teal, when Peter Teal came and spoke at Yale, the light bulb went off over his head. I mean, he felt, he felt there was a real connection with this guy. He says Teal was a guy who was a man of faith. And the fact that Vance could make a hell of a lot of money, didn't hurt. Yeah, that's the other thing that comes through. This is a man, obviously, in Vance, who has railed against elite cultures, wherever he's been. You know, he could go through his, his anger, righteous anger at the architect's the Iraq War. You can go through what you just talked about, his aversion to the elites of Yale. You can go to his attachment to the Magma movement, which was built on this idea that elites

9:13have screwed over the working class. And yet he has been one of the great beneficiaries of elite culture, using it as a ladder throughout his career to advance himself. Donald Trump is an incredible elite. Peter Teal is the co-founder of PayPal. He is an elite. Amy Truyer is the most elite. Law professor in the country. Is there not a contradiction here? Yeah, I mean, it would certainly, it would certainly seem to be a kind of phony populism that he's espousing when you look at all the people who got him where he is. Now you may recall that Susie Wiles famously said to me in that vanity fair piece back in December, that whereas Marco Rubio, where his pivot from Never Trump or to Magma Acolyte was principled, that in JD's case it was, well, he's running for the Senate, it was sort of political. So look, one astonishing thing for Susie Wiles to say out loud, even if she believed

10:16it, right? But there you go. So there's certainly a school of thought shared by many that JD Vance is a craven opportunist and as Stuart Stevens put it to me, he'd be a trusky eye if he thought it would advance his cause. Yeah, but Truyer didn't think so. She says, I have a very different view of JD. I do not think he changed it all. I think he's exactly the same guy. Amy Truyer is a fan. She's all in for JD. They're close friends to this day when the would be assassin stormed the White House Correspondix dinner back in whatever that was. And JD Vance was hustled to a safe room. One of the first people he texted was Amy Chua, who guess what was in the ballroom wondering, hey, when are you coming back? That's how close they are. She is all in.

11:17She believes that he has not changed and that if you're going to be, but she would probably tell you that as some of her other friends of JD told me who were at Yale Law at the time, you know, if you've got to be, if you're going to be a politician, you have to be ready to jump for opportunities when they come a lot. Yeah, it's a bit of like, you know, what do you expect politicians act political? Actually, that leads me to this, the newsy anecdote that you have here, one of many, which is just the role that he played in the 2016 election. Now, so Vance just to back up as a critic of Trump openly talking about Trump being an opioid for the mass. He back channels according to Hillary Clinton's campaign. This stuff has not been reported before. Although he votes for Evan McMullen in that race, he is back channeling to the Clinton

12:19campaign to offer advice. And you have people, a person who serves as an intermediary for the Clinton campaign, having JD call Jake Sullivan, Clinton's top advisor, urging her to, you know, focus more on that blue wall, although it's blue wall states, which he famously did not. And then you have this, he called me again. This is according to the source. He said, quote, I hate Hillary, but I hate Trump more. Trump can't win. He can't win. Hillary is going to lose, but she doesn't have to. And then no one really denies that this actually happened. All you have those that, that, you know, might have actually been a source close to Sullivan says it was actually about the basket of deplorables, comment that Hillary made that JD call to say, clean it up. But JD's team doesn't really deny that he was offering unsolicited or solicited advice to the Clinton campaign in 2016, which is remarkable. Well, it's, yeah, it's kind of what Ben Bradley used to call a non denial denial. Yeah. A long one. It's an incredible story.

13:20Again, when you consider that Vance was in no one's certain terms, because of Pox on both their houses 2016, he could not bring himself to vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. But then he starts talking to this intermediary and says, This message is brought to you by Casper. So you know what becomes more important to busier life gets your bed, your bed becomes exceptionally important. When you're working long days and juggling everything else life throws at you, there's nothing better than finally getting to the end of the day and knowing that you're going to get in to a comfortable bed, which is a great place to crash. A mattress is one of those things that I think is really easy to just put off upgrading. You spend years sleeping on the same mattress and you just convince yourself that it's fine. You don't know anything better. But if you're going to spend roughly a third of your life in bed and that is actually what you do, you spend a third of your life in bed, you probably shouldn't settle for just average. Casper makes reliable high quality mattresses designed to deliver consistent, comfortable

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15:24This person, this intermediary told him, hey, look, I could put you in touch with him, but Jake Sullivan's busy. They're running a campaign. But Vance was on a mission according to this source, this intermediary. He kept, he was insistent. And so he was finally put in touch with Sullivan. He calls Sullivan. It was six weeks before the election. It was not long after Hillary had made that unforced error at a donor's meeting where she said that half of Trump's voters could be called, it could be in a basket of deplorables. And Vance tells Sullivan, again, according to this source who was in a position to know, Vance tells Sullivan, she's got to fix this deplorables thing. She's got to focus. He was trying to help Hillary Clinton get elected. I mean, that's crazy. And Trump forgave him ultimately for this story.

16:28But Trump presumably does not know this story. It does not know about the back unless it's possible that he does, but I'd be surprised. I don't believe that Trump has any idea that JD Vance, his VP once upon a time, was going through back channels to elect Hillary Clinton. I'll see how the fraud is then, which does lead to sort of the premise of the back end of the piece, which is what is actually, what is Trump's actual opinion of JD? So there's a friend who you quote who says, I think JD genuinely likes Trump. He thinks he's really funny. I also think Trump genuinely likes JD. He said, I think he likes Usha a lot because Usha is withholding. She's not going to suck up to Trump. She won't do it. That's just me, but I've seen it. I think he finds her classy. She's very pretty, but she won't dye her hair. And I think he just likes her. I would quibble with whether Trump likes people who don't suck up to him, but putting that aside. But then later in the piece, you do say, you say he's impressed Trump is supposedly impressed

17:29by how Vance has slimmed down, I guess the South Democrat diet worked and how he presented himself on a recent book tour. But mostly Trump's been making Vance's life miserable, right? Not only by anointing him the public point, but for him, and welcome more, that'd be Iran. Behind closed doors, the president has needled his VP, said to have cracked to some of his inner circle, you stuck me with this guy. I'm stuck with him. It's a modern version of the humiliation LBJ used to heap on his number two, Hubert Humphrey. So what's your take away? What is the Trump impression of JD Vance at this juncture? Well, look, I think that the whole story of Trump and Vance is fascinating. And complex. And it goes back to that first meeting they had. I wrote about the first time Trump met with Susie Wiles in 2015, and Trump was blown away by the fact that he was in the room with the daughter of the great Pat Summeral.

18:30This is the kind of thing that impresses him. I think that as you well know, Trump loves it when people who have attacked him come to him crawling around Bended Knee. Vance has certainly done that. And by all accounts of the people who know, Vance was charmed, just charmed out of his socks by Trump when they first met. And Trump said you said a lot of nasty shit about me. And Vance had let's talk about it. And by the end of it, he was convinced that everything he'd ever said about Trump was wrong. 95% of what the conventional media reports was false. He, to me, when I was in the White House with Vance, when people in the White House were still talking to me. He told me that Trump was, he defended Trump's remarks at Charlottesville.

19:37He told me that no, the media got that totally wrong. You know, I don't know what the media got wrong about Trump referring to very fine people on both sides who were marching with neo-Nazis with Tiki Torches chanting blood and soil. But Vance is saying that that's wrong. Not true. He'd never said that. So it's wild. And I think that at the end of the day, Trump loves the fact that Vance recanted all that. We hear Trump saying that about Michael Cohen. You've recanted everything. All's forgiven. Even when he hasn't. So I get the psychology there. But I think Vance, as we can talk more about this. But I think Vance is in a really difficult, fraught position. Because as one person put it to me on background, at a certain point, he's going to start to

20:38get traction Vance's if he is indeed the front runner. He's going to start to run ads. He's going to start to have rallies. People will pay attention. Trump will not be able to stand that. Trump will not be able to share that spotlight. And come next year, he will destroy him. He will take him down. So that's a reasonable argument, given what we know about Trump. That's a real possibility. And I will add that Steve Bannon, whom I also interviewed for this, will get to Tucker Carlson later. But Steve Bannon told me that he thinks this relationship is only going to go south in a hurry. Well, it does, I mean, if we're being real about it, is there a relationship with Trump in politics that has not eventually gone south? I mean, there's no man as, you know, loyalty is usually in one direction.

21:38And you can be one of the great suck ups of the world. You can acquiesce as much as you possibly can. But eventually those relationships go south and surely, they almost inevitably. Almost inevitably. Almost inevitably. Right. If Vance were put in a position, so Mike Pence is the obvious comparison, right? First VP, he is the ultimate loyalty guy. Does it, whatever Trump wants and then eventually gets to a place where he's like, I can't do that. And that's on January 6th. Does Vance capable of that sort of independence, or is he too subsumed at this juncture? Well, Vance, let's say Vance had his word. Vance has said, and I don't have the, I'm only paraphrasing, but Vance has said that he wouldn't have done what Vance did on January 6th. What Pence did, yeah. Yeah. What Pence did? He said it. Adelaide, we don't have to guess. We don't have to really speculate about what would happen. Yeah, but is there a line you think, is there a line you think that he would draw?

22:39I mean, you would think January 6th would be the line, but do you think Vance has a threat of independent thought still, or is he just totally bought into the Trump project? I think he's all in. I think he has to be aware that he's in a really difficult position. I mean, he can't run away from Trump. And so he's carrying the baggage of affordability, inflation, a war gun, haywire, every other problem that Trump has passed along to Vance, he's going to have to run with all of that, including his inability to solve this pointless war of choice. So Vance has to carry all that baggage and unlike a potential rival, for example, Rubio, or even let's, who knows? Bobby Kennedy, do you do?

23:40Let's talk Tucker here because I think Tucker is a more interesting one. Because Tucker, at least, has said, hey, I don't like this war and he broke with Trump over the war. Vance can't do that. Yeah. No, exactly right. So, you know, think of you, Edward Humphrey in 1968, who at the very end of that campaign, in October 30, finally created some distance between himself and LPJ on his conduct to the Vietnam War. It was too little too late. And it was almost impossible for him to break with LPJ. The same thing is true for Vance. He's got mission impossible in a way. All right. Last question for you. But there's a line here that stuck out for me. But almost two years into Trump's second term. Still the central question of Vance. Does he stand for anything other than his own advancement? So, he's been a lot of time talking to people who know him, who nurtured him. He's been a lot of time talking to people inside the White House. He talked to Tucker. He talked to Steve Bannon. Why'd you come away with an answer on that?

24:41Well, it seems to me, there are two schools of thought about JD Vance. One is we've already discussed, which is the notion that he's a cynical opportunist who will just blow with the wind. But the other school of thought is that he is unlike Trump, who has no convictions or beliefs in his transactional about everything. That Trump, that Vance is actually a true believer in a post-Trump mega ideology, a world view that is more authoritarian and is in fact a kind of Catholic theocracy. And it goes back to this guy, Patrick Denean at Notre Dame, that Vance, along with Peter Tiel, Denean's been a huge influence on Vance. And Jacob Heilbrunn is a guy I interviewed who lays this out pretty in an interesting way.

25:42That's a real worry about Vance. He actually believes in this stuff and that he has the intellectual shock troops in place. A bunch of people who have followed him, some of them from that class at Yale Law School. So take your pick. Either one sounds like a great option to me, but there are people who think that Vance is actually a true believer in something that is much more ideological than mega. Yeah, but it just strikes me that you can't go within 10 years from secretly advising Jake Sullivan on how to clean up the deplorable so that Trump won't win to now believing in this stuff. Something seems a little bit off-kilter. Well, yeah, look, it's also possible that both things could be true. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I think it's, as I say, it's been for me. It was an amazing journey.

26:42I spent the last six months starting at Yale Law School tracing his journey from there to where we are now. And I hope everybody will read the piece and also check out my new sub-stack. Yes. Good plug. All right. Chris Wippel, who has written for Vance, God, and Vance at Yale. You should check it out. It's a great piece. I'm sure he's on the sub-stack now. You just got to follow him at Chris Wippel. So Chris, thanks so much, man. Really appreciate great work. Sam, thank you. Always great to be with you. Take care. Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exama. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let Exama take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe Exama.

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